Claude Code is a slot machine
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Claude Code is a slot machine
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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#2my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding.
I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.
no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools.
studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, taking notes, make Opus check my notes. it improved a lot my studying sessions too.
I respect the different experiences each of us get from this. for fairness I share mine
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#3and a damn good one
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#4> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer, but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually.
The answer to this is nuanced. You can summon ~30k LoC codebases using CC without much fanfare. Will it work? Maybe, in some of the ways you were thinking -- it will be a simulacrum of the thing you had in your mind.
If something is not working, you need to know the precise language to direct CC (and _if you know this language_, you can use CC like a chisel). If you don't know this language, you're stuck -- but you'd also be stuck if you were writing the thing _by hand_.
In contrast to _writing the thing by hand_, you can ask CC to explain what's going on. What systems are involved here, is there a single source of truth, explain the pipeline to me ...
It's not black and white in the way I experienced this paragraph. The "details" you need to know vary across a broad spectrum, and excellent wizards can navigate throughout the spectrum, and know the meta-strategies to use CC (or whatever agentic system) to unstick themselves in the parts of the spectrum they don't know.
(lots of that latter skill set correlate with being a good programmer in the first place)
Many of my colleagues who haven't used CC as much seem to get stuck in a "one track" frame of mind about what it can and cannot do -- without realizing that they don't know the meta-strategies ... or that they're describing just one particular workflow. It's a programmable programming tool, don't put it into a box.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#5my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding. I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, takin…
> I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.
> pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools.
I have very similar experiences, but very often I wonder if I couldn't just have gone to an open source project on the same topic (e.g. building a toy parser) and read the source code there, instead of letting a code generator AI reproduce it for me. Because that happy feeling is very similar to early moments in my developer career, when I read through open source standard libraries and learned a lot from it.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#6Actually the model I like to use is a Pacinko machine. Where you can visualize all of the options that are available, while internal cursor just randomly bounces from pin to pin.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#7I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plumbing, boilerplates, error handlers, formatting, reports, templates, and cancellations.
Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable.
You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#8my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding. I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, takin…
> I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them.
We probably have different personalities but the former is the only part I care about. It’s the operation that bores me.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#9I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plu…
My job pays well and I create real stuff but most of the work is honestly just slop. So maybe I should use AI to save myself the effort..I could salvage more free time for myself that way..
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#10I think much like how we're still figuring out how to use and manage social media to minimize the downsides and maximize its utility, we're gonna have to do the same with AI. I find it incredibly powerful for certain things and incredibly frustrating for others. Begging the AI to one shot some project feels like the wrong way to use it, it's better as a scalpel. Or as a learning device, or a more advanced rubber ducky.