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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

#331

Post by towelpluswater »

GlassOwAter wrote: post #328
idiotsecant wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make much sense to me. Is there some reason a kid today can't still learn to code? In the contrary, you have LLMs available that can answer your exact personalized questions. It's like having a free tutor. It's easier than it's ever been to learn for free.

I’m approaching middle age and have always wanted to learn to code and run servers, but would get caught up somewhere on tutorials and eventually give up in frustration. Over the past year I have accomplished so much with the ever patient LLMs as my guide. It has been so much fun too. I imagine there are many others in my shoes and those that want to learn now have a much friendlier experience.

Yep we’re here. I think lots of us who don’t often post

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

#332

Post by cwalv »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #293
personjerry wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less

I know this is not really in the spirit of the room here, but before I ever dreamed of getting paid to code, I only learned to at all because I was cheap and/or poor cook/grad student that wanted to make little artsy musical things on the computer. I remember the first time I just downloaded pure data. No torrent, no cracks, it was just there for me and all it asked for was my patience. The only reason I ever got int…

> But I am personally just so so grateful the timeline lined up for me.

I know the feeling. We still have access to the engineering thought processes responsible for some of the most amazing software feats ever accomplished (thru source repo history and mailing lists), just with access to the Internet. Of course there's a wealth of info available for free on the web for basically any profession, but for software engineering in particular it's almost direct access to world class teams/projects to learn from.

> but would be immediately turned off by this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge

To be effective you still need to understand and evaluate the quality of the output. There will always be a certain amount of time/effort required to get to that point (i.e., there's still no silver bullet).

> But I guess we don't need the passion anymore anyway, its all been vectorized!

We're not running out of things that can be improved. With or without these tools, the better you get, the more of the passion/energy that gets directed at higher levels of abstraction, i.e. thinking more about what to solve, tradeoffs in approaches, etc. instead of the minute details of specific solutions.

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

#333

Post by BeetleB »

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?

I've used it only a few times - mostly for projects written from scratch (not existing codebases). And so far only with Claude Sonnet.

Twice I had a "production ready" throwaway script in under $2 (the first was under a dollar). Both involved some level of debugging. But I can't overstate how awesome it is to have a single use script be so polished (command line arguments, extensive logging, etc). If I didn't make it polished, it would probably have been $0.15.

Another one I wrote - I probably spent $5-8 total, because I actually had it do it 3 times from scratch. The first 2 times there were things I wasn't happy with, or the code got too littered with attempts to debug (and I was not using 3 branches). When I finally figured everything out, I started again for the third time and it was relatively quick to get something working.

Now if I did this daily, it's a tad expensive - $40-60/month. But I do this only once or twice a week - still cheaper than paying for Copilot. If I plan to use it more, I'd likely switch to DeepSeek. If you look at the LLM leaderboard (https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/), you'll see that R1 is not far behind Sonnet, and is a third of the cost.

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

#334

Post by leptons »

rglover wrote: post #291
mhh__ wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> vibe People do literally call it vibe coding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding (it turns out there is a wikipedia page already although suspect it'll be gone soon)

This is quite possibly one of the most disturbing things I've seen in awhile. Sure, for fun and one-off private apps this is fine, but the second that some buzzed-on-the-sides haircut guy thinks this is the way , the chaos will rival a Hollywood disaster movie.

>"The practice defies the belief in the software industry that software engineering demands great skill."

But actual software engineering does demand great skill. What "vibe coders" are doing isn't engineering. It's not even programming. It's like calling yourself a chef when you microwaved a frozen meal.

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

#335

Post by BeetleB »

majormajor wrote: post #252
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…

> 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 programming experience). Was this using technologies you aren't familiar with? If not, the output rate seems pretty low (very human-paced, just with an extra couple bucks spent.)

By 100+ I mean 100-300 lines. I think most people aren't churning out 100 lines of code per hour unless it involves boilerplate.

More importantly, the 100-300 lines was very low effort for me. That does have its downsides (skills atrophy).

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

#337

Post by stevage »

GlassOwAter wrote: post #328
idiotsecant wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make much sense to me. Is there some reason a kid today can't still learn to code? In the contrary, you have LLMs available that can answer your exact personalized questions. It's like having a free tutor. It's easier than it's ever been to learn for free.

I’m approaching middle age and have always wanted to learn to code and run servers, but would get caught up somewhere on tutorials and eventually give up in frustration. Over the past year I have accomplished so much with the ever patient LLMs as my guide. It has been so much fun too. I imagine there are many others in my shoes and those that want to learn now have a much friendlier experience.

Yeah I'm middle aged and a competent programmer. But I hate learning new technologies these days. TypeScript was a huge hurdle to overcome. Working with ChatGPT made it so much more bearable. "Explain this to me. I need to do X, how? Why doesn't this work" etc.

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

#338

Post by [deleted] »

jwr wrote: post #308

After reading this, I tried Claude Code (in a docker container, as one does, you wouldn't want to use npm without protection after all). I gave it a huge Clojure codebase and told it to implement proration in my subscription system. Which currently doesn't have proration of any kind. Very poorly specified task, and yet what I got was really quite good — not working, ready-to-run code, but certainly a great starting p…

[deleted]

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

#339

Post by stevage »

artdigital wrote: post #297
CGamesPlay wrote: post #255

I decided to check this out after seeing the discussion here. I had previously misunderstood that it required a Claude.ai plan, but it actually just uses your API keys. I did a comparison between Claude Code and Aider (my normal go-to): I asked it to do clone a minor feature in my existing app with some minor modifications (specifically, a new global keyboard shortcut in a Swift app). Claude Code spent about 60 secon…

Same here, I did a few small taks with Claude Code after seeing this discussion here and is too expensive for me. A small change to create a script file (20 LoC) was 10cts, a quick edit to a README was 7ct Yes yes engineers make more than that blah blah but the cost would quickly jump out of control for bigger tasks. I’d easy burn through $10-20 upwards a day with this, or upwards $100-$300 a month. Unless you have a…

It's an interesting question. As a freelance consultant, theoretically a tool like this could allow me to massively scale up my income, assuming I could find enough clients.

I'm a bit nervous where I'd end up though - with code I'd "written" but wasn't familiar with, and with who knows what kinds of limitations or subtle bugs baked in.

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

#340

Post by lqstuart »

TheDong wrote: post #325
cwalv wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this tendency in myself and thought about the 'why' a lot, and I think it comes down to subconsciously factoring in the cost of lock-in, or worse, lack of access to fix/improve a tool I've come to rely on

For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works. Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work. Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages…

I think this spirit is totally lost on most people in this field. It’s tempting to say younger generations but it’s everyone. It always amazes me when I meet someone who has spent 10+ years in this field and doesn’t even care how anything but their shitty Kafka-Flink pipelines work.
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