Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 870 posts

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

#81

Post by TheGRS »

Madmallard wrote: post #4

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.

I'm trying it out with Godot for my little side projects. It can handle writing the GUI files for nodes and settings. The workflow is asking cursor to change something, I review the code changes, then load up the game in Godot to check out the changes. Works pretty well. I'm curious if any Unity or Unreal devs are using it since I'm sure its a similar experience.

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

#83

Post by shj2105 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #42
porise wrote: 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.

I'm afraid that we're entering a time when the performance difference between the really cutting edge and even the three-month-old tools is vast If you're using plain vanilla chatgpt, you're woefully, woefully out of touch. Heck, even plain claude code is now outdated

Why is plain Claude code outdated? I thought that’s what most people are using right now that are AI forward. Is it Ralph loops now that’s the new thing?

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

#84

Post by daxfohl »

I'm curious to see what effect this change has on leadership. For the last two years it's been "put everything you can into AI coding, or else!" with quotas and firings and whatever else. Now that AI is at the stage where it can actually output whole features with minimal handholding, is there going to be a Frankenstein moment where leadership realizes they now have a product whose codebase is running away from their engineering team's ability to support it? Does it change the calculus of what it means to be underinvested vs overinvested in AI, and what are the implications?

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

#85

Post by Macha »

languid-photic wrote: post #63
porise wrote: 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.

They build Claude Code fully with Claude Code.

Which is equal parts praise and damnation. Claude Code does do a lot of nice things that people just kind of don't bother for time cost / reward when writing TUIs that they've probably only done because they're using AI heavily, but equally it has a lot of underbaked edges (like accidentally shadowing the user's shell configuration when it tries to install terminal bindings for shift-enter even though the terminal it's configuring already sends a distinct shift-enter result), and bugs (have you ever noticed it just stop, unfinished?).

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

#86

Post by inerte »

coffeeaddict1 wrote: post #79
atonse wrote: 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…

But how can you be a responsible builder if you don't have trust in the LLMs doing the "right thing"? Suppose you're the head of a software team where you've picked up the best candidates for a given project, in that scenario I can see how one is able to trust the team members to orchestrate the implementation of your ideas and intentions, with you not being intimately familiar with the details. Can we place the same…

You don't simply put a body in a seat and get software. There are entire systems enabling this trust: college, resume, samples, referral, interviews, tests and CI, monitoring, mentoring, and performance feedback.

And accountability can still exist? Is the engineer that created or reviewed a Pull Request using Claude Code less accountable then one that used PICO?

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

#87

Post by jjfoooo4 »

keerthiko wrote: post #51
porise wrote: 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 w…

That was true for me, but is no longer.

It's been especially helpful in explaining and understanding arcane bits of legacy code behavior my users ask about. I trigger Claude to examine the code and figure out how the feature works, then tell it to update the documentation accordingly.

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

#88

Post by daxfohl »

einrealist wrote: post #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 neces…

I still find in these instances there's at least a 50% chance it has taken a shortcut somewhere: created a new, bigger bug in something that just happened not to have a unit test covering it, or broke an "implicit" requirement that was so obvious to any reasonable human that nobody thought to document it. These can be subtle because you're not looking for them, because no human would ever think to do such a thing.

Then even if you do catch it, AI: "ah, now I see exactly the problem. just insert a few more coins and I'll fix it for real this time, I promise!"

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

#89

Post by Macha »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #3

It's been a bit like the boiling frog analogy for me I started by copy pasting more and more stuff in chatgpt. Then using more and more in-IDE prompting, then more and more agent tools (Claude etc). And suddenly I realise I barely hand code anymore For sure there's still a place for manual coding, especially schemas/queries or other fiddly things where a tiny mistake gets amplified, but the vast majority of "basic wo…

I've had the opposite experience, it's been a long time listening to people going "It's really good now" before it developed to a permutation that was actually worth the time to use it.

ChatGPT 3.5/4 (2023-2024): The chat interface was verbose and clunky and it was just... wrong... like 70+% of the time. Not worth using.

CoPilot autocomplete and Gitlab Duo and Junie (late 2024-early 2025): Wayyy too aggressive at guessing exactly what I wasn't doing and hijacked my tab complete when pre-LLM type-tetris autocomplete was just more reliable.

Copilot Edit/early Cursor (early 2025): Ok, I can sort of see uses here but god is picking the right files all the time such a pain as it really means I need to have figured out what I wanted to do in such detail already that what was even the point? Also the models at that time just quickly descended into incoherency after like three prompts, if it went off track good luck ever correcting it.

Copilot Agent mode / Cursor (late 2025): Ok, great, if the scope is narrowly scoped, and I'm either going to write the tests for it or it's refactoring existing code it could do something. Like something mechanical like the library has a migration where we need to replace the use of methods A/B/C and replace them with a different combination of X/Y/Z. great, it can do that. Or like CRUD controller #341. I mean, sure, if my boss is going to pay for it, but not life changing.

Zed Agent mode / Cursor agent mode / Claude code (early 2026): Finally something where I can like describe the architecture and requirements of a feature, let it code, review that code, give it written instructions on how to clean it up / refactor / missing tests, and iterate.

But that was like 2 years of "really it's better and revolutionary now" before it actually got there. Now maybe in some languages or problem domains, it was useful for people earlier but I can understand people who don't care about "but it works now" when they're hearing it for the sixth time.

And I mean, what one hand gives the other takes away. I have a decent amount of new work dealing with MRs from my coworkers where they just grabbed the requirements from a stakeholder, shoved it into Claude or Cursor and it passed the existing tests and it's shipped without much understanding. When they wrote them themselves, they tested it more and were more prepared to support it in production...

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

#90

Post by coffeeaddict1 »

inerte wrote: post #86
coffeeaddict1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how can you be a responsible builder if you don't have trust in the LLMs doing the "right thing"? Suppose you're the head of a software team where you've picked up the best candidates for a given project, in that scenario I can see how one is able to trust the team members to orchestrate the implementation of your ideas and intentions, with you not being intimately familiar with the details. Can we place the same…

You don't simply put a body in a seat and get software. There are entire systems enabling this trust: college, resume, samples, referral, interviews, tests and CI, monitoring, mentoring, and performance feedback. And accountability can still exist? Is the engineer that created or reviewed a Pull Request using Claude Code less accountable then one that used PICO?

> And accountability can still exist? Is the engineer that created or reviewed a Pull Request using Claude Code less accountable then one that used PICO?

The point is that in the human scenario, you can hold the human agents accountable. You cannot do that with AI. Of course, you as the orchestrator of agents will be accountable to someone, but you won't have the benefit of holding your "subordinates" accountable, which is what you do in a human team. IMO, this renders the whole situation vastly different (whether good or bad I'm not sure).

Post reply on HN