I've been reading Hooked by Nir Eyal and this was my conclusion too about all LLMs after just the introduction.
Claude Code is a slot machine
121–130 of 303 posts
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
You touch upon an interesting phenomenon that is quite pervasive throughout the world of software development, and possibly many other fields as well. To avoid heated discussions, allow me to illustrate the concept with why enterprise software is mainly built with Java, whereas most blog posts are about writing backends with TypeScript, Python, or Rust. The reason for this is at least twofold: 1. Professional program…
As someone who has been using Java for enterprise software for over 25 years, but who likes to program his pet projects in Python, let me give you another reason: 3. Python has a very fast feedback loop. You type, run and see the result immediately. This is great for small projects and prototypes. Java needs much more work, not just for the compiling but it also needs more boilerplate. This is fine for enterprise pro…
I'm very into tight cadence and have a lot of options to choose from, doing most of my "pets" in Racket, Elixir, Picolisp and p5js, but I still sometimes generate a Maven project and start hacking in a unit test because libraries and performance are excellent and sometimes it requires less effort to brute a problem with imperative mutations.
Pharo is an alternative but documentation and libraries just aren't as good, and maybe never will be.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#123Am I the only one who doesn't find CC makes me faster? I mean, it could, if I let it, but that means not reading or understanding what it's writing. Basically I just don't really believe anyone is writing software of the same quality in less time. But I can totally see how you can write software of lower quality in a fraction of the time.
The interesting thing is going to be how this all holds up in a year or five. I suspect it's going to be a lot of rewriting the same old shit with LLMs again and again because the software they've already made is unmaintainable.
I didn't get into software to labour like a factory worker day in, day out. I like to solve problems and see them deliver value over years and even decades, like an engineer.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…
I didn't understand which group was supposed to be which until the very last point, so I don't think you're correct. In my personal network, the most senior people with lots of programming experience have the most positive attitude and seem to be more pragmatic about it in general.
Couple of questions: the most senior people in your personal network — are they hands-on _lately_? And are they ~>25y experience? If it's a no to either, I took those into account.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#125> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying. It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—an…
100% with you. I thought I loved writing code until a few months ago when I was able to tell an LLM exactly how I wanted it done, exactly the structure and the goals for today. I realized that I love getting stuff done and that writing code was the price I had to pay in terms of my time.
Exactly this for me as well. And I'm really good at writing code! It's so weird to realize I never liked it, that I just liked making things.
Now I don't write code unless Claude does it, I just review.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#126> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying. It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—an…
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…
I fall into the latter category and I’m a strong proponent of ai.
Do you know how many times I’ve solved the same boring thing over and over again in slightly different contexts?
Do you know how many things I look at and can see 6 ways to solve it and at least 3 of them will turn out fine?
I can get ai to do all that for me now. I only have to work on the interesting and challenging pieces.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#127> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying. It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—an…
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…
I am finding that I really like AI for tasks I don't want to do, and am annoyed by it for tasks I enjoy.
A non-programming example: I do some work in library music. I thoroughly enjoy writing and producing the music itself. I don't like writing descriptions of the music, and I'm not very skillful at making any needed artwork. I don't use AI for the music part, but use AI extensively for the text and artwork.
(I'm also not putting a human out of work here; before using AI for these tasks, I did them myself, poorly!)
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#128> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying. It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—an…
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…
I love programming but I don't really enjoy figuring out how to consume other people's APIs.
The things I've enjoyed writing the most have always been components "good practice" would say I should have used a library for (HTML DOM, databases) but I decided to NIH it and came up with something relatively pleasant and self contained.
When I use LLMs to generate code it's usually to interface to some library or API I don't want to spend time figuring out.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#129On Friday I was converting a constrained solver from python to another language, and ran into some difficulty with subsituting an optimzer that's a few lines of easily written Scipy; but barely being supported in another language. One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. But another AI tool was really struggling with getting the right…
A very relatable experience. But not all that different from how humans work when in unfamiliar domains.
I'd rather work with a human. Even with our flaws, it's still better than constantly being lied to by a tin can. If a junior kept delivering broken results as much as the "AI" does, they wouldn't be on my team that long.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…
I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more. Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or…
The models themselves seem to be plateauing with the companies behind them shifting to additional products on top of them. It seemed like a weekly occurrence we would get a new model from the top dogs.