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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#91

Post by peab »

hakunin wrote: post #51
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #25

> 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—an…

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it.

Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button centered and have rounded corners. Using AI I can make frontend changes in minutes instead of days.

I don't use the AI to one shot system design, although I may use it to brainstorm and think through ideas.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#92

Post by hakunin »

gavinray wrote: post #76
hakunin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

I think you might have to get more granular than: > people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) I began programming at 9/10, and it's been one of only a few lifelong passions. But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things.

That's what I mean by product-building vs programming (3rd group).

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#93

Post by api »

One of the reasons a lot of things look like gambling is that a lot of things look like gambling. Hunting, gathering, and other baseline pre-civilization survival activities look like gambling. Dating looks like gambling. Reproduction even looks like gambling with each offspring, as a product of genetic recombination, being a dice roll. Investing, of course, looks like gambling.

It's why we get so addicted to gambling. We're built for it because a lot of legitimate real things look like gambling.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#94

Post by zqna »

hakunin wrote: post #51
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #25

> 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—an…

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

To the first list also add the typical mediocre developer who has struggled for their entire career, never investing in acquiring deep understanding of how things work, and who is making guesses when attempting to fix things, later blaming the magic behind them. For those people the magic of LLMs is just the same, they are comfortable with it, and will be giving the same excuses that they are used to, even more so now.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#95

Post by echelon »

peab wrote: post #91
hakunin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it. Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button ce…

I love software engineering. I love algorithms and complexity and data structures and distributed systems.

But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#96

Post by hakunin »

lodovic wrote: post #75
hakunin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

To be fair, I started programming in the nineties, I genuinely enjoy the process, but I really enjoy agentic coding as well. It's just thinking on a higher level, and you don't need to do all the chores anymore. I still do proper software engineering with tests, layers, separation of concerns, etcetera, but I don't have to type so much anymore. And the speed is on average double compared to writing it by hand.

I was going to include "people who use verbose programming languages/environments" :), but perhaps it's more of a likelihood scale across all groups. The more verbose the language, the more drawn to AI you will be.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#97

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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.

Here's an example, from a session from yesterday and today, buyer beware naturally I'm still testing and refining it: https://github.com/rdaum/tature

I'll now go through this, remove the excessive comments and flowery language, add more tests, put it through its paces. But it did me a service by getting the pieces in place to start.

And I'm even above the 250 karma threshold!

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#98

Post by benreesman »

hakunin wrote: post #51
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #25

> 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—an…

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

I'm squarely in the latter group and I just don't think of it in like/dislike terms: I think of it as a rapidly changing (though beginning to converge) set of new tools in a toolbox that only ever grows. In particular its in the code generation / code validation subtoolbox that already included IDL compilers, emacs macros, type systems / proof assistants, code review, and others.

It's capability increasing to have new tools, this is most apparent at the entry level but most impactful at the margins: the difficulty of driving a taxi is now zero, driving an F1 car is now harder, but F1 cars might soon break the sound barrier.

This is not a democratizing force at the margins if one bases like/dislike on that.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#99

Post by boredtofears »

tptacek wrote: post #24
rustc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you feel like you end up with as clear of a mental model reviewing it as you do if you wrote it?

I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question for myself. Maybe the answer is, "Probably not, and it probably doesn't matter" but I'm still trying to figure out what kind of downstream effects that may have later on my judgment.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#100

Post by cobbal »

mccoyb wrote: post #4

> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer, but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually. The answer to this is nuanced. You can summon ~30k LoC codebases using CC without much fanfare. Will it work? Maybe, in some of the ways you were thinking -- it will be a…

I read this entire post before realizing you weren't referring to `cc`, the C compiler. It actually kinda works with this interpretation, particularly the "if you know this language" part.
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