A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

The section on IDEs/agent swarms/fallibility resonated a lot for me; I haven't gone quite as far as Karpathy in terms of power usage of Claude Code, but some of the shifts in mistakes (and reality vs. hype) analysis he shared seems spot on in my (caveat: more limited) experience.

> "IDEs/agent swarms/fallability. Both the "no need for IDE anymore" hype and the "agent swarm" hype is imo too much for right now. The models definitely still make mistakes and if you have any code you actually care about I would watch them like a hawk, in a nice large IDE on the side. The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do. The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. They also don't manage their confusion, they don't seek clarifications, they don't surface inconsistencies, they don't present tradeoffs, they don't push back when they should, and they are still a little too sycophantic. Things get better in plan mode, but there is some need for a lightweight inline plan mode. They also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines. They still sometimes change/remove comments and code they don't like or don't sufficiently understand as side effects, even if it is orthogonal to the task at hand. All of this happens despite a few simple attempts to fix it via instructions in CLAUDE . md. Despite all these issues, it is still a net huge improvement and it's very difficult to imagine going back to manual coding. TLDR everyone has their developing flow, my current is a small few CC sessions on the left in ghostty windows/tabs and an IDE on the right for viewing the code + manual edits."

Are game developers vibe coding with agents?

It's such a visual and experiential thing that writing true success criteria it can iterate on seems like borderline impossible ahead of time.

> And people still call them stochastic parrots

Both can be true. You're tapping into every line of code publicly available, and your day-to-day really isn't that unique. They're really good at this kind of work.

> - How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work?

Any qualified guesses?

I'm not convinced more traders on wall street will allocate capital more effectively leading to economic growth.

Will more programmers grow the economy? Or should we get real jobs ;)

If you access a model through an openrouter provider it might be quantized (akin to being "cut with trash"), but when you go directly to Anthropic or OpenAI you are getting access to the same APIs as everyone else. Even top-brass folks within Microsoft use Anthropic and OpenAI proper (not worth the red-tape trouble to go directly through Azure). Also, the creator and maintainer of Claude, Boris Cherny, was a bit of an oddball but one of the comparatively nicer people at Anthropic, and he indicated he primarily uses the same Anthropic APIs as everyone else (which makes sense from a product development perspective).

The underlying models are all actually really undifferentiated under the covers except for the post-training and base prompts. If you eliminate the base prompts the models behave near identically.

A conspiracy would be a helluva lot more interesting and fun, but I've spoken to these folks firsthand and it seems they already have enough challenges keeping the beast running.