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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#191

Post by scotty79 »

gonzalohm wrote: post #159
scotty79 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a very common experience when you try to make it write niche stuff. It just makes everything up wholesale. If you on the other hand wanted to write a react app ...

But then I may as well have the AI say no, I don't know how to do that, here are some useful resources. Instead of misleading me and making me waste my time figuring out why the code doesn't work

We might get there at some point. But it's not natural for this technology. It wasn't trained to recognize what it does and doesn't know. But I'm hopeful. It was terrible at doing math as well and it's getting significantly better with just more effort.

It might be hard to tune it though so that AI won't claim that it doesn't know something when it does, by error, or just because it doesn't like you.

It's not uncommon for a student to say they don't know something they actually do when they are questioned.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#192

Post by skydhash »

osigurdson wrote: post #182
peab wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If we're sticking with the accepted definitions, there is.

Computer programming is the idea of making a computer do some task in an automated manner by giving it instructions that it will follow.

Coding is using some kind of language for the above. You take some a spec and you transform it into a textual representation.

Computer science is mostly about studying what the computer can do and what it cannot. It is the actual foundation of everything

Software engineering is about producing software by following engineering principles. Coding is a small part of it. It's mostly about getting things done reliably. The constraints are rarely technical, but mostly about coordination and resources usage.

Most people talks about computer programming when they should talk about software engineering. Computer programming is easy and we have a lot of tools to assists with coding technicalities. Software engineering is hard and the more you do it, the more you see that the problem is mostly about truly understanding what needs to be done and do it well.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#193

Post by dwaltrip »

eric-burel wrote: post #160

Can we collectively stop upvoting low quality 300 words random opinions about llm based dev? As a professional in the field I find the qualify of what's posted on HN really super low in this area, compared to posts eg related to cloud infrastructure or software engineering. There are better posts and sources than that.

The post may not have a ton of meat, but it resonates and seems ripe for discussion. It’s quite timely as we all try to figure out how and when to use these tools.

Your comment doesn’t add much. Where’s the substance to your critique?

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#194

Post by Rexxar »

hakunin wrote: post #96
lodovic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI help us to do faster what we shouldn't have to do at all if our tools where better.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#195

Post by ChuckMcM »

astrobe_ wrote: post #48
ChuckMcM wrote: post #29

That headline really resonates as I spent many years in Las Vegas. LLMs in general have very slot machine like qualities. WHen they “pay off” they are great.

.. But the house always wins ?

Right? I hope that at some point the weights system will become clear enough that one could bias against wrong answers. Just “telling” it that is wrong biases for the current token cache and doesn’t back propagate to the model. Of course back propagating user input would be very exploitable so I don’t see that happening.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#196

Post by marcosdumay »

astrobe_ wrote: post #48
ChuckMcM wrote: post #29

That headline really resonates as I spent many years in Las Vegas. LLMs in general have very slot machine like qualities. WHen they “pay off” they are great.

.. But the house always wins ?

Quite possibly. They are subsidized right now, but those things are really expensive.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#197

Post by jonator »

yoz-y wrote: post #187
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…

Even if you're working on a large complex system like that, I believe coding agents are still useful at at least taking highly specific prompts/instructions you write and doing the writing for you. Then doing other tedious tangential work like generating unit tests over a pure function, adding comments, generating documentation, etc that all increase the quality of the codebase without requiring toil on your part.

With especially novel or complex projects, you'd probably not expect to use the agent to do much of the scaffolding or architecting, and more of the tedium.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#198

Post by gatkinso »

quantumHazer wrote: post #54
gatkinso wrote: post #3

and a damn good one

in the sense that is totally unpredictable and suck your time into the void without learning anything?

in the sense that if I have to change the shape of a complex static object or do anything tedious, it can just do it. What exactly would you say I have to learn from tasks like that?

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#199

Post by rstuart4133 »

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…

> 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.

Perhaps you mean "the fun part of building computer systems", because it sounds like you don't enjoy writing code.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#200

Post by troupo »

danielbln wrote: post #70
troupo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people. It's not different from most people. Everyone runs into AI bullshit. However, hype and new tech optimism overrides everything.

Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools. Slapping something into ChatGPT is one way, though maybe not the most efficient way of getting value out of these tools.

> Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools.

There aren't. Every new "one true way of doing it" that changes every few days runs into these problems.

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