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

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

#241

Post by simonw »

jmull wrote: post #237
simonw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I've had an open req for my team at a California tech company I've had days where I would interview (remotely) 2-3 candidates in a single day, several days a week for several weeks straight. It's not impossible to interview 100 people in a few months at that rate.

So... do you really think you were doing it right? Sorry this is a little harsh, but how do you get anywhere near 100 people before realizing the approach must be horribly flawed, and devising and implementing a better one? Surely it behooves you to not waste your employer's time, your own time, and the time of all those people you're interviewing (mostly pointlessly).

These were 25 minute phone screens for candidates that had been sourced by recruiting, a few years ago at a company that was going through hyper-growth (hiring hundreds of engineers in a year). Phone screening several dozen people for 2-4 eventual hires doesn't feel too inefficient to me.

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

#242

Post by 101008 »

ddawson wrote: post #236

I do not know how to code, nothing beyond the simplest things but I am obsessed with AI development. Several month’s ago I decided to see if Claude could do the work for me. My test was to create a tower defense game that would run in a web browser. It took me about eight prompts, each time refining it, including agreeing to the suggesting that Claude recommended and seeing Claude agree with me on the bugs that I poi…

Honesty question, and leaving aside implications about what's possible and all of that, what was particular positive about the experience?

You didn't do anything, just asked a different entity to do it for you. And nothing noble or original, just a copy of existing games. I see no difference between this and getting a $500 coupon to use at Fiverrr and ask a freelance engineer to do the same while you chat with them.

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

#243

Post by gitgud »

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…

Interesting, but it seems ridiculous to disambiguate “Programmer” vs “Coder”.

They’re synonymous words and mean the same thing right?

Person who writes logic for machines

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

#244

Post by BeetleB »

slooonz wrote: post #224
BeetleB wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That amount of output is comparable to what many professional engineers produce in a given day, and they are a lot more expensive. Keep in mind this is the commenters first attempt. And I'm surprised he paid so much. Using Aider and Sonnet I've on multiple occasions produced 100+ lines of code in 1-2 hours, for under $2. Most of that time is hunting down one bug it couldn't fix by itself (reflective of real world pro…

Remember that input tokens are quadratic with the length of the conversation, since you re-upload the n previous messages to get the (n+1)-nth message. When Claude completes a task in 3-4 shots, that’s cents. When he goes down in a rabbit hole, however…

I'm aider there's a command to "reset" so it doesn't send any prior chat. Whenever I complete a mini feature I invoke the command. It helpfully shows the size of the current contact in tokens and the cost so I keep an eye on it.

Doesn't Code have a similar option?

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

#245

Post by geoka9 »

BeetleB wrote: post #169
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…

Some hints for people stuck like this: Consider using Aider. It's a great tool and cheaper to use than Code. Look at Aiders LLM leaderboard to figure out which LLMs to use. Use its architect mode (although you can get quite fast without it - I personally haven't needed it). Work incrementally. I use at least 3 branches. My main one, a dev one and a debug one. I develop on dev. When I encounter a bug I switch to debug…

Thanks, that's a helpful set of hints!

Can you provide a ballpark of what kind of $ costs we are talking here for using Aider with, say, Claude? (or any other provider that you think is better at the moment).

Say a run-of-the-mill bug-fixing session from your experience vs the most expensive one off the top of your head?

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

#246

Post by deergomoo »

matt_heimer wrote: post #94
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…

LLM are replacing Google for me when coding. When I want to get something implemented, let's say make a REST request in Java using a specific client library, I previously used Google to find example of using that library. Google has gotten worse (or the internet has more garbage) so finding code an example is more difficult than it used to be. Now I ask an LLM for an example. Sometimes I have to ask for a refinement…

I used the Kagi free trial when I was doing Advent of Code in a somewhat unfamiliar language (Swift) last year, as well as ChatGPT occasionally.

