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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

#91

Post by nsingh2 »

jimbokun wrote: post #46
maxdo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coplilot is not on par with cc or cursor even

I use it to access Claude. So what's the difference?

This stuff is a little messy and opaque, but the performance of the same model in different harnesses depends a lot on how context is managed. The last time I tried Copilot, it performed markedly worse for similar tasks compared to Claude Code. I suspect that Copilot was being very aggressive in compressing context to save on token cost, but I'm not 100% certain about this.

Also note that with Claude models, Copilot might allocate a different number of thinking tokens compared to Claude Code.

Things may have changed now compared to when I tried it out, these tools are in constant flux. In general I've found that harnesses created by the model providers (OpenAI/Codex CLI, Anthropic/Claude Code, Google/Gemini CLI) tend to be better than generalist harnesses (cheaper too, since you're not paying a middleman).

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

#92

Post by iwontberude »

iwontberude wrote: post #19
jopsen wrote: post #8

> - 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 ;)

Most of this countries challenges are strictly political. The pittance of work software can contribute is most likely negligible or destructive (e.g. software buttons in cars or palantir). In other words were picked all the low hanging fruit and all that left is to hang ourselves.

edit: country's* all that is left*

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

#93

Post by vardalab »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #53

Once again, 80% of the comments here are from boomers. HN used to be a proper place for people actually curious about technology

I'm almost a boomer and I agree. THis dichotomy is weird. I am retired EE and I love the ability to just have AI do whatever I want for me. I have it manage a 10 node proxmox cluster in my basement via ansible and terraform. I can finally do stuff I always wanted but had no time. I got sick of editing my kids sports videos for highlights in Davinci Resolve so just asked claude to write a simple app for me and then use all my random video cards in my boxes to render clips in parallel and so on. Tech is finally fun again when I do not have to dedicate days to understand some new framework. It does feel a little like late 1990's computing when everyone was making geocities webpages but those days were more fun. Now with local llms getting strong as well and speaking to my PC instead of typing it feels like SciFi, so yeah, I do not get this hacker news hand wringing about code craft.

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

#94

Post by fooker »

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…

> It might become cheaper or it might not

If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper.

(But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)

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

#95

Post by dirtytoken7 »

daxfohl wrote: post #65

I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…

[dead]

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

#96

Post by philipwhiuk »

> 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.

The bits left unsaid:

1. Burning tokens, which we charge you for

2. My CPU does this when I tell it to do bogosort on a million 32-bit integers, it doesn't mean it's a good thing

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

#97

Post by dpflan »

addisonj wrote: post #40
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…

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…

“””

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)

“””

This perspective is crucial. Scale is the great equalizer / demoralizer, scale of the org and scale of the systems. Systems become complex quickly, and verifiability of correctness and function becomes harder. Companies that built from day with AI and have AI influencing them as they scale, where does complexity begin to run up against the limitations of AI and cause regression? Or if all goes well, amplification?

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

#98

Post by thr59182617 »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #52
hollowturtle wrote: post #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…

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

I see way more hype that is boosted by the moderators. The scared ones are the nepo babies who founded a vaporware AI company that will be bought by daddy or friends through a VC.

They have to maintain the hype until a somewhat credible exit appears and therefore lash out with boomer memes, FOMO, and the usual insane talking points like "there are builders and coders".

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

#99

Post by riku_iki »

uejfiweun wrote: post #31

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…

> like the SWE job will still exist, but with a much lower technical barrier of entry

its opposite, now in addition to all other skills, you need skill how to handle giant codebases of viobe-coded mess using AI.

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

#100

Post by atonse »

ryandrake wrote: post #23
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…

I noticed the same thing, but wasn't able to put it into words before reading that. Been experimenting with LLM-based coding just so I can understand it and talk intelligently about it (instead of just being that grouchy curmudgeon), and the thought in the back of my mind while using Claude Code is always: "I got into programming because I like programming, not whatever this is..." Yes, I'm building stupid things fas…

Funny you say that. Because I have never enjoyed management as much as being hands on and directly solving problems.

So maybe our common ground is that we are direct problem solvers. :-)

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