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Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

ccunpacked.dev

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Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but my point was that they seem to explicitly not care about code quality and/or the insane amount of bloat, and seem to just want the LLM to be able to deal with it.

I've heard somewhere that they have roughly 100% code churn every few months, so yes, they unfortunately don't care about code quality. It's a shame, because it's still the best coding agent, in my experience.

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Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#72
However, excellent development practices involve modularizing code based on functional domains or responsibilities.

The utils directory should only contain truly generic, business-agnostic utilities (such as date retrieval, simple string manipulation, etc.).

We can see that the code produced by Vibe is not what a professional engineer would write. This may be due to the engineers using the Vibe tool.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#73
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been corrected, I did another fact checking pass!

Another? Why weren't all the facts checked on the first pass?

We've moved from "move fast and break things" to "hallucinate fast and patch later." It's the inevitable side effect of using AI to curate AI-written codebases.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#77
post #7

There's this weird thing about AI generated content where it has the perfect presentation but conveys very little. For example the whole animation on this website, what does it say beyond that you make a request to backend and get a response that may have some tool call?

I agree with you and I'm generally an AI "defender" when people superficially dismiss AI capabilities, but this is a more subtle point.

If you prompt with little raw material and little actual specification of what you want to see in the end, eg you just say make a detailed breakdown dashboard-like site that analyzes this codebase, the result will have this uncanny character.

I'd describe it as a kind of "fanfic", it (and now I'm not just talking about this website but my overall impression related to this phenomenon) reminds me a bit like how when I was 15 or so, I had an idea about how the world works then things turned out to be less flashy, less movie-like, less clear-cut, less-impressive-to-a-teenage-boy than I had thought.

If you know the concept of "stupid man's idea of a smart man", I'd say AI made stuff (with little iteration) gives this outward appearance of a smart man from the Reddit-midwit-cinematic-universe. It's like how guns in movies sound more like guns than real guns. It's hyperreality.

Again this is less about the capabilities of AI and it's more connected to the people-pleasing nature of it. It's like you prompt it for some epic dinner and it heaps you up some hmmm epic bacon with bacon yeah (referring to the hivemind-meme). Or BigMac on the poster vs the tray, and the poster one is a model made with different components that are more photogenic. It's a simulacrum.

It looks more like your naive currently imagined thing about what you think you need vs what you'd actually need. It's like prompting your ideal girlfriend into AI avatar existence. I'm sure she will fit your ideal thought and imagination much better but your actual life would need the actual thing.

This relates to the Persona thing that Anthropic has been exploring, that each prompt guides the model towards adopting a certain archetypal fiction character as it's persona and there are certain attraction basins that get reinforced with post training. And in the computer world, simulated action can be easily turned into real action with harnesses and tools, so I'm not saying that it doesn't accomplish the task. But it seems that there are more sloppy personas, and it seems that experts can more easily avoid summoning them by giving them context that reflects more mundane reality than a novice or an expert who gives little context. Otherwise the AI persona will be summoned from the Reddit midwit movie.

I'm not fully clear about all this, but I think we have a lot to figure out around how to use and judge the output of AI in a productive workflow. I don't think it will go away ever, but will need some trimming at the edges for sure.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#78
post #72

However, excellent development practices involve modularizing code based on functional domains or responsibilities. The utils directory should only contain truly generic, business-agnostic utilities (such as date retrieval, simple string manipulation, etc.). We can see that the code produced by Vibe is not what a professional engineer would write. This may be due to the engineers using the Vibe tool.

That's the hallmark of "vibe coding": optimizing for immediate output while treating the utils folder as a generic junk drawer.

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but my point was that they seem to explicitly not care about code quality and/or the insane amount of bloat, and seem to just want the LLM to be able to deal with it.

I've heard somewhere that they have roughly 100% code churn every few months, so yes, they unfortunately don't care about code quality. It's a shame, because it's still the best coding agent, in my experience.

> they unfortunately don't care about code quality.

> It's a shame, because it's still the best coding agent, in my experience.

If it is the best, and if it delivers the value users are asking for, then why would they have an incentive to make further $$$ investments to make it of a "higher" quality if the value this difference could make is not substantial or hurts the ROI?

On many projects I found this "higher quality" not only to be false of delivering more substantial value but actually I found it was hurting the project to deliver the value that matters.

Maybe we are after all entering the era of SWE where all this bike-shedding is gone and only type of engineers who will be able to survive in it will be the ones who are capable of delivering the actual value (IME very few per project).

Re: Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide

#80

I guess they really do eat their own dogfood and vibe code their way through it without care for technical debt? In a way, it’s a good challenge, but it’s fairly painful to watch the current state of the project (which is about a year old now, so it should be in prime shape).

They explicitly boast about using claude code to write code: https://x.com/bcherny/status/2007179836704600237

That's how you get "oh this TUI API wrapper needs 68GB of RAM" https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987 or "we need 16ms to lay out a few hundred characters on screen that's why it's a small game engine": https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427

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