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Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

hollandtech.net

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Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#121

Post by irishcoffee »

operatingthetan wrote: post #41
irishcoffee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My drill, hammer, and chainsaw are also subservient, they just have a much cruder form of communication, noise.

The apple dictionary says the word means "prepared to obey others unquestioningly." I don't think an inanimate object is capable of "obeying." Or at least that is a very strange way to refer to the act of using a tool.

When I actuate the chain on my chainsaw to move, it’s obeying me unquestionably, in the same way that when I press a key on my keyboard it obeys me unquestionably. What exactly is the difference?

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#122

Post by RandyRanderson »

This is interesting: there is a mountain of data (eg code in gh) that is the "truth" because God labeled it as so: meaning that many people are using it to do something (they have voted).

There is also a mountain of bullshit eg "[architectural|design] [anti]patterns" that are written mostly (I would argue) to sell something (consulting, hardware, etc). This is typically at odds with a good solution.

There is a relative lack of actual documented architectures that work. Not only do you need the details but also the usage of these systems so as to judge what "good" is.

We will probably just go the HTML route with architecture: take a really bad base and just keep throwing compute, memory, and network I/O at the problem until it works.

Note to self: invest in energy ETFs.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#123

Post by otar »

himata4113 wrote: post #110

I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "a…

> AI is only as good as the person using it, that's why we have such vast range of what people "claim" AI can do and why everyone has way different opinions of it.

Banger statement.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#124

Post by operatingthetan »

gchamonlive wrote: post #34
operatingthetan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Suggesting it should be 'subservient' is also anthropomorphizing. Not really, you can program a machine to give out orders humans can interpret, so humans can serve a machine that isn't anthropomorphized.

The machine in your scenario is just relaying human intent.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#125

Post by FpUser »

Very recently I've submitted architecture of one of my backends to Claude for review. The architecture is highly unconventional but not unique in very high performance backend segment. Claude was actually good that it literally grilled me on how particular problems A,B,C... etc are solved. Basically I was impressed with the level of questioning and challenge and Claude gave me excellent results in the end.

I then logged in from completely different account, described the problem and asked to design architecture of backend with the same functionality and performance. Suddenly I got standard distributed enterprise monsterware running on amazon. Yes - it could do the task for at least 100-time price for comparable performance and way more complex to manage at even more markup

I then have merged both conversations and started grilling Claude why is it doing such a disservice to a customer who is looking to optimize ROI.

Claude's answer was basically - It runs on large corporate's development methodologies / propaganda that outweighs every rational choice just because of sheer volume

So yes, be careful what you wish AI to do. It can and will set you up.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#126

Post by operatingthetan »

irishcoffee wrote: post #121
operatingthetan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The apple dictionary says the word means "prepared to obey others unquestioningly." I don't think an inanimate object is capable of "obeying." Or at least that is a very strange way to refer to the act of using a tool.

When I actuate the chain on my chainsaw to move, it’s obeying me unquestionably, in the same way that when I press a key on my keyboard it obeys me unquestionably. What exactly is the difference?

It’s just a chain reaction. Obeying requires agency (the choice to follow the direction or not). LLMs and chainsaws don’t have it.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#127

Post by greenchair »

cvwright wrote: post #73
retrac wrote: post #2

For 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…

LLMs are bringing us back to all the “proper” software engineering stuff that we’ve always known we should be doing, but until now we never had enough time/people/money to do it right. Brainstorming and research before writing a design. Writing a design or spec before writing the code. Comprehensive unit tests. Etc etc etc. Like you, I get vastly better output from the tool when I create a detailed spec in markdown b…

yep and a side effect it is bringing back waterfall.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#128

Post by jcgrillo »

RandyRanderson wrote: post #122

This is interesting: there is a mountain of data (eg code in gh) that is the "truth" because God labeled it as so: meaning that many people are using it to do something (they have voted). There is also a mountain of bullshit eg "[architectural|design] [anti]patterns" that are written mostly (I would argue) to sell something (consulting, hardware, etc). This is typically at odds with a good solution. There is a relati…

> There is a relative lack of actual documented architectures that work. Not only do you need the details but also the usage of these systems so as to judge what "good" is.

Mostly these things are the secret sauce (or at least primary ingredients) underlying all the successful products you've heard of. Over time the secrets come out in the form of papers, blog posts, and open source software. But often the cutting edge isn't public because it's in this or that company's private, proprietary codebase. As people move between companies the knowledge diffuses, but if you're relying on a model that was trained on last year's public code you're at least a few more years than that behind. And it's even worse than that, because correct patterns--ones that actually work well--are underrepresented in the dataset.

Garbage in, garbage out. I don't understand what people are hoping for with this whole "agentic" thing... Autocompleting the function I'm currently working on is potentially useful, provided it produces acceptable code more than.. idk.. 95% of the time. "Agentically" building larger system components? Nah.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#129

Post by greenchair »

dawnerd wrote: post #98
cvwright wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are bringing us back to all the “proper” software engineering stuff that we’ve always known we should be doing, but until now we never had enough time/people/money to do it right. Brainstorming and research before writing a design. Writing a design or spec before writing the code. Comprehensive unit tests. Etc etc etc. Like you, I get vastly better output from the tool when I create a detailed spec in markdown b…

I’ve found the opposite. It’s making people lazy. We used to plan stuff and now it’s just dump this LLM created spec to an LLM and ship the code.

Yes that too but performing detailed planning is a minority viewpoint from what I've seen till now. Many Devs jump straight to code after briefly skimming the jira record.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#130

Post by stephbook »

pelario wrote: post #43
NicoHartmann wrote: post #16

> "I’m not saying don’t use AI agents. I use Claude Code every day." Irony is using Claude to write a beautifully structured, 2,000-word essay warning the industry about the dangers of letting Claude design things. It’s self-awareness by proxy.

This should be the first comment. I wrote some criticism, mostly because many internal contradictions in the article. Then, I notice the structure... "The accountability gap" Here’s the question nobody’s asking: when it goes wrong, who carries the bag? (..) "What to do instead" "The craft still matters"

> It’s not just inefficient. It’s backwards.

> That’s not fair. And it’s not smart.

The amount of AI slop that makes it to HN is concerning. I don't know whether readers here don't care or don't notice it anymore. Or maybe they are only reading the title and then commenting? My #1 tell is an article that's suspiciously long without any real "story", that is, pictures of someone hacking at a laptop. It's always 20,000 words AI hate, ironically.

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