He is actually a terrible architect for anything beyond basic stuff. The suggestions I had rejected would have probably gotten me fired. Like every know-it-all, it tends to over complicate simple tasks, and out of a sudden your one hour feature becomes a multi-day nightmare.
Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
151–160 of 209 posts
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#152I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "a…
What is an instancing system?
To better scale the game infrastructure, instead of letting every player on the same big server, they are put in different smaller servers (instances). Players can interact with other players on the same instance (see them, do quests together, trade, etc.). Sort of like AWS instances.
Normally instances are random within the same region, but usually there's a system in place so you can join the same one as your friend.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#153Wish I read this article sooner.
The stories of claude code deleting the whole databases felt unreal, until something similar happened to me(using opus 4.7) yesterday
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
This should be the first comment. I wrote some criticism, mostly because many internal contradictions in the article. Then, I notice the structure... "The accountability gap" Here’s the question nobody’s asking: when it goes wrong, who carries the bag? (..) "What to do instead" "The craft still matters"
> It’s not just inefficient. It’s backwards. > That’s not fair. And it’s not smart. The amount of AI slop that makes it to HN is concerning. I don't know whether readers here don't care or don't notice it anymore. Or maybe they are only reading the title and then commenting? My #1 tell is an article that's suspiciously long without any real "story", that is, pictures of someone hacking at a laptop. It's always 20,000…
I've found a common giveaway of AI writing to be having many unnatural pauses in sentences. For example,
A good architect’s most important skill isn’t designing systems. It’s knowing which systems not to build. It’s pushing back on complexity. It’s asking “why?” five times until the actual requirement emerges from the aspirational nonsense. It’s telling the CTO that their conference-inspired idea is a terrible fit for the team they actually have.
AI agents are pathologically agreeable. Ask Claude if your idea is good and it’ll tell you it’s good. Ask it if a microservices architecture makes sense for your three-person team and it’ll explain why microservices are an excellent choice. Ask it if you should build a custom ML pipeline instead of using a managed service and it’ll enthusiastically lay out the design.Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#155This post reeks of being written by Claude. Surely you all feel it, too? Are people who write these kinds of posts lacking self awareness, integrity? Does it matter?
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#156I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "a…
> They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. Presumably that's better than no game at all. > It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "acceptable" level and it was still awful as the whole design was simply flawed. Doing 2 weeks of fixing might have been hell, but this sounds like it was…
Why does it “sound” like a good thing for the company?
Unless it’s a mega establishment product people move on and don’t stick with buggy crashing products
This wouldn’t be acceptable for a car safety, well I could like a whole bunch but you should get the idea
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#157I don’t depend on one shot prompts with lots of constraints to reliably produce, well, anything.
For any nontrivial task I spend 2-8 hours in specification (I spent 3-4 hours on a stateless rust CLI tool design this weekend) and detailed task breakdown in implementation planning.
I use TDD to start with red tests that turn green when acceptance criteria are met.
I write agents to use to check work and they are my enforcers of constraints, as well as fresh eyes. I use these agents for spec review, plan review and code review.
I am actually pretty proud of the projects I create with generative AI. I just apply a lot of discipline so I don’t end up with slop.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#158I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "a…
> AI is only as good as the person using it I think it might be even worse than that. It seems to be a multiplier for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Possibly because being trained to exhibit positive demeanor means that it will always tell you you're the best, no matter what.
Not sure why I saw this getting downvoted. This is exactly what is happening to that person, they think they are way more capable then they really are that's why they're taking on hard challenges and high complexity tasks when they're not ready for it.
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#159please don't submit AI slop articles, ty
Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend
#160If there was ever a "magic prompt" this one comes close: Brainstorm N ways to do X. Sort by probability. Rather than your AI giving you the average response, it tends to sample wider from the input space. Then I can decide which one to go with (or choose something else). Don't outsource all of your thinking.
I've found this to be useful, but it still requires the user to have the capability to understand/evaluate the options.
If you have a competent user it can be quite powerful