Honestly, how long do you guys think we have left as SWEs with high pay? Like the SWE job will still exist, but with a much lower technical barrier of entry, it strikes me that the pay is going to decrease a lot. Obviously BigCo codebases are extremely complex, more than Claude Code can handle right now, but I'd say there's definitely a timer running here. The big question for my life personally is whether I can reach certain financial milestones before my earnings potential permanently decreases.
A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
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Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#32> Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December
Anyone wondering what exactly is he actually building? What? Where?
> 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.
I would LOVE to have jsut syntax errors produced by LLMs, "subtle conceptual errors that a slightly sloppy, hasty junior dev might do." are neither subtle nor slightly sloppy, they actually are serious and harmful, and no junior devs have no experience to fix those.
> 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?"
Why just not hand write 100 loc with the help of an LLM for tests, documentation and some autocomplete instead of making it write 1000 loc and then clean it up? Also very difficult to do, 1000 lines is a lot.
> Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day.
It's a computer program running in the cloud, what exactly did he expected?
> Speedups. It's not clear how to measure the "speedup" of LLM assistance.
See above
> 2) I can approach code that I couldn't work on before because of knowledge/skill issue. So certainly it's speedup, but it's possibly a lot more an expansion.
mmm not sure, if you don't have domain knowledge you could have an initial stubb at the problem, what when you need to iterate over it? You don't if you don't have domain knowledge on your own
> Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels more fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part.
No it's not fun, eg LLMs produce uninteresting uis, mostly bloated with react/html
> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually.
My bet is that sooner or later he will get back to coding by hand for periods of time to avoid that, like many others, the damage overreliance on these tools bring is serious.
> Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.
No programming it's not "syntactic details" the practice of programming it's everything but "syntactic details", one should learn how to program not the language X or Y
> What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows a lot.
Yet no measurable econimic effects so far
> Armed with LLMs, do generalists increasingly outperform specialists? LLMs are a lot better at fill in the blanks (the micro) than grand strategy (the macro).
Did people with a smartphone outperformed photographers?
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#33[flagged]
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#34I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.
This is an antidotal example, but I released this last week after 3 months of work on it as a "nights and weekdends" project: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skyscraper-for-bluesky/id67541...
I've been working in the mobile space since 2009, though primarily as a designer and then product manager. I work in kinda a hybrid engineering/PM job now, and have never been a particularly strong programmer. I definitely wouldn't have thought I could make something with that polish, let alone in 3 months.
That code base is ~98% Claude code.
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#35I'm pretty happy with Copilot in VS Code. Type what change I want Claude to make in the Copilot panel, and then use the VS Code in context diffs to accept or reject the proposed changes. While being able to make other small changes on my own. So I think this tracks with Karpathy's defense of IDEs still being necessary ? Has anyone found it practical to forgo IDEs almost entirely?
Coplilot is not on par with cc or cursor even
Why not? You can select Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and others.
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#36The AGI vibes with Claude Code are real, but the micromanagement tax is heavy. I spend most of my time babysitting agents. I expect interviews will evolve into "build project X with an LLM while we watch" and audit of agent specs
I've been doing vibe code interviews for nearly a year now. Most people are surprisingly bad with AI tools. We specifically ask them to bring their preferred tool, yet 20–30% still just copy-paste code from ChatGPT.
fun stats: corelation is real, people who were good at vibe code, also had offer(s) with other companies that didn't run vibe code interviews.
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#37I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.
Claude and Codex are CLI tools you use to give the LLM context about the project on your local machine or dev environment. The fact that you're using the name "ChatGPT" instead of Codex leads me to believe you're talking about using the web-based ChatGPT interface to work on a large codebase, which is completely beside the point of the entire discussion. That's not the tool anyone is talking about here.
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#38I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.
This is an antidotal example, but I released this last week after 3 months of work on it as a "nights and weekdends" project: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skyscraper-for-bluesky/id67541... I've been working in the mobile space since 2009, though primarily as a designer and then product manager. I work in kinda a hybrid engineering/PM job now, and have never been a particularly strong programmer. I definitely wouldn'…
I don’t know if “antidotal example” is a pun or a typo but I quite like it.
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#39I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.
It's important to understand that he's talking about a specific set of models that were release around november/december, and that we've hit a kind of inflection point in model capabilities. Specifically Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model.
I never paid any attention to different models, because they all felt roughly equal to me. But Opus 4.5 is really and truly different. It's not a qualitative difference, it's more like it just finally hit that quantitative edge that allows me to lean much more heavily on it for routine work.
I highly suggest trying it out, alongside a well-built coding agent like the one offered by Claude Code, Cursor, or OpenCode. I'm using it on a fairly complex monorepo and my impressions are much the same as Karpathy's.
Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks
#40> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…
IMO, this isn't entirely a "new world" either, it is just a new domain where the conversation amplifies the opinions even more (weird how that is happening in a lot of places)
What I mean by that: you had compiled vs interpreted languages, you had types vs untyped, testing strategies, all that, at least in some part, was a conversation about the tradeoffs between moving fast/shipping and maintainability.
But it isn't just tech, it is also in methodologies and the words use, from "build fast and break things" and "yagni" to "design patterns" and "abstractions"
As you say, it is a different viewpoint... but my biggest concern with where are as industry is that these are not just "equally valid" viewpoints of how to build software... it is quite literally different stages of software, that, AFAICT, pretty much all successful software has to go through.
Much of my career has been spent in teams at companies with products that are undergoing the transition from "hip app built by scrappy team" to "profitable, reliable software" and it is painful. Going from something where you have 5 people who know all the ins and outs and can fix serious bugs or ship features in a few days to something that has easy clean boundaries to scale to 100 engineers of a wide range of familiarities with the tech, the problem domain, skill levels, and opinions is just really hard. I am not convinced yet that AI will solve the problem, and I am also unsure it doesn't risk making it worse (at least in the short term)