The LLM was obviously much faster and the information was much higher density, but it had quite literally about a 20% rate of just making up APIs from my limited experiment. But I was very impressed with Kagi’s results and ended up signing up, now using it as my primary search engine.

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

#247

Post by computerdork »

smallerfish wrote: post #192
alextingle wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the question actually difficult, though? If you ask for some standard task, then of course those who are leaning heavily on LLMs will do well, as that's exactly where they work best. That doesn't tell you anything about the performance of those candidates in situations where the LLM won't help them. I suppose, if you are specifically looking for coders to perform routine tasks, then you'll get what you need. Of co…

No, I'm not doing leetcode or algorithm questions - it's basically "build a [tiny] product to specs", in a series of steps. I'm evaluating candidates on their process, their effectiveness, their communication (I ask for narration), and their attention to detail. I do review code afterwards. And, bear in mind that this is only round 1 - once I talk with the ones who do well, I'll go deep on a number of topics to under…

Haven't coded for a couple years (but have been a dev for two decades) and haven't used LLM's myself for coding (not against this), so am really just curious, wouldn't you want to know if a dev can solve and understand problems themselves?

Because it seems like tougher real-world technical problems (where there are tons of dependencies with other systems in addition to technical and business requirements) needs for the dev to have an understanding of how things work, and if you rely on an LLM, you may not gain enough of an understanding of what's going on to solve problems like this...

... Although, I could see how devs that are more focused on application development and knowing the business domain is their key skill, wouldn't need to have as strong an understanding of the technical (no judgement here, have been in this role myself at times).

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

rs186 wrote: post #233
frankc wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the interest has more to do with who is doing the tweeting, don't you think?

Reminder: "appeal to authority" is a classical logical fallacy. For me, I don't know this person, which means that all the words are completely meaningless. Which is exactly the point.

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by majormajor »

pydry wrote: post #54
ReptileMan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't had to spend time debugging a peace of cloth, and the cloth defects are obvious

There's a lot of code out there written for people who are far more concerned with cost and speed than quality - analogous to the "fast fashion" consumer segment. Ive worked on all sorts of code bases filled to the brim with bugs which end users just worked around or ignored or didnt even encounter. Pre-product market fit startups, boring crappy CRUD for routine admin, etc. It was horrible shit for end users and deve…

> I wouldnt be surprised if high end software devs (e.g. >1 million hit/day webapps where quality is critical) barely do anything different while the demand for devs at the low end of the market craters.

Over the last few decades the prevalance of more and more frameworks to handle more and more of what used to be boilerplate that everyone had to do for GUI apps has not significantly impacted the bottom end of the job market.

It's only, if anything, caused even higher demand for "just one more feature".

When's the last time you worked on a product in that space where the users or product managers didn't have any pending feature requests? Didn't add new ideas to the backlog faster than the team could implement?

Someone's gonna have to know just enough to make sure the LLM is producing shit that passes the (low) bar of adequateness. But that job will probably be even further away from the CS-knowing, performance-critical, correctness-matters roles than it is today. It's already a big gap, I just don't see the shit-shoveler job going away. The corporate world loves its shit shoveling.

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

#250

Post by yoyohello13 »

geoka9 wrote: post #245
BeetleB wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some hints for people stuck like this: Consider using Aider. It's a great tool and cheaper to use than Code. Look at Aiders LLM leaderboard to figure out which LLMs to use. Use its architect mode (although you can get quite fast without it - I personally haven't needed it). Work incrementally. I use at least 3 branches. My main one, a dev one and a debug one. I develop on dev. When I encounter a bug I switch to debug…

Thanks, that's a helpful set of hints! Can you provide a ballpark of what kind of $ costs we are talking here for using Aider with, say, Claude? (or any other provider that you think is better at the moment). Say a run-of-the-mill bug-fixing session from your experience vs the most expensive one off the top of your head?

When I was using aider with Claude 3.5 api it cost about $0.01 per action.
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