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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#181

Post by jakelazaroff »

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.

To me this is sort of like saying about music "The guitar was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things."

That's true, but there's something qualitatively different about writing a song on a guitar vs. prompting to create a song in Suno. The guitar (or piano/Ableton/whatever) is an instrument, whereas Suno is… I'm not really sure.

But that difference makes me totally disinterested in using Suno to produce music. And in the same way — even though I also consider code "just a means to an end" — I'm also totally disinterested in using Claude Code to produce software.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#182

Post by osigurdson »

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…

Is there really a large delta between computer programming, coding, computer science and software engineering?

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#183

Post by serf »

ben_w wrote: post #174
MattGaiser wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The models are plateauing, but unlike humans, a certain amount of brute force testing of their output is fine. They can just iterate until they succeed.

Kinda. While it's possible to do that, you've got an exponential cost increase for linear improvements — scale from a case where an AI makes 1 mistake to 2, double the output cost, 3 mistakes double again, 4 mistakes double again, etc.

Smart caching fixes a lot of the issues there. If a fork is marked somehow as successful then presumably the cache lookup next time will be less painful/costly.

Of course that's dependent on how caching gets implemented/where/when/how, but it's not unsolvable for common occurrence questions/answers.

As for getting the SOTA questions wrong : we as humans would likely also go through an iterative feedback loop until initial success and experience, too.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#184

Post by danielbln »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #110
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'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more. Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or…

I see myself in that description, and I LOVE this new way of working. It eliminates most yak shaving that comes my way, and that's what I hated most from the before times. I can quickly build mental models on things and focus on the solution building instead of bike shedding the code. It's not perfect, but it's pretty great.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#185

Post by hakunin »

stavros wrote: post #170
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…

It's not really much of an insight that people who like programming itself don't want to outsource it to an AI, whereas people who like building things do.

You're probably right, but this dividing line only became prominent now that AI coding agents polarized the community across it. This in itself is interesting to me.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#186

Post by stavros »

hakunin wrote: post #185
stavros wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really much of an insight that people who like programming itself don't want to outsource it to an AI, whereas people who like building things do.

You're probably right, but this dividing line only became prominent now that AI coding agents polarized the community across it. This in itself is interesting to me.

Yes, definitely, I just mean that all the groups can be condensed down to those two.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#187

Post by yoz-y »

jonator wrote: post #56

For me the fun part of coding is having visions of products or systems I'd like to exist, and writing code only as a means to an end. Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algori…

For me the problem with the vision is that stuff I’d like to exist is so far above the capabilities of AI (rather complex games) that I don’t even want to try it. And for stuff that I build and use they are pointless because they don’t accelerate me much.

I found it great to write bash scripts, automation, ffmpeg command lines, OCR, refactoring… it’s a great autocomplete.

Working in a large team I realized that even relying too much of other people’s work is making me understand the technology less and I need to catch up.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#188

Post by RainyDayTmrw »

bgwalter wrote: post #138

Yes, the gamification is why some people like it. It is another addiction. Most proponents and bloggers are tied to "AI" money though, directly or indirectly. I've seen little organic praise from high profile programmers. There aren't many, and once you search they all at least work on a commercial "AI" application.

Simon Willison[1] of Django Framework founder[2] fame is a pretty big AI programming proponent at his blog. He's pretty high profile, as far as real-world programmers (as in, not executives and not promoters) go.

You could argue, he makes money off of AI with his newsletter and whatnot, so he does stand to gain something, but it's a lot less than the executives and investors who've filled the news.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#190

Post by stlava »

My worry is we're going to have a generation of engineers that have not built up the necessary critical thinking/pattern matching skills needed to weigh tradeoffs and bring in context to ask the right questions and interpret the answers.

Sure we can segment this into code generation models and code review models but are engineers really going to want to be questioned by a code review tool on "what are you trying to do?" or are they just going to merge and pull the slot lever again?

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