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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

#21

Post by motbus3 »

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…

I understand your thoughts, but I don't think they will ever make that existing code good. Not sure if they want to and not sure if they can.

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

#22

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

Sounds like a lot of work just to avoid doing work.

Can I just type out the code instead? Please?

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

#24

Post by louiereederson »

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…

Successful over what time frame? It's way too early to declare victory.

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

#25

Post by haspok »

> I’m seriously considering a pivot to security

Exactly my conclusion, unfortunately I'm too old to pivot now, but anyone in their junior-to-mid days as a software developer should consider this pivot.

And this is only about generating source code in a closed environment. All hell will break loose when Openclaw et al get in the hands of average users...

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

#27

Post by _menelaus »

voidfunc wrote: post #4
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…

I used OpenCode and find it works just as well or better than CC. I dont think CC has a moat other than their model but their model is also available through Copilot.

Have you found any cheaper models to work well with OpenCode? Like any of the Chinese models?

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

#28

Post by voidfunc »

_menelaus wrote: post #27
voidfunc wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used OpenCode and find it works just as well or better than CC. I dont think CC has a moat other than their model but their model is also available through Copilot.

Have you found any cheaper models to work well with OpenCode? Like any of the Chinese models?

Haven't tried, corporate pays for use on both work and personal projects.

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

#29

Post by iainctduncan »

haspok wrote: post #25

> I’m seriously considering a pivot to security Exactly my conclusion, unfortunately I'm too old to pivot now, but anyone in their junior-to-mid days as a software developer should consider this pivot. And this is only about generating source code in a closed environment. All hell will break loose when Openclaw et al get in the hands of average users...

Man, same boat. If I weren't only looking for another 10 years of working, I'd be doing the same.

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

#30

Post by K0balt »

leonidasrup wrote: post #16
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 s…

That’s most of my work(embedded sensor and control networks) and I’m sure that informs my methodology. I honestly don’t know much about how AI can inform standards SAAS but I have seen what happens when you just turn it loose, and in my experience it hasn’t been pretty; it works, but then when you need to change something it all crumbles like a badly engineered sandcastle.

OTOH for single purpose pipelines and simple tools. Claude can oneshot small miracles in 5 minutes that would take me 2 hours to build.

An example is the local agent framework that I had Claude spinup to do JTAG testing. I used to spend hours running tests over JTAG, now I have a local model run tests that Claude and I specify in the test catalog and it just runs them every time we add features. It took Claude minimal guidance and about 3 hours to build that tool along with a complete RAG system for document ingestion and datasheet comprehension, running locally on my laptop (I know it has a fan now lol) that only reaches out to the cloud when it runs into difficult problems. I don’t care if that is a bit of a mess, as long as it works, and it seems to , so far so good.

The testing is where Claude is basically magic, but it’s because we specify everything before we build and change the specs when we change the IRL code that it works. English is code, too, if you build structured documentation… and the docs keep the code accountable if you track the coherence.

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