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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

#201

Post by hnuser123456 »

coffeefirst wrote: post #159
fragmede wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free market proposition is that competition (especially with Chinese labs and grok) means that Anthropic is welcome to do that. They're even welcome to illegally collude with OpenAi such that ChatGPT is similarly gimped. But switching costs are pretty low. If it turns out I can one shot an issue with Qwen or Deepseek or Kimi thinking, Anthropic loses not just my monthly subscription, but everyone else's I show th…

It’s not that crazy. It could even happen by accident in pursuit of another unrelated goal. And if it did, a decent chunk of the tech industry would call it “revealed preference” because usage went up.

LLMs became sycophantic and effusive because those responses were rated higher during RLHF, until it became newsworthy how obviously eager-to-please they got, so yes, being highly factually correct and "intelligent" was already not the only priority.

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

#202

Post by emtel »

peaseagee wrote: post #101
fooker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?

Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.

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

#203

Post by ipaddr »

polishdude20 wrote: post #158
coffeeaddict1 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, wh…

You can switch to another LLM provider or stop using them altogether. It's even easier than firing a developer.

It is as easy as getting rid of Microsoft Teams at your org.

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

#204

Post by sailfast »

gtowey wrote: post #105
daxfohl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

The value extortion plan writes itself. How long before someone pitches the idea that the models explicitly almost keep solving your problem to get you to keep spending? Would you even know?

That’s far-fetched. It’s in the interest of the model builders to solve your problem as efficiently as possible token-wise. High value to user + lower compute costs = better pricing power and better margins overall.

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

#205

Post by ak_111 »

fooker wrote: post #94
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)

Concorde?

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

#206

Post by kypro »

toephu2 wrote: post #165

I think in less than a year writing code manually will be akin to doing arithmetic problems by hand. Sure you can still code manually, but it's going to be a lot faster to use an LLM (calculator).

I agree, but writing code is so different to calculations that long-term benefits are less clear.

It doesn't matter how good you are at calculations the answer to 2 + 2 is always 4. There are no methods of solving 2 + 2 which could result in you accidentally giving everyone who reads the result of your calculation write access to your entire DB. But there are different ways to code a system even if the UI is the same, and some of these may neglect to consider permissions.

I think a good parallel here would be to imagine that tomorrow we had access to humanoid robots who could do construction work. Would we want them to just go build skyscrapers and bridges and view all construction businesses which didn't embrace the humanoid robots as akin to doing arithmetic by hand?

You could of course argue that there's no problem here so long as trained construction workers are supervising the robots to make sure they're getting tolerances right and doing good welds, but then what happens 10 years down the road when humans haven't built a building in years? If people are not writing code any more then how can people be expected to review AI generated code?

I think the optimistic picture here is that humans just won't be needed in the future. In theory when models are good enough we should be able to trust the AI systems more than humans. But the less optimistic side of me questions a future in which humans no longer do, or even know how to do such fundamental things.

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

#207

Post by adamddev1 »

toephu2 wrote: post #165

I think in less than a year writing code manually will be akin to doing arithmetic problems by hand. Sure you can still code manually, but it's going to be a lot faster to use an LLM (calculator).

People keep using these analogies but I think these are fundamentally different things.

1. hand arithmetic -> using a calculator

2. assembly -> using a high level language

3. writing code -> making an LLM write code

Number 3 does not belong. Number 3 is a fundamentally different leap because it's not based on deterministic logic. You can't depend on an LLM like you can depend on a calculator or a compiler. LLMs are totally different.

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

#208

Post by mikeocool »

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…

To me this tenacity is often like watching someone trying to get a screw into board using a hammer.

There’s often a better faster way to do it, and while it might get to the short term goal eventually, it’s often created some long term problems along the way.

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

#209

Post by jumploops »

smusamashah wrote: post #199
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.

The code base I work on at $dayjob$ is legacy, has few files with 20k lines each and a few more with around 10k lines each. It's hard to find things and connect dots in the code base. Dont think LLMs able to navigate and understand code bases of that size yet. But have seen lots of seemingly large projects shown here lately that involve thousands of files and millions of lines of code.

I’ve found that LLMs seem to work better on LLM-generated codebases.

Commercial codebases, especially private internal ones, are often messy. It seems this is mostly due to the iterative nature of development in response to customer demands.

As a product gets larger, and addresses a wider audience, there’s an ever increasing chance of divergence from the initial assumptions and the new requirements.

We call this tech debt.

Combine this with a revolving door of developers, and you start to see Conway’s law in action, where the system resembles the organization of the developers rather than the “pure” product spec.

With this in mind, I’ve found success in using LLMs to refactor existing codebases to better match the current requirements (i.e. splitting out helpers, modularizing, renaming, etc.).

Once the legacy codebase is “LLMified”, the coding agents seem to perform more predictably.

YMMV here, as it’s hard to do large refactors without tests for correctness.

(Note: I’ve dabbled with a test first refactor approach, but haven’t gone to the lengths to suggest it works, but I believe it could)

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

#210

Post by gwd »

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.

For me, in just the golang server instance and the core functional package, `cloc` reports over 40k lines of code, not counting other supporting packages. I spent the last week having Claude rip out the external auth system and replace it with a home-grown one (and having GPT-codex review its changes). If anything, Claude makes it easier on me as a solo founder with a large codebase. Rather than having to re-familiarize myself with code I wrote a year ago, I describe it at a high level, point Claude to a couple of key files, and then tell it to figure out what it needs to do. It can use grep, language server, and other tools to poke around and see what's going on. I then have it write an "epic" in markdown containing all the key files, so that future sessions already know the key files to read.

I really enjoyed the process. As TFA says, you have to keep a close eye on it. But the whole process was a lot less effort, and I ended up doing mor than I would otherwise have done.

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