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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#21

Post by RobinL »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #11
itsthecourier wrote: post #2

my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding. I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, takin…

It's nice that you have all those wonderful experiences with LLMs. But for once in your life, could you show us the code? Because you look like yet another cheerleader that have nothing to show, and it's annoying.

I have had similar experiences to OP. All of these apps (mostly maths learning, but also the bus one) were coded using a mix of copilot and Gemini CLI: https://rupertlinacre.com/

I'm probably capable of building all of them by hand, but with a 6yo I'd have never had the time. He loves the games, his mental arithmetic has come on amazingly now he does it 'for fun'.

All code is here: https://github.com/rupertlinacre

Much of this built out of a frustration that most maths resources online are trying to sell you something, full of ads, or poor quality. Just a simple zoomable numberline is hard to find

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#23

Post by ChadNauseam »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #11
itsthecourier wrote: post #2

my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding. I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, takin…

It's nice that you have all those wonderful experiences with LLMs. But for once in your life, could you show us the code? Because you look like yet another cheerleader that have nothing to show, and it's annoying.

Sure. I'll show something. I'm working on an app to help teach myself french. I work at a busy startup so I only have a few hours to spare here and there, but I've managed to make an app that works very well for me, mainly because of the help I receive from Claude Code. I can't make the github repo public because it contains some copyright material [^1]. but maybe I'll make a censored version public if there's interest. It's at https://yap.town .

[^1]: to be clear, nothing in the frontend is copyrighted. I use some copyrighted works to figure out how common various words are, which I need because I wanted the app to teach the most common words first.

Edit: the site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#24

Post by tptacek »

rustc wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #7

I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plu…

And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?

I spend a fraction of the time verifying LLM production of rote code --- which I do in fact do, I'm not a vibe coder --- than I would writing it. I don't understand why people always expect this to be a mic drop rebuttal.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#25

Post by Wowfunhappy »

> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying.

It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones).

And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part.

It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#26

Post by b_e_n_t_o_n »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #16
b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #10

I think much like how we're still figuring out how to use and manage social media to minimize the downsides and maximize its utility, we're gonna have to do the same with AI. I find it incredibly powerful for certain things and incredibly frustrating for others. Begging the AI to one shot some project feels like the wrong way to use it, it's better as a scalpel. Or as a learning device, or a more advanced rubber duck…

I never allow ai to write code, certainly not unsupervised. I like to write some code and then have claude check my work. Not just for bugs, but for architecture and style as well.

I let it write boilerplate, or other low impact stuff like html/css. It worked nicely converting Svelte components from Svelte 4 to 5 for example. And AI autocomplete has been a genuine productivity win although not without the occasional subtle bug. But I can't imagine trusting it for an entire codebase. If you're letting the AI write your code you're not thinking about it deeply enough to critique it imo. Which is fine for CSS or whatever but not most code.

It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#27

Post by smokel »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #11
itsthecourier wrote: post #2

my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding. I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, takin…

It's nice that you have all those wonderful experiences with LLMs. But for once in your life, could you show us the code? Because you look like yet another cheerleader that have nothing to show, and it's annoying.

You touch upon an interesting phenomenon that is quite pervasive throughout the world of software development, and possibly many other fields as well.

To avoid heated discussions, allow me to illustrate the concept with why enterprise software is mainly built with Java, whereas most blog posts are about writing backends with TypeScript, Python, or Rust. The reason for this is at least twofold:

1. Professional programmers don't get paid to write blog posts, and typically want to spend their free time doing other things. Hobbyists do have the time, but they typically do not see the added value of a boring language such as Java, because they don't work in teams.

2. When something is already known, it is boring for people to read about, and therefore less interesting to write about. When something is new, many people write about it, but it's hard to tell who is right and who is wrong.

Given that good writing, and the additional marketing to find the respective audience, take energy, it is not strange that we find weirdly biased opinions when reading blog posts and forums on the internet. I typically find it better to discuss matters with people I know and trust, or to experiment a bit by myself.

The same might happen now with reporting on AI assisted coding.

Edit: might as well just have said "visibility bias" and "novelty bias" if I had consulted an LLM before commenting.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#28

Post by yomismoaqui »

rustc wrote: post #17
tptacek wrote: post #7

I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plu…

And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?

If before I did a thing in 60 minutes and now Claude Code does it in 5 minutes I will not spend 55 minutes reviewing that code.

I will maybe spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and refining the code with the help of Claude Code and then the rest of the time I will go for another feature/bugfix.

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