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Will Claude Code ruin our team?

justinjackson.ca

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Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#101

Post by vict7 »

paulddraper wrote: post #98
bob001 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a startup is laying off engineers then it’s dead in the water. That means it’s not growing and focused on cost cutting at the expense of velocity. Thats what a large company does. The issue isn’t AI but the startup fundamentally being broken and this being a last gasp for air before it dies.

HN is an interesting place. 6 years ago it was “you need that many engineers, lol, I can build a clone this weekend.” Now it’s “you need many engineers, trust me bro.”

Have you ever heard of the Goomba fallacy?

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#102

Post by joefourier »

vict7 wrote: post #101
paulddraper wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is an interesting place. 6 years ago it was “you need that many engineers, lol, I can build a clone this weekend.” Now it’s “you need many engineers, trust me bro.”

Have you ever heard of the Goomba fallacy?

Oh I'm happy this has a name now! Even if it's quite silly.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#103

Post by paulddraper »

joefourier wrote: post #100
paulddraper wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is an interesting place. 6 years ago it was “you need that many engineers, lol, I can build a clone this weekend.” Now it’s “you need many engineers, trust me bro.”

> HN is an interesting place. How is it interesting that in a forum with thousands of active users, someone posted a comment that disagreed with other comments from 6 years ago? Even in this thread, there's many different opinions being expressed.

It's not a single user, rather the majority prevailing opinion/most upvoted comments.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#104

Post by Traster »

>we're no longer hiring: specialists. In this new era, generalists win.

I am truly astonished someone said this. My experience with AI has been the opposite. It can knock up something reasonable given the right prompting. It can generate a lot of code. It will hit deliver whatever goal you have, but it won't do it in the simplest neatest way, it won't have context about how you way to grow the codebase in the future.

The inevitable result of this is that it produces much more complexity to do a given thing than a senior engineer will. This is a big problem, because their performance degrades as their context window fills. So you will reach a point where the AI has coded you into a corner, it has created such complexity that it can't understand what is going on without filling its context window, at which point it can't do anything and you're left with a massive stinking pile of slop that's too big for you to work on and too complex for it to unpick.

The only way of sustainably using AI to accelerate your productivity is to be the specialist who can give guidance on structure and approach so that the codebase doesn't spiral.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#105

Post by braebo »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #71
jghn wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. > The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable. This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.

>This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can. For designers, all you need to do is look at the google logo. That's the epitome of skill in design. It's trivial to come up with a multi colored word and have it fit in a sort of clean aesthetic. For PMs it's much more harder to prove it to you. So I won't go about this useless endeavor. Suffice to say it's not reall…

I’d love to see some of your design work.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#106

Post by threethirtytwo »

braebo wrote: post #105
threethirtytwo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can. For designers, all you need to do is look at the google logo. That's the epitome of skill in design. It's trivial to come up with a multi colored word and have it fit in a sort of clean aesthetic. For PMs it's much more harder to prove it to you. So I won't go about this useless endeavor. Suffice to say it's not reall…

I’d love to see some of your design work.

Yeah that’s a trap. Because design is so opinion based if I put anything out here you can call it utter crap and say it’s proof on how I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Anything said about design can’t be proven simply because it’s an aesthetic opinion. However we do have common opinions on what looks good and what doesn’t look good but the kind of study to prove that is unreadable on HN.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#108

Post by izacus »

paulddraper wrote: post #103
joefourier wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN is an interesting place. How is it interesting that in a forum with thousands of active users, someone posted a comment that disagreed with other comments from 6 years ago? Even in this thread, there's many different opinions being expressed.

It's not a single user, rather the majority prevailing opinion/most upvoted comments.

Based on what? Your personal observation and memory bias?

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#109

Post by KellyCriterion »

satvikpendem wrote: post #10
suzzer99 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?" Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.

I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.

This could be a superinteresting field in the future, I guess?

But how do you land contracts? Nobody will post on LinkedIn like "Hiring consultant to cleanup or AI-mess-codebase"? :-D So, nobody will admit that they are in trouble already,so how do you find out?

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#110

Post by chamomeal »

thunky wrote: post #74
chamomeal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn. Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really…

Your friends struggle with learning programming because they don't care enough about learning it. You're the only one that cares. Same can be said for any skill. Threads like this bother me a bit because it makes programmers seem so smug, like they are this gifted class that is able to wizard the machine where mere mortals cannot. Its intellectual elitism.

> intellectual elitism

I was trying to say the opposite!! Googling errors for hours is NOT in intellectually demanding task. It’s tedious.

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