If the cost of the raw materials and worker were less than the price tag at the store, sure, I would probably opt to make my own clothes. They would fit me perfectly, and I can get the right shade of blue instead of bluish.

In the case of AI, Claude costs $100 or $200/mo for really good coding tasks. This is much less expensive than hiring someone to do the same thing for me.

That sounds like a nice hobby.

Which part is the hobby? Clothes making or using Claude to generate real production code?

Both. I would note that "real production code" is not necessarily a high bar. For example it does not rule out gross negligence. Most of the companies that outsource their thinking and working to Claude will die of it.

I have a different point of view. Claude code is extremely good at creating and maintaining solid, everyday code including Ansible playbooks (used in production), creating custom dev/ops scripts for managing servers (again, used in production), creating Grafana dashboards (again, production), comparing database performance between nodes, etc. Just because a person did not hand-write this code does not make it any less production ready. In fact, Claude reviewed our current Ansible code base and already highlighted a few errors (the files written by hand). Plus, we get the benefit of having Claude write and execute test plans for each version we create. Well worth the $100/mo we pay.

And to your note that real production code is not necessarily a high bar, what is "real production code"? Does it need to be 10,000 lines of complex C/rust code spread across a vast directory structure that requires human-level thinking to be production ready? What about smaller code bases that do one thing really well?

Honestly, I think many coders here on HN dismiss the smaller, more focused projects when in reality they are equally important as the large, "real" production projects. Are these considered non-production because the code was not written by hand?

All it sounds like to me is that Ansible is production-ready, Grafana is production ready, the compilers and runtimes you're using are production-ready.

Each of those things is a mountain of complexity compared to the molehill of writing a single script. If you're standing on top of a molehill on top of a mountain, it's not the molehill that's got your head in the clouds.