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I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

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Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#111

Post by swat535 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #75
beezlewax wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for artisan programming to become a thing.

Like, writing binaries directly? Is assembly code too much of an abstraction?

People stress about good system design because of maintainability. No one cares about binary code because that's just the end result. What matters is the code that generates it, as that’s what needs to be maintained.

We have not yet reached a point where LLM generated code can also be maintained by LLMs and the tooling is not there. Once that happens, your argument will hold more weight. But for now, it doesn’t. Injecting unreadable, likely bug-ridden code into your application increases technical debt tenfold.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#112

Post by Balgair »

develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

Hey, I've been hearing about this issue that programmers have on HN a lot.

But I'm in the more 'bad programmer/hacker' camp and think that LLMs are amazing and really helpful.

I know that one can post a link to the chat history. Can you do that for an example that you are comfortable sharing? I know that it may not be possible though or very time consuming.

What I'm trying to get at is: I suck at programming, I know that. And you probably suck a lot less. And if you say that LLMs are garbage, and I say they are great, I want to know where I'm getting the disconnect.

I'm sincerely, not trying to be a troll here, and I really do want to learn more.

Others are welcome to post examples and walk through them too.

Thanks for any help here.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#113

Post by pchristensen »

relaxing wrote: post #85

Does anyone know a good video of someone demonstrating their workflow with these coding assistants?

This is the OP walking another developer through the process - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jpzv-_YQf6k

He had more like it - search for “yegge chat oriented programming”

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#114

Post by kolbe »

develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

I am willing to say I am a good prompt engineer, and "AI takes the wheel" is only ever my experience when my task is a very easy one. AI is fantastic for a few elements of the coding process--building unit tests, error checking, deciphering compile errors, and autocompleting trivially repetitive sections. But I have not been able to get it "take the wheel"

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#115

Post by raylad »

I tried it on a small Django app and was not impressed in the end.

It looks like it’s doing a lot, and at first I was very impressed, but after a while I realized that when it ran into a problem it kept on trying nonworking strategies even though it had tried them before and I had added to claude.md instructions to keep track of strategies and not reuse failing ones.

It was able to make a little progress, but not get to the end of the task, and some of its suggestions were completely insane. At one point there was a database issue and it suggested switching to an entirely different database than the one that was already used by the app, which was working and production.

$12 spent in a couple of hours later, it had created 1200 lines of partially working code and rather of a mess. I ended up throwing away all the changes and going back to using the web UI.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#117

Post by h4ny »

nsonha wrote: post #106
triyambakam wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of candidates? That's significant if not an exaggeration. What are the stark differences you have seen? Did you inquire about the candidate's use of language models?

if it's real that person interviewed at least one candidate per day last year. Idk what kind of engineering role in what kind of org where you even do that.

There are companies whose product is high-quality mock interviews. I wouldn't be surprised by that number of interviews in just a year and it can easily be more than one candidate per day.

Edit: there are also recruitment agencies with ex-engineers that do coding interviews, too.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#118

Post by mtlynch »

mechanicum wrote: post #104
mtlynch wrote: post #33

This is particularly interesting, as Steve Yegge works on (and I think leads) Sourcegraph Cody[0], which is a competitor to Claude Code. Cody does use Claude Sonnet, so they do have some aligned interests, but it's still surprising to see Yegge speak so glowingly about another product that does what his product is supposed to do. [0] https://sourcegraph.com/cody

I mean, doing that is pretty much what made him (semi-)famous in the first place ( https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 ).

Yeah, but it's pretty different complaining from the position of a rank and file engineer at what was then like a 50k-person org as opposed to praising a competitor's product when you're at a small company, and you're the public face of your product.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#119

Post by simonw »

crabl wrote: post #72
develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

What I've noticed from my extensive use over the past couple weeks has been Claude Code really sucks at thinking things through enough to understand the second and third order consequences of the code that it's writing. That said, it's easy enough to work around its deficiencies by using a model with extended thinking (Grok, GPT4.5, Sonnet 3.7 in thinking mode) to write prompts for it and use Claude Code as basically…

"Claude Code really sucks at thinking things through enough to understand the second and third order consequences of the code that it's writing"

Yup, that's our job as software engineers.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#120

Post by Silhouette »

slooonz wrote: post #69
develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

I decided to try seriously the Sonnet 3.7. I started with a simple prompt on claude.ai ("Do you know claude code ? Can you do a simple implementation for me ?"). After minimal tweaking from me, it gave me this : https://gist.github.com/sloonz/3eb7d7582c33e95f2b000a0920016... After interacting with this tool, I decided it would be nice if the tool could edit itself, so I asked (him ? it ?) to create its next version.…

Thanks for writing up your experience and sharing the real code. It is fascinating to see how close these tools can now get to producing useful, working software by themselves.

That said - I'm wary of reading too much into results at this scale. There isn't enough code in such a simple application to need anything more sophisticated than churning out a few lines of boilerplate that produce the correct result.

It probably won't be practical for the current state of the art in code generators to write large-scale production applications for a while anyway just because of the amount of CPU time and RAM they'd need. But assuming we solve the performance issues one way or another eventually it will be interesting to see whether the same kind of code generators can cope with managing projects at larger scales where usually the hard problems have little to do with efficiently churning out boilerplate code.

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