A Month of Chat-Oriented Programming
November 17, 2025
A Month of Chat-Oriented ProgrammingOr when did you last change your mind about something?Nick Radcliffe. 12th November 2025.
TL;DR: I spent a solid month “pair programming” with Claude Code, trying to suspend disbelief and adopt a this-will-be-productive mindset. More specifically, I got Claude to write well over 99% of the code produced during the month. I found the experience infuriating, unpleasant, and stressful before even worrying about its energy impact. Ideally, I would prefer not to do it again for at least a year out two. The only problem with that is that it “worked”. It’s hard to know exactly how well, but I (“we”) definitely produced far more than I would have been able to do unassisted, probably at higher quality, and with a fair number of pretty good tests (about 1500). Against my expectation going in, I have changed my mind. I now believe chat-oriented programming (“CHOP”) can work today, if your tolerance for pain is high enough.
The notes below describe what has and has not worked for me, working with Claude Code for an intense month (in fact, more like six weeks now).
I recently listened to this Pragmatic Engineer podcast with Flask developer Armin Ronacher (highly recommended), where he talks about how he was an ardent resistor to the use of live language models for software development until he sat down and invested some time in that a few months ago, at which point he became convinced it was the future of how he was going to develop. Here’s something similar from Nick Radcliffe, who was “a fairly outspoken and public critic of large-language models (LLMs), Chatbots, and other applications of LLM”.
He spent a month doing chat-oriented programming (CHOP), which is one of the various ways you can work with large language models as a software engineer. While he found it infuriating and frustrating, he acknowledges it did indeed make him productive.
He also details his experience and things that he learned that you might find valuable yourself.
