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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

#51
post #21

I 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.

Almost always, notes like these are going to be about greenfield projects.

Trying to incorporate it in existing codebases (esp when the end user is a support interaction or more away) is still folly, except for closely reviewed and/or non-business-logic modifications.

That said, it is quite impressive to set up a simple architecture, or just list the filenames, and tell some agents to go crazy to implement what you want the application to do. But once it crosses a certain complexity, I find you need to prompt closer and closer to the weeds to see real results. I imagine a non-technical prompter cannot proceed past a certain prototype fidelity threshold, let alone make meaningful contributions to a mature codebase via LLM without a human engineer to guide and review.

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

#52

> 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…

Lots of very scared, angry developers in these comment sections recently...

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

#55
> 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 "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later.

Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot. You send all the necessary data, including information that you would never otherwise share. And you most likely do not pay the actual costs. It might become cheaper or it might not, because reasoning is a sticking plaster on the accuracy problem. You and your business become dependent on this major gatekeeper. It may seem like a good trade-off today. However, the personal, professional, political and societal issues will become increasingly difficult to overlook.

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

#56

I'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?

I have been assigning issues to copilot in Github. It will then create a pull request and work on and report back on the issue in the PR. I will pull the code and make small changes locally using VSCode when needed.

But what I like about this setup is that I have almost all the context I need to review the work in a single PR. And I can go back and revisit the PR if I ever run into issues down the line. Plus you can run sessions in parallel if needed, although I don't do that too much.

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

#57
post #11

> 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…

I think he's really getting at something there. I've been thinking about this a lot (in the context of trying to understand the persistent-on-HN skepticism about LLMs), and the framing I came up with[1] is top-down vs. bottom-up dev styles, aka architecting code and then filling in implementations, vs. writing code and having architecture evolve.

[1] https://www.klio.org/theory-of-llm-dev-skepticism/

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

#58

> 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…

Lots of very scared, angry developers in these comment sections recently...

Not angry nor scared, I value my hard skills a lot, I'm just wondering why people believe religiously everything AI related. Maybe I'm a bit sick with the excessive hype

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

#59

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 reac…

I think the senior devs will be fine. They're like lawyers at this point - everyone is too scared they'll screw up and will keep them around

The juniors though will radically have to upskill. The standard junior dev portfolio can be replicated by claude code in like three prompts

The game has changed and I don't think all the players are ready to handle it

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

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol typing on my phone during lunch and meant anecdotal. But let's leave it anyways. :)
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