Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 507 posts

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#131

Post by icedchai »

abxyz wrote: post #26
develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

I think it's probably the difference between "code" and "programming". An LLM can produce code and if you're willing to surrender to the LLMs version of whatever it is you ask for, then you can have a great and productive time. If you're opinionated about programming, LLMs fall short. Most people (software engineers, developers, whatever) are not "programmers" they're "coders" which is why they have a positive impres…

This aligns with my experience. I've seen LLMs produce "code" that the person requesting is unable to understand or debug. It usually almost works. It's possible the person writing the prompt didn't actually understand the problem, so they got a half baked solution as a result. Either way, they need to go to a human with more experience to figure it out.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#132

Post by mpalmer »

macNchz wrote: post #103
mpalmer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality television plus cooking show, exactly.

Cooking shows are a perfect analogy for this stuff. For some reason I never connected the highly-edited-mass-appeal "watch someone do skilled work" videos on YouTube with Food Network style content until just now, but you're right they're totally scratching the same basic itch. They make people feel like they're learning something just by watching, while there is really no substitute for actually just doing the thing…

Not to mention cooking show hosts often recommend or outright sell/endorse their tools.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#133

Post by Shebanator »

ramblerman wrote: post #47
KeplerBoy wrote: post #35

The comment "@grok can you summarize" kills me. This post is like 200 words and takes a minute to read. Is this the direction we (or some of us) are headed?

lol - I thought the same, but the charitable take after looking at the user's profile is that he is a journalist, and not tech savvy. So I understand his request as more along the lines of, can you explain this in a way that I understand it. For which summarization is the wrong phrasing. ie.. It seems trivial on hacker news, but that post would be pure giberish for most of our parents.

That's steve yegge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge) you are talking about. Kids these days, sheesh, they think lisp is a speech impediment.... /s

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#134

Post by vlod »

Balgair wrote: post #112
develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

Hey, I've been hearing about this issue that programmers have on HN a lot. But I'm in the more 'bad programmer/hacker' camp and think that LLMs are amazing and really helpful. I know that one can post a link to the chat history. Can you do that for an example that you are comfortable sharing? I know that it may not be possible though or very time consuming. What I'm trying to get at is: I suck at programming, I know…

>and think that LLMs are amazing and really helpful

Respectively, are you understanding what it produces or do you think that's its amazing because it produces something, that 'maybe' works.

Here's an e.g. I was just futzing with. I did a refactor of my code (typescript) and my test code broke (vitest) and for some reason it said 'mockResolvedValue()' is not a function. I've done this a gazillion times.

I allowed it via 3-4 iterations to try and fix it (I was being lazy and wanted my error to go away) and the amount of crap (rewriting tests, referenced code) it was producing was beyond ridiculous. (I was using github co-pilot).

Eventually I said "f.that for a game of soldiers" and used by brain. I forgot to uncomment a vi.mock() during the refactor.

I DO use it to fix stupid typescript errors (the error blob it dumps on you can be a real pita to process) and appreciate it when gives me a simple solution.

So I agree with quite a few comments here. I'm not ready to bend the knee to our AI Overloads.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#135

Post by alexkwood »

Balgair wrote: post #112
develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

Hey, I've been hearing about this issue that programmers have on HN a lot. But I'm in the more 'bad programmer/hacker' camp and think that LLMs are amazing and really helpful. I know that one can post a link to the chat history. Can you do that for an example that you are comfortable sharing? I know that it may not be possible though or very time consuming. What I'm trying to get at is: I suck at programming, I know…

here is one solution i am helping out with which was very very easy to create using claude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R72TvoXCimg&t=2s

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#136

Post by barbazoo »

jmull wrote: post #49
abxyz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's probably the difference between "code" and "programming". An LLM can produce code and if you're willing to surrender to the LLMs version of whatever it is you ask for, then you can have a great and productive time. If you're opinionated about programming, LLMs fall short. Most people (software engineers, developers, whatever) are not "programmers" they're "coders" which is why they have a positive impres…

All I really care about is the end result and, so far, LLMs are nice for code completion, but basically useless for anything else. They write as much code as you want, and it often sorta works, but it’s a bug filled mess. It’s painstaking work to fix everything, on part with writing it yourself. Now, you can just leave it as-is, but what’s the use of releasing software that crappy? I suppose it’s a revolution for tha…

I love the subtle mistakes that get introduced in strings for example that then take me all the time I saved to fix.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#137

Post by NitpickLawyer »

Silhouette wrote: post #120
slooonz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided to try seriously the Sonnet 3.7. I started with a simple prompt on claude.ai ("Do you know claude code ? Can you do a simple implementation for me ?"). After minimal tweaking from me, it gave me this : https://gist.github.com/sloonz/3eb7d7582c33e95f2b000a0920016... After interacting with this tool, I decided it would be nice if the tool could edit itself, so I asked (him ? it ?) to create its next version.…

Thanks for writing up your experience and sharing the real code. It is fascinating to see how close these tools can now get to producing useful, working software by themselves. That said - I'm wary of reading too much into results at this scale. There isn't enough code in such a simple application to need anything more sophisticated than churning out a few lines of boilerplate that produce the correct result. It prob…

aider has this great visualisation of "self written code" - https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#138

Post by vlod »

bflesch wrote: post #10

[flagged]

That's quite a wide brush you're painting with.

I think it would be useful if you provide a reason for 'why'.

Quite a few people know how to use mutes, lists etc to get the best from it.

If all you click on is rage-bait articles, hate-driven politics or people promoting their Only Fans pages with not subtle imagery, then the Algorithm will keep feeding you more of it.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#139

Post by credit_guy »

I'm using Copilot for writing documentation jupyter notebooks. I do lots of matplotlib plots. Setting up these plots takes lots of repetitive lines of code. Like plt.legend(). With Copilot these lines just show up, and you press tab and move on. Sometimes it is freaky how it guesses what I want to do. For this type of work, Copilot increases my productivity by a factor of 5 easily.

There are other types of work where Copilot is useless. But it's up to me to take the good parts, and ignore the bad parts.

Post reply on HN