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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#131

Post by skydhash »

tptacek wrote: post #7

I 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…

Programming is about not doing all of these things. You have a powerful machine that is quite good at doing those things. You just have to notice those patterns and then build the tool that will be doing those kind of works. And the most simple one is a snippet generator and editors macros. Then you have project generators, and code reuse thingies from the programming language.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#132

Post by righthand »

garciasn wrote: post #64
jonator wrote: post #56

For me the fun part of coding is having visions of products or systems I'd like to exist, and writing code only as a means to an end. Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algori…

I see AI-accelerated codegen as doing all of the boring shit I hated: do while error == true; Write code Run code Read error Attempt to fix error Run code Read error Search Google for error Attempt to fix error Run code Read error done --- Claude does all of this for me now, allowing me to concentrate on the end goal, not the minutiae. It hasn't at all changed my workflow; it just does all of the horribly mundane par…

If you enjoy being a custodian no one is going to chastise you for that. As you have stated there are many nightmares to clean up and all teams need a person who wants to do the clean up.

This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.

Just food for thought.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#133

Post by MattGaiser »

andoando wrote: post #118
gavmor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities). I'm confused—can you expand on this? What's "the work" that you've "grown to hate?" Is it "coding," or is it your "responsibilities?"

If its any typical corporate job, as they said I imagine the coding is rather boring. We need a new feature. Ok add this controller, add some if statements for this business logic, make some api calls, add this to the db, write some models. Ok done, same thing over and over again. Id certainly love to be able to do the architecting part and have someone do the work

I’ve found GitHub Copilot Agent quite good for this kind of coding. You write up the architecture you want and I paste it into an issue and it fills in the rest.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#134

Post by ivanjermakov »

ankit219 wrote: post #111

One unpopular opinion I hold is that in recent times programming became a lot more about integrating libraries and frameworks vs writing your own thing. This was fine because if someone open sourced it, why repeat the same work. That ended up in cases where a lot of work was modifying the libraries to your use case. With vibe coding, I suspect this is a group that has adapted to it really well (alongside hobby coders…

Unpopular opinion would be that if the project is not much more than a bunch of libraries/tools/techs integrated together than the need for its existence is questionable. Diversity there breaks "one way of doing things" and makes it harder to learn actual tech that makes it work.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#135

Post by MattGaiser »

yahoozoo wrote: post #130
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The models are plateauing, but unlike humans, a certain amount of brute force testing of their output is fine. They can just iterate until they succeed.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#136

Post by AlecSchueler »

b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #72
AlecSchueler wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're still figuring out how to use and manage social media to minimize the downsides and maximize its utility Considering the state of today's social media landscape and people's relationship to it, this fills me with dread.

I think we're starting to have a conversation about what healthy social media usage looks like and its place in life. Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation and a shift back towards being genuine. I fully understand the irony here btw. Hopefully it doesn't take 2 decades of AI usage to have that conversation tho.

> Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ironic but it gave me a good chuckle nonetheless.

There's also a lot of talk about drinking more moderately down at my local bar.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#137

Post by [deleted] »

righthand wrote: post #132
garciasn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see AI-accelerated codegen as doing all of the boring shit I hated: do while error == true; Write code Run code Read error Attempt to fix error Run code Read error Search Google for error Attempt to fix error Run code Read error done --- Claude does all of this for me now, allowing me to concentrate on the end goal, not the minutiae. It hasn't at all changed my workflow; it just does all of the horribly mundane par…

If you enjoy being a custodian no one is going to chastise you for that. As you have stated there are many nightmares to clean up and all teams need a person who wants to do the clean up. This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#138

Post by bgwalter »

Yes, the gamification is why some people like it. It is another addiction. Most proponents and bloggers are tied to "AI" money though, directly or indirectly.

I've seen little organic praise from high profile programmers. There aren't many, and once you search they all at least work on a commercial "AI" application.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#139

Post by sitzkrieg »

peab wrote: post #91
hakunin wrote: post #51

Earlier 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 went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it. Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button ce…

no one uses ai to one shot system design because they cant. it will fuck up in any moderate sized project

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#140

Post by fragmede »

hakunin wrote: post #51
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #25

> 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…

It's easy enough to defend your categorization by saying that anyone who claims they're in the dislike.1 group who likes it is really in the like.1 (or 2 or 3) group, but I think it's the dislike.1 group that's most likely to reap the benefit of AI help, having seen the industry go through paradigm shifts (like the rise and fall of OOP) and being tired of having to keep up. At the start of my career, I got real good with C++ in Visual Studio and the MFC libraries, only to throw that away for Python and WX, only to throw that away for Jquery only to throw that away. I put on an English stiff upper lip and learn the next thing, but I'll be honest, I'm not 20 anymore. I've changed, things have changed. Getting a really clever code-golfed function in C++ really tickled my fancy back in the day, until I had to go back and figure out wtf I'd written and had to fix a subtle bug with it. (I do still miss writing that kind of "I'm too clever for my own good" code though.)

So even before AI my taste in what constitutes the joy of programming evolved and changed. AI lets me waste less time looking up and writing almost-boilerplate shit that I'd have to look up. I'm often writing things in new/different languages that I'll be transparent, I'm not familiar with. I do still look at the code that gets generated (especially when Claude runs itself in circles and I fix it manually), and I roll my eyes when I find egregiously stupid code that it's generated. What I guess separates me then is I just roll my eyes, roll up my sleeves, and get to work, instead of going off on a rant about how the future of programming is stupid, and save even my own journal from a screed about the stupidity of LLMs. Because they do generate plenty of stupid code, but in the course of my career, I'd be lying if I claimed I never have.

As to the big question, do I like AI dev? Given that it may put me out of a job in "several thousand days", it would be easy to hate on it. But just as the world and my career moved on from fat clients on Windows in the 90's, so too will the work evolve to match modern tools, and fighting that isn't worth the energy, imo, better to adapt and just roll with it.

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