Live data from Hacker News

A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

twitter.com

111–120 of 870 posts

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#111
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok but the capabilities are also rising. what point are you trying to make?

That it's not getting cheaper?

you are wrong. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

this is accounting for the fact that more tokens are used.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#112
post #94

> It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot. You send all the neces…

> It might become cheaper or it might not If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper. (But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)

> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year

You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true.

I'm agreeing with you, to be clear.

There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will continue to get better.

Three things, actually.

The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].

[0]: https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2018/09/a-critical-appraisal-...

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#113
post #21

I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.

I've been trying Claude on my large code base today. When I give it the requirements I'd give an engineer and so "do it" it just writes garbage that doesn't make sense and doesn't seem to even meet the requirements (if it does I can't follow how - though I'll admit to giving up before I understood what it did, and I didn't try it on a real system). When I forced it to step back and do tiny steps - in TDD write one test of the full feature - it did much better - but then I spent the next 5 hours adjusting the code it wrote to meet our coding standards. At least I understand the code, but I'm not sure it is any faster (but it is a lot easier to see things wrong than come up with green field code).

Which is to say you have to learn to use the tools. I've only just started, and cannot claim to be an expert. I'll keep using them - in part because everyone is demanding I do - but to use them you clearly need to know how to do it yourself.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#114
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coplilot is not on par with cc or cursor even

I use it to access Claude. So what's the difference?

Different harnesses and agentic environments produce different results from the same model. Claude Code and Cursor are the best IME and Copilot is by far the worst.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#115
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might become cheaper or it might not If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper. (But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)

That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?

Instead of advancing tenuous examples you could suggest a realistic mechanism by which costs could rise, such as a Chinese advance on Taiwan, effecting TSMC, etc.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#116

> Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December Anyone wondering what exactly is he actually building? What? Where? > The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly…

This is a low quality curmudgeonly comment

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#117
post #112
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might become cheaper or it might not If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper. (But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)

> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true. I'm agreeing with you, to be clear. There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will con…

interesting post. i wonder if these people go back and introspect on how incorrect they have been? do they feel the need to address it?

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#118
post #65

I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…

It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of it is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other.

This would be fine if not for one thing: the meta-skill of learning to use the LLM depreciates too. Today's LLM is gonna go away someday, the way you have to use it will change. You will be on a forever treadmill, always learning the vagaries of using the new shiny model (and paying for the privilege!)

I'm not going to make myself dependent, let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something I happen to rent and can't keep. If I wanted a cheap high that I didn't mind being dependent on, there's more fun ones out there.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#119
HN should ban any discussion on “things I learned playing with AI” that don’t include direct artifacts of the thing built.

We’re about a year deep into “AI is changing everything” and I don’t see 10x software quality or output.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan of AI tooling and think it does meaningfully increase value. But I’m damn tired of all the talk with literally nothing to show for it or back it up.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#120
post #11

> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…

The new LLM centered workflow is really just a management job now. Managers and project managers are valuable roles and have important skill sets. But there's really very little connection with the role of software development that used to exist. It's a bit odd to me to include both of these roles under a single label of "builders", as they have so little in common. EDIT: this goes into more detail about how coding (…

i don't disagree. at some point LLM's might become good enough that we wouldn't need exact technical expertise.
Post reply on HN