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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#151

Post by fragmede »

escapecharacter wrote: post #109
rollcat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the root of the issue is that "AI" is being anthropomorphised, or oversold as actually "intelligent". If there's anything I've learned about software, "intelligent" usually means "we've thrown a lot of intelligent people at the problem, and made the solution even more complicated". Machine learning is not software, but probably should be approached as such. It's a program that takes some input and transforms it…

A helpful, and snarky, critique of the majestic rhetoric around “cloud computing” was to mentally replace “cloud” with “someone else’s computer”. When thinking through a claim of what AI can do, you can do the same. “AI” -> “just some guy”. If that doesn’t feel fair, try “AI” -> “some well-read, eager-to-please intern”.

Was all that snark, the cloud to ass" string replacement firefox extension; was it actually helpful? We're still trying to sell the masses (and ourselves) on the benefits of self-hosting, and the cost of cloud hosting vs on-prem has never really been answered. Don't get me wrong, a trawl through my comments here will find I don't always manage to hold my tongue when I'm feeling snarky, so I very much understand the desire, but at the end of the day, what has that actually helped? My friends who were Unix and Linux sysadmins who didn't manage to upskill are still out of a job when their employers moved the servers they were babysitting into the cloud, and my data is still swimming around somewhere in Facebook and Google's data centers.

Sure let's call the AI names, behind its back and to its face if we're feeling particularly bold, but is that actually going to amount to anything?

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#152

Post by leptons »

troupo wrote: post #37
ggandhi wrote: post #13

Lovable, I feel, works at a higher abstraction layer. The unpredictability of whether my prompt will generate something delightful in that initial design creates an addictive slot machine dynamic. But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic?

> But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic? No. They would become extremely useful and more magical. Because instead of weird incantations and shamanic rituals of "just one more .rules file, bro, I swear" you could create useful reproducible working tools.

Except an LLM is not and never will be deterministic, by its very design that is not how it operates. It would need to be a fundamentally different tech from the ground up.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#153

Post by hakunin »

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…

I love experiences folks shared in response to this. Makes me realize that there are many significant factors that influence how people see programming. My own experience for most years has been a combination of the joy of clear/convincing writing with the joy of a high level ergonomic language (Ruby) to express the code. In Ruby and its frameworks, you almost never write boilerplate, so everything is the interesting part. And the surest way to have good understanding of the code is to type it out. (That's why most books ask you to manually type the example code). Figured I'd share my experience too.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#154

Post by bdangubic »

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…

I am both 1) and 2) and totally in love with AI dev… I am just one soul of course, your general observation might be right.

With 3 decades under my belt in the industry I can tell you on trait that THE BEST SWEs ALL have - laziness… if I had to manually do something 3 times, that shit is getting automated… AI dev took automation of mundane parts of our work to another level and I don’t think I could ever code without it anymore

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#155

Post by unshavedyak »

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…

I'm a bit different in your list, imo. I'm ~25years camp, did it long before it was my career and it's been my obsession for most of it.

I use Claude Code for two primary reasons:

1. Because whether i like it or not, i think it's going to become a very important tool in our craft. I figure i better learn how to use this shovel and find the value in it (if any), or else others will and leave me behind.

2. Because my motivation outweighs my physical ability to type, especially as i age. I don't have the endurance i once did and so being able to spend more time thinking and less time laboring is an interesting idea.

Claude Code certainly isn't there yet for my desires, but i'm still working on finding the value in it - thinking of workflows to accelerate general dev time, etc. It's not required yet, but my fear is soon enough it will be required for all but fun hobby work. It has potential to become a power tool for a wood workers shop.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#156

Post by potatolicious »

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…

+1, and also to add: this isn't even a new phenomenon. My hot take is that AI coding is only the latest in a trend that has been running in the industry for literally decades. The technology itself might be novel but what it's doing is very, very old!

You used to have to write tons of real code to stand up something as simple as a backend endpoint. Now a lot of this stuff is literally declarative config files.

Ditto frontends. You used to have to imperative manage all kinds of weird bullshit, but over the last decade we've gradually moved to... declarative, reactive patterns that let the some underlying framework handle the busywork.

We also created... declarative config files to ensure consistent deploys every time. You know, instead of ssh'ing into production machines to install stuff.

We used to handle null pointers, too, and tore our hair out because a single missed check caused your whole process to go poof. Now... it's built into the language and it is physically impossible to pull of a null pointer dereference. Awesome!

We've been "putting ourselves out of work" for going on decades now, getting rid of more boilerplate, more repetitive and error-prone logic, etc etc. We did it with programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. All in the service of focusing on the bits we actually care about and that matter to us.

This is only the latest in a long line of things software engineers did to put themselves out of work. The method of doing it is very new, the ends are not. And like every other thing that came before it, I highly doubt this one will actually succeed in putting us out of work.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#157

Post by gonzalohm »

danielbln wrote: post #70
troupo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people. It's not different from most people. Everyone runs into AI bullshit. However, hype and new tech optimism overrides everything.

Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools. Slapping something into ChatGPT is one way, though maybe not the most efficient way of getting value out of these tools.

So what should I have done differently? If I have to spend 1 hour to setup the AI tools then I'm not saving any time

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#158

Post by wyldfire »

Love it or hate it, at the very least you can grant it this: Claude Code can mitigate some of the cost of Yak Shaving [1]. You need this digression/distraction feature, even though it's not the main attraction. Testing/infrastructure etc -- whatever it is, let's just have the automaton do the tedium.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#159

Post by gonzalohm »

scotty79 wrote: post #46
gonzalohm wrote: post #42

My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people. As an example, the other day asks chatgpt to write a configuration file for SQL fluff that formatted the code as an example that I provided. It proceeded to invent all the SQL fluff rules. And the ones that were actual rules were useless for the actual format that I wanted. I get it, SQLFluff rules are really confusing, but that's why I asked f…

I think that's a very common experience when you try to make it write niche stuff. It just makes everything up wholesale. If you on the other hand wanted to write a react app ...

But then I may as well have the AI say no, I don't know how to do that, here are some useful resources. Instead of misleading me and making me waste my time figuring out why the code doesn't work

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#160

Post by eric-burel »

Can we collectively stop upvoting low quality 300 words random opinions about llm based dev? As a professional in the field I find the qualify of what's posted on HN really super low in this area, compared to posts eg related to cloud infrastructure or software engineering. There are better posts and sources than that.
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