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Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
21–30 of 209 posts
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#22For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output. When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was li…
So where AI has deterministic inputs and outputs it is extremely good to the point I think that there's a theoretical issue around computational there. Like - it can do the work for us. It jives with post training and verifiable rewards. The reason AI doesn't do well at 'architecture' is 1) are are bad at it and have given it a lot of mush and 2) we don't have good abstractions for it. The result is - you stick to 'v…
> The reason AI doesn't do well at 'architecture' is
[...] 2) we don't have good abstractions for it.
Maybe it's time for an architecture-oriented programming language?
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Effective planning with LLMs isn’t prompting “design me a system” - it’s asking “how would a system to accomplish x be designed” and then engaging in dialogue and research with the LLM as an assistant and critic - running outputs through other agents for further critique and refinement - asking for justifications of decisions you are not informed enough to evaluate properly yourself. It is entirely possible to develo…
> It is entirely possible to develop strong systems outside of your current skill and knowledge with methods like this. If this is true how can you confidently make this assertion. You yourself are not in a position to evaluate it, you are just running it through a couple times hoping for a "oh wait, you're right to call me out on that, that is not correct at all".
1. Tell it to find docs and research best practices.
2. Ask for references and read them.
> When done properly your own knowledge should have grown to meet the product you end up with.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#24Re: "the attaboy problem". I strongly disagree that this is a problem. What we have is a anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. You actually can get it to point out issues in your design, if you just put enough humility and uncertainty in your prompt formulation, but more importantly, we have all seen that Claude makes mistakes. The title of this post is that it's a poor architect. Imagin…
> oh you've read about cuda have you? I live in a cluster of cuda cores! When I need to tie my shoes, I'll give you a call"
I suddenly have new concerns about what my future might be like.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#25With the new agentic capabilities, I am quickly running out of Architecture decisions I have already made myself! For my work-in-progress engineering application. There is also some kind of don't know every little if/else with my own Code now.
However the good part, what I had planned for 5 years, now looks like doable in 6 months. Looking forward to real use by the end of this year.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep telling people that they have to design and think about it first and then go to the tool, but they keep saying “Claude can plan too” and obviously it produces some shit that requires a lot of changes while when I get it to go I can almost always one shot the stuff I want because I am actually putting in the time to give it a detailed plan of what to do. Even just saving me the time to deal with CI is worth it.
Effective planning with LLMs isn’t prompting “design me a system” - it’s asking “how would a system to accomplish x be designed” and then engaging in dialogue and research with the LLM as an assistant and critic - running outputs through other agents for further critique and refinement - asking for justifications of decisions you are not informed enough to evaluate properly yourself. It is entirely possible to develo…
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Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#27> It hasn’t thought about the problem at all. It’s pattern-matching against its training data and producing the most plausible-sounding response.
The article kind of lost me here. Agents are way more than that, today. And the author knows it, as later it says stuff like
> Claude will never do this. It’s trained to be helpful.
But the first phrase just tell me author just have a deep dislike for agents and it's looking for rationalizations for that feeling.
Part of the criticism is on point, sure. But if it "being trained to be helpful" is a problem, it's fixable. It can "be trained to be more critical".
Later:
> But it wasn’t designed for your team. (..) It was designed for the median of everything Claude has seen. A generic best practice for a generic problem at a generic company. Which is to say, it was designed for nobody.
That's non-sense. Anybody who understand algorithms know that, sure, on a first instance you have a "good algorithm" that has a good performance on average, or in worst-case. But then, you can design algorithms that are adaptive to the input. Same applies here.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#28> It hasn’t thought about the problem at all. It’s pattern-matching against its training data and producing the most plausible-sounding response. The article kind of lost me here. Agents are way more than that, today. And the author knows it, as later it says stuff like > Claude will never do this. It’s trained to be helpful. But the first phrase just tell me author just have a deep dislike for agents and it's lookin…
>Agents are way more than that, today.
Not really though. They just iterate more and more.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#29Re: "the attaboy problem". I strongly disagree that this is a problem. What we have is a anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. You actually can get it to point out issues in your design, if you just put enough humility and uncertainty in your prompt formulation, but more importantly, we have all seen that Claude makes mistakes. The title of this post is that it's a poor architect. Imagin…
>anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient.
Suggesting it should be 'subservient' is also anthropomorphizing. I think your callout is correct, but you still can't help but refer to it in terms we use for other people or living entities. This is by design from the AI companies.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#30For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output. When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was li…
I keep telling people that they have to design and think about it first and then go to the tool, but they keep saying “Claude can plan too” and obviously it produces some shit that requires a lot of changes while when I get it to go I can almost always one shot the stuff I want because I am actually putting in the time to give it a detailed plan of what to do. Even just saving me the time to deal with CI is worth it.
It sounds like people are treating it exactly like managers treat software engineers
"Here's my idea, go build it please"
"Can I ask you questions about it?"
"Hey, You're the engineer you figure it out. That's why I pay you"
Tale as old as time