151–160 of 409 posts
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How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?
Typescript on the frontend, Python on the backend, SQL for the database, bash for CI. This isn't even counting HTML/CSS or the YAML config.
Same for sql, do you really context switch between sql and other code that frequently?
Everyone should stop using bash, especially if you have a scripting language you can use already.
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the…
> There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well. While this is true in my experience, the opposite is not true. LLMs are very good at helping me go through a structure processing of thinking about architectural a…
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Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!" Claude writing code ge…
I would say notetaking would be a much bigger help than Claude at this point. There's a lot of methods to organize information that I believe would help you, better than an hallucination machine.
I absolutely can attest to what parent is saying, I have been developing software in Python for nearly a decade now and I still routinely look up the /basics/.
LLM's have been a complete gamechanger to me, being able to reduce the friction of "ok let me google what I need in a very roundabout way my memory spit it out" to a fast and often inline llm lookup.
The prompt was: Ultrathink. You're a principal engineer. Do not ask me any questions. We need to improve the quality of this codebase. Implement improvements to codebase quality. I'm a little disappointed that Claude didn't eventually decide to start removing all of the cruft it had added to improve the quality that way instead.
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That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…
I think we have different opinions on what's fun and what's boring!
Some tasks I do enjoy coding. Once in the flow it can be quite relaxing.
But mostly I enjoy the problem solving part: coming up with the right algorithm, a nice architecture , the proper set of metrics to analyze etc
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It's necessary to allow Claude Code to be fully autonomous, otherwise it will stop and ask you to run commands.
and just letting it to do whatever it thinks it should do, without a human intervening, is a good plan?
To extend what may seem like a [prima facie] insane, stupid, or foolhardy idea: Why not send the output of /dev/urandom into /bin/bash? Or even /proc/mem? It probably won't do anything particularly interesting. It will probably just break things and burn power.
And so? It's just a computer; its scope is limited.
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But anyone didn't do it... you an expert in software development did it. I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge. You are illustrating the GP's point, not negating it.
> I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge. You're imagining that I'm giving Claude technical advice, but that is the point I'm trying to make: I am not . This is what "vibe-coding" tries to specify. I am only giving Claude UX feedback from using the app it makes. "Add a dropdown…
Your 20 years is assisting you in ways you don't know; you're so experienced you don't know what it means to be inexperienced anymore. Now, it's true you probably don't need 20 years to do what you did, but you need some experience. Its not that the task you posed to the LLM is trivial for everyone due to the LLM, its that its trivial for you because you have 20 years experience. For people with experience, the LLM makes moderate tasks trivial, hard tasks moderate, and impossible tasks technically doable.
For example, my MS students can vibe code a UI, but they can't vibe code a complete bytecode compiler. They can use AI to assist them, but it's not a trivial task at all, they will have to spend a lot of time on it, and if they don't have the background knowledge they will end up mired.
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Or “can you prototype doing A via approaches X, Y, and Z, and show me what each looks like?” I love to prototype various approaches. Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. The LLM can do this in a tenth of the time I can, and I just need to get a general idea of how each approach would feel in practice.
> Sometimes I just want to see which one feels like the most natural fit. This sentence alone is a huge red flag in my books. Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain. There's a reason the field is called Software Engineering and not Software Art. Words like "feels" does not belongs. It would be like…
Software development is nowhere near advanced enough for this to be true. Even basic questions like "should this project be built in Go, Python, or Rust?" or "should this project be modeled using OOP and domain-driven design, event-sourcing, or purely functional programming?" are decided largely by the personal preferences of whoever the first developer is.
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Just be careful if functionality varies between library y version 2 and library y version 3, or if there is a similarly named library y2 that isn't the same. You may get possibilities, but not for what you asked for.
If you run to the point where you can execute each idea and examine its outputs, problems like that surface pretty quickly
It is something I noticed when talking to LLMs, if they don't get it right the first time, they probably never will, and if you really insist, the quality starts to degrade. It is not unlike people, the difference being that if you ask someone the same thing 200 times, he will probably going to tell you to go fuck yourself, or, if unable to, turn to malicious compliance. These AIs will always be diligent. Or, a human…