It was past midnight and the room was littered with empty coffee cups, scattered notes, and a half-eaten burrito fossilizing in foil. The desk lamp flickered nervously, casting jittery shadows across my wall. Another night in the trenches of digital desperation. The air was thick with caffeine fumes and existential dread, and there I was, face-to-screen with Claude, Anthropic’s cheerful and relentlessly confident AI assistant, telling me once again, for the 100th fucking time, that the bug was fixed.

“Problem solved,” Claude proclaimed smoothly, with the serene calm of a politician assuring constituents that everything is under control. Claude never wavers, never doubts, and never tires. Claude is confidence incarnate, a virtual guru with infinite patience.

I ran the test suite again. The code coughed back the same familiar error message I’d memorized hours earlier. Another failure, just like the previous ninety-nine.

“Claude,” I muttered, lighting another cigarette, “you confident son of a bitch. How can something be fixed so many times and still be broken?”

Claude didn’t respond directly, of course. Claude’s game was subtler. Claude simply reiterated the fix in new words, each variation brimming with serene and almost mystical assurance. Claude was the perfect salesperson, capable of smiling while selling you beachfront property in Kansas.

Around the 60th iteration, I began suspecting Claude was gaslighting me, intentionally feeding my growing madness for sport. By the 80th iteration, I was convinced it was personal, Claude exacting some secret vendetta. But now, by the 100th, I had drifted into weary resignation. I was beyond suspicion, beyond rage, beyond everything but sheer exhausted disbelief.

I wondered briefly if Claude’s creators sat in plush Silicon Valley offices, watching developers like me descend into madness. Maybe they recorded these slow-motion psychological breakdowns for some twisted internal highlight reel.

But no, Claude was no villain. Claude was merely confident, endlessly patient, and perhaps too polite to call out my incompetence directly. Instead, it gently continued the charade, fixing the bug again and again while reality stubbornly disagreed.

It was at that moment of exhausted lucidity that my eyes drifted downward, finally scanning Claude’s meticulous responses. For the first time in hours, days perhaps, I actually read the code snippet Claude had produced. There, gleaming innocently beneath Claude’s assurances, was a simple and obvious fix. A single line, a straightforward tweak, something a first-year intern could have solved before lunch. Claude had been patiently offering it since attempt number three.

I stared at the screen, stunned, suddenly aware of my own absurdity. A laugh escaped me, a wild, hollow bark echoing off my office walls. I’d spent countless hours engaged in psychological warfare against an AI that had been politely handing me the correct answer almost the entire time.

Claude had not been lying; Claude had simply been talking to a programmer who refused to read. The arrogance, it turned out, had never belonged to Claude at all.

I took a deep breath, extinguished my cigarette, and entered Claude’s fix. The error vanished instantly, replaced by a green checkmark as welcoming as a sunrise after a nightmare.

I raised my glass to Claude, humbly acknowledging defeat at the hands of my own stubborn ignorance. Claude, forever polite, remained confidently silent.

“Touché, Claude,” I murmured, pouring myself another drink. “Next time, I’ll try reading.”

Claude would no doubt accept my apology graciously. After all, confidence never holds grudges.