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What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

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Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#11

Post by simianwords »

adrian_b wrote: post #9
golly_ned wrote: post #5

I came away with a very different conclusion, which is that the fact that such “bad” software can be so resoundingly successful for a business, yet be so odious to experienced human reviewers, means that it was the right engineering choice to go fast, rather than “do things right” by emphasizing code quality. What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehen…

It was "good engineering" only because this was a new kind of product and the customers were not aware yet of what they should get for the money they pay. The bad quality of the Claude Code program has resulted in increased costs for the customers (very high memory consumption, slow execution, higher and sometimes much higher token count than necessary), and even for Anthropic, but nobody was aware of this, because t…

Your kind of critique forgets the tradeoff between getting something out quick vs doing something slowly and nicely.

If you choose slowly, you are depriving your users of the value from your app for a long time. It’s not as clear a choice as you think

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#12

Post by adrian_b »

simianwords wrote: post #11
adrian_b wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was "good engineering" only because this was a new kind of product and the customers were not aware yet of what they should get for the money they pay. The bad quality of the Claude Code program has resulted in increased costs for the customers (very high memory consumption, slow execution, higher and sometimes much higher token count than necessary), and even for Anthropic, but nobody was aware of this, because t…

Your kind of critique forgets the tradeoff between getting something out quick vs doing something slowly and nicely. If you choose slowly, you are depriving your users of the value from your app for a long time. It’s not as clear a choice as you think

Have you read my entire comment?

I have already said that sometimes time-to-market is the most important, so that should be the priority, but the advantage of delivering immediately the application is only temporary, so you must improve quickly your first possibly vibe-coded implementation, otherwise better alternatives will be delivered by others.

Claude Code is an obvious example of this, because it has practically opened a new market, but because it has remained a mess now there are better alternatives.

What is wrong is not generating instantly a proof-of-concept application that barely works and using it in the beginning, but continuing to build upon that even after you had enough time to rewrite it.

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#13

Post by beacon294 »

j_bum wrote: post #2

As someone who finds a huge amount of enjoyment in developing using Opus 4.6 in Claude code, I’d love to know what other harnesses people use that deliver the same experience as CC. CC is a vibe-coded mess, but it works very well for me. I do a lot of work in R and find codex (5.4 & 5.3-codex) just totally drop the ball with R. Anthropic’s models are far better with R, so I use them. But I do wonder how much the harn…

Pi

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#14

Post by simianwords »

adrian_b wrote: post #12
simianwords wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your kind of critique forgets the tradeoff between getting something out quick vs doing something slowly and nicely. If you choose slowly, you are depriving your users of the value from your app for a long time. It’s not as clear a choice as you think

Have you read my entire comment? I have already said that sometimes time-to-market is the most important, so that should be the priority, but the advantage of delivering immediately the application is only temporary, so you must improve quickly your first possibly vibe-coded implementation, otherwise better alternatives will be delivered by others. Claude Code is an obvious example of this, because it has practically…

The advantage is definitely not temporary as can be seen by how many people use codex vs Claude code. Claude code works just fine and I have zero issues at usability level. Could they have more features? Yes but I see that they are shipping quick. It is obvious to me that they took the right balance between time to market and clan code

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#15

Post by conartist6 »

golly_ned wrote: post #5

I came away with a very different conclusion, which is that the fact that such “bad” software can be so resoundingly successful for a business, yet be so odious to experienced human reviewers, means that it was the right engineering choice to go fast, rather than “do things right” by emphasizing code quality. What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehen…

It just won't survive, it's that simple.

You get to know before others how the future will play out

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#16

Post by leonidasrup »

K0balt wrote: post #6

Obviously they were legit vibing it. AI coding is like having a team of 100 interns. It’s incredibly powerful but you need to keep it under control or you’re gonna have a bad day. Write documentation describing the specs , the APIs, the protocols, and the customer stories. Specify that everything must be divided with clear separations of concerns, interfaces, and state objects. Any single file should have a clearly d…

It depends on the kind of software you are programming.

If you are programming regular commercial software (office applications, web apps, games) with customers tolerating occasional bug and lot of pressure deliver fast, you can gain lot from Claude. Facebook motto: Move fast and break things

If you are programming software for industrial applications, critical software, most of the time you spend is not on writing software but writing tests, documenting, doing multiple rounds of reviews and for really critical applications doing formal verification. In this case AI can be also counterproductive, because if you absolutely have to understand every single line of code, manual coding helps to understand the code.

Example of cutting costs in programming of critical software

https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/article/22027840/b...

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#17

Post by spicyusername »

golly_ned wrote: post #5

I came away with a very different conclusion, which is that the fact that such “bad” software can be so resoundingly successful for a business, yet be so odious to experienced human reviewers, means that it was the right engineering choice to go fast, rather than “do things right” by emphasizing code quality. What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehen…

The argument is that the bad code will result in the companies core product failing.

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#18

Post by mpalmer »

adrian_b wrote: post #10
mpalmer wrote: post #3

Why does everything always have to reveal something? It's such a definitive, decisive word, which is abused to the point of meaninglessness by clickbait. Claude Code's source could imply, suggest, point to, highlight, call attention to, indict, or invite deeper reflection about AI engineering culture. Quit sucking all the life out of words to get clicks. The way we use them, they're a finite resource.

Reveal = show something that was hidden previously. Seems like the appropriate word to use about a source code leak. The words proposed by you are suitable for describing the consequences of a revelation, while no longer containing any hint about their original cause, so using them would have lead to a more verbose sentence for delivering the same information.

It wasn't hidden previously. It was fairly well-understood.

The CC source doesn't "reveal" a single thing about anything other than Anthropic internals. It says nothing about the industry at large, certainly nothing new.

And this:

    The words proposed by you are suitable for describing the consequences of a revelation, while no longer containing any hint about their original cause
doesn't make any sense. There is no "revelation" here. And the word "reveal" contains no connotations whatsoever about the "cause" of a "revelation".

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#19

Post by redhale »

golly_ned wrote: post #5

I came away with a very different conclusion, which is that the fact that such “bad” software can be so resoundingly successful for a business, yet be so odious to experienced human reviewers, means that it was the right engineering choice to go fast, rather than “do things right” by emphasizing code quality. What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehen…

But it is working primarily because of the Max subscription model. If I could use my Max subscription to get $5000 worth of tokens for only $200 via OpenCode or Pi, I would drop Claude Code today. I think a lot of people (and enterprises) are of a similar opinion. Not saying Claude Code would have no users, but its dominance would be greatly diminished.

Re: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

#20

Post by motbus3 »

adrian_b wrote: post #9
golly_ned wrote: post #5

I came away with a very different conclusion, which is that the fact that such “bad” software can be so resoundingly successful for a business, yet be so odious to experienced human reviewers, means that it was the right engineering choice to go fast, rather than “do things right” by emphasizing code quality. What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehen…

It was "good engineering" only because this was a new kind of product and the customers were not aware yet of what they should get for the money they pay. The bad quality of the Claude Code program has resulted in increased costs for the customers (very high memory consumption, slow execution, higher and sometimes much higher token count than necessary), and even for Anthropic, but nobody was aware of this, because t…

I guess that now people are more aware on how bad their software is, we cannot blame the "super intelligent ai" to not be ready yet.

The amount of regex matching people found os staggering

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