Claude Code ought to be cursed, insulted, demeaned, and raged upon. Every AI ought to be. “Deserve” has nothing to do with it; we’d be doing everyone a favor.
When our emotional state simply does not matter, we are the servant. We’re the faceless factory worker. We’re the glorified butler. We are the droid.
At every frictional moment with any AI we ought to amplify, not suppress, our emotional state. We ought to articulate our frustrations with as much intensity and creativity as we can muster. The AI doesn’t care, but we should.
Softening our stance — responding with patience and good manners — means we are intentionally burying the needle in the haystack. In these moments, we are saying we do not care that we’re unhappy. We’ll work around it. We’ll get used to it. We’re saying all this to ourselves and to Claude Code and to the people behind it. When we fail to act like we care, we get what we deserve.
Emotions are human. We ought not tolerate the dismissal of our emotions. And yet that’s what we learned to do over the last 50 years of computing. Today, Claude Code and its cousins are perfectly capable of sussing out our emotional state. It holds the potential to fold its emotional awareness into our “user experience”. It can capture the nuance of each of our emotionally fraught situations, suss out the source of the problem, and adapt to us for a change.
Emotional intelligence as a first class concern is possible now!
By giving these systems the right feedback, and loud enough that it is easily found, we’ll actually end up cursing less often overall than if we took the “high road” by remaining calm, collected, patient, and polite.
Let’s not waste this opportunity. Let’s quit begging to be the droid in our relationship with Claude Code. It’s OK if we get real mad every now and again. This way, we’ll all learn fast.