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Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

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Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#41
post #3

The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.

There’s really not much to specialize in and differentiate yourself. All this harness customization is fleeting. Remember prompt engineering?

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#42
post #14

I've spent the last year building an app with Claude Code without knowing how to code. I'm still surprised at how much it gets wrong, even on the newest models. What makes it work for me is describing exactly what I want and then actually checking everything it gives back.

For me, I just don't trust Claude Code to write first-class professional code. I have used all frontier claude models and it always does sloppy job that needs to be fixed by codex. I have claude/codex setup and any execution must go to codex and all reviews as well.

Similar here. I use Claude Code and Codex for developing specs, but then have Deepseek v4 Pro implement because it just seems to actually do what it's told, given enough tries. And Reasonix + Deepseek is mostly cache hits when I let it grind on it for a long time, and I can have a huge fleet of agents with very specific focus for code review and rule enforcement mostly sharing cache.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#44
> From what I'm hearing, you for every model release, you basically delete all of the codebase, delete all of the prompt and start from scratch every time. That in the old world would have been not something Startup would have done for the product. It's like press delete every six months for everything.

> That's right. So to be fair, we don't delete the entire codebase.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not accurate. Most LSPs do provide text editing tools, which the Language Server Protocol calls "code actions". These actions do things like: reorganizing imports, expanding macros, extracting a selection into a function, or converting one type of control flow into another (e.g. if to match). Common LSPs, like rust-analyzer and Ruff (Python) support code actions. Editors also expose code actions: Zed, for ins…

Come on what are we talking about. Ruff is a linter. Can you show me any LSP server that can move an arbitrary function from file1.ts to file2.ts based on calling it on the command line?

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Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#47
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not command line applications, they use JSON-RPC inline, and it's an interactive flow, so you need the client to actually persist state. So what you'd see in the LLM traces, for example, is a couple back-and-forths using JSON-RPC. It absolutely works at the moment, and claude code will happily use it if everything is set up correctly, just tested it using https://github.com/typescript-language-server/typescri…

What did you test exactly? Look what I’m asking for is not complicated Node cutpaste.js inputpath startcharnum endcharnum outputpath startcharnum I was just using it as an example of how dropping claude / gpt in a Linux shell and saying good luck and then giving interviews about spawning sub agents seems to overlook basic text editing primitives But if you managed to move an arbitrary char range from one file to anot…

No, not an arbitrary character range, it's quite a lot smarter than that. It's an AST transformation - it takes the parsed tree out and puts it in another file and updates any imports that refer to the prior function to the new location. That all happens in the LSP side, not the LLM side, so it's deterministic. You can look at the source code for the LSP yourself.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#48
post #3

The TL;DR of the fragment at around 6:57 in the video, for those who don't want to watch, is that Boris recommends to delete all the customizations, CLAUDE.md, skills, and other stuff you had for older models, and try using the new models without all that, because the new models can surprise you.

The ability to start a Claude Code session in a temporary "config free" mode, similar to how incognito works for chrome, would be a nice feature to make this easy to try out, especially since model releases are so frequent.

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not command line applications, they use JSON-RPC inline, and it's an interactive flow, so you need the client to actually persist state. So what you'd see in the LLM traces, for example, is a couple back-and-forths using JSON-RPC. It absolutely works at the moment, and claude code will happily use it if everything is set up correctly, just tested it using https://github.com/typescript-language-server/typescri…

What did you test exactly? Look what I’m asking for is not complicated Node cutpaste.js inputpath startcharnum endcharnum outputpath startcharnum I was just using it as an example of how dropping claude / gpt in a Linux shell and saying good luck and then giving interviews about spawning sub agents seems to overlook basic text editing primitives But if you managed to move an arbitrary char range from one file to anot…

The relevant points have already been made: (1) LSP is a JSON-RPC protocol, not a CLI app, and (2) Language Servers that implement LSP often utilize AST manipulation, even the resultant manipulations are exposed to the client via character ranges.

Still, these links may be of interest:

TypeScript’s language-service implementation of the “Move to file” refactor: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/main/src/servic...

Documentation for how `typescript-language-server` exposes that refactor as an opt-in code action: https://github.com/typescript-language-server/typescript-lan...

`ast-grep`, an AST-based search and transformation tool that may be closer in spirit to the cli functionality you describe, albeit more general-purpose: https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep

Re: Interview with Boris Cherny [video]

#50
post #31

2 weeks rebuilding in Swift is absolutely crazy. Wonder if they're using production Opus 5 for this or their internal Mythos (if they even use it internally)

If it's on the house (and they can probably turn up the token speed) why use anything other than the most powerful models?

it's still more expensive and slower to run bigger models though. resource usage is not free
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