Any code that chatgpt or claude ever gave me was overly verbose and highly inefficient in the best case, and riddled with subtle or not so subtle bugs in the worst case. Before the average junior dev will even discover those bugs his grasp on the codebase will have fallen so far behind that he won't stand a chance to redeem the project.
Software quality is taking a nosedive.
Our industry is vibecoding itself off the cliff.
Claude Code is a slot machine
141–150 of 303 posts
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#142You definitely need to be careful of the addition mechanics of CC, but is it still a slot machine if there are loads of steps you can take to improve your odds of success? For instance, only allowing it to code within a feedback loop of some kind. I find the author's premise that the skill here is just "knowing which model to use" way too reductive. Seems like an entirely different beast to gambling, where the odds are fixed by the house.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#143avoid any gambling addiction, run with --dangerously-skip-permissions
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#144> 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…
Not development related but I have plenty of colleagues that take pleasure in the mundane. Small easy dopamine hits I guess.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#145That headline really resonates as I spent many years in Las Vegas. LLMs in general have very slot machine like qualities. WHen they “pay off” they are great.
There are many ways to describe LLMs and coding assistants. The slot machine is a pretty good one.
I also compare "AI" to using a Ouija Board. It's not meant for getting real answers or truth. The game is to select the next letter in a word to create a sequence of words. It's an entertainment prop, and LLMs should be treated similarly.
I have also compared "Artificial Intelligence" to artificial flavors. Beaver anus is used as artificial vanilla flavoring (that is a real thing that happens), and "AI"/LLMs are the digital equivalent. Real vanilla tastes so much better, even if it is more expensive. I have no doubt that code written by real humans works much better than AI slop code. Having tried the various "AI" coding assistants, and I am not at all impressed with what it creates. Half the time if I ask for "vanilla", it will tell me "banana".
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#146> 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 don't know if there's a correlation between the groups as you say, but I will add some contradictory anecdata.
I started learning to program at about the same age I learned to read, so since the late 80s. While I was finishing secondary school, I figured out from first principles (and then wrote) a crude 3D wireframe engine in Acorn BASIC, and then a simple ray caster in REALbasic, while also learning C on classic Mac OS. At university I learned Java, and when I graduated I later taught myself ObjC and swift. One of my jobs, picked up a bit of C++ while there; another, Python. I have too many side projects to keep track of.
Even though I recognise the flaws and errors of LLM generated code, I still find the code from the better models a lot better[0] than a significant fraction of the humans I've worked with. Also don't miss having a coworker who is annoyingly self-righteous or opinionated about what "good" looks like[1].
[0] The worse models are barely on the level of autocomplete — autocomplete is fine, but the worst models I've tried aren't even that.
[1] I appreciate that nobody on the outside can tell if me confidently disagreeing with someone else puts me in the same category as I'm describing. To give a random example to illustrate: one of the people I'm thinking of thought they were a good C++ programmer but hadn't heard of any part of the STL or C++ exceptions and wasn't curious to learn when I brought them up, did a lot of copy-pasting to avoid subclassing, asserted some process couldn't possibly be improved a few hours before I turned it from O(n^2) to O(n), and there were no unit tests. They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#147> 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 genuinely enjoy programming, but I don't enjoy doing maintenance programming on other people's horrible code.
This is the sort of thing no one wants to do and leads to burnout.
The AI won't get burnt out going through a static analysis output and simplifying code, running tests, then rerunning the analysis for hours and hours at a time.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. I'll show something. I'm working on an app to help teach myself french. I work at a busy startup so I only have a few hours to spare here and there, but I've managed to make an app that works very well for me, mainly because of the help I receive from Claude Code. I can't make the github repo public because it contains some copyright material [^1]. but maybe I'll make a censored version public if there's intere…
Site is stuck on "checking browser support".
There should be a better UX for users on unsupported browsers now.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#149Earlier 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.
I've been hearing this a lot, but I kinda disagree. They aren't plateauing IMO, they are getting better at new things, and that enables new capabilities. This doesn't often show in the traditional benchmarks (which are becoming less and less useful indicators of capabilities).
Take gemini 2.5 for example. It has enormous useful context. There were gimmicks before, but the usefulness dropped like a stone after 30-40k tokens. Now they work even with 100+k tokens, and do useful tasks at those lengths.
The agentic stuff is also really getting better. 4.1-nano can now do stuff that sonnet 3.5 + a lot of glue couldn't do a year ago. That's amazing, imo. We even see that with open models. Devstral has been really impressive for its size, and I hear good things about the qwen models, tho I haven't yet tried them.
There's also proof that the models themselves are getting better at raw agentic stuff (i.e. they generalise). The group that released swe-agent recently released mini-swe-agent, a ~100 LoC harness that runs Claude4 in a loop with no tools other than "terminal". And they still get to within 10% of their much larger, tool supporting, swe-agent harness on swe-bench.
I don't see the models plateauing. I think our expectations are overinflated.
Re: Claude Code is a slot machine
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been coding for 35 years and I've grown to hate it. Most of the work is boring. The things I absolutely loved doing, they require focus, and focus is something I just don't get to have at this point in my life (young kids) and career (if I'm focused I'm neglecting my responsibilities). I've found AI to be a useful tool when using a new library (as long as the version is 2 years old) and in the limited use I've m…
Only 20 years since it started as a hobby. There is programming that I enjoy doing for the fun of it or for experimentation and I wouldn’t use AI for that (most likely because it’d be something that isn’t well known or documented). If work wants me to use it for the job, then sure why not? That too is something new to learn how to do well, will possibly be important for future career growth, and is exciting in a diff…
I on the other hand find agentic LLMs mentally draining.
I can't enter a flow state since the workflow boils down to waiting and then getting interrupted, and then waiting again. Often the LLM does the wrong thing and then instead of moving to implement another feature, I'm stuck in a loop where I'm trying to get it to fix poor decisions or errors.
It's possible I get a feature implemented faster thanks to agentic LLM, but the experience of overseeing and directing it is dreadful and pretty much invariably I end up with some sort of tech debt slop.
I much prefer the chat interfaces for incorporating LLMs into my workflow.