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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#161

Post by potatolicious »

qsort wrote: post #36
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…

I think I partially agree, your first paragraph is exactly how I feel. Boilerplate and trivial stuff absolutely should be automated. It's also true that people have been pushing a narrative where programming is some dark art and you should use Methodology X or Theory Y. Bro, chill, you're writing a website. On the other hand software development in the high sense, i.e. producing solutions for actual problems that rea…

> "producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level"

Absolutely agreed, but I think the idea is that coding tools (or languages, or libraries, or frameworks) frees us to do the actually hard, skill-intensive bits of this, because the thing that's intellectually demanding isn't marshaling and unmarshaling JSON.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#162

Post by itomato »

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…

It’s still cans of snakes all the way down though when it comes debugging time.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#163

Post by Swizec »

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…

> To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:

> 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)

> 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)

> I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.

I’ve been programming for almost 30 years. Started when I was 9 years old and I’ve been looking at code pretty much every day since then.

I love AI coding and leading teams. Because I love solving big problems. Bigger than I can do on my own. For me htat’s the fun part. The code itself is just a tool.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#164

Post by potatolicious »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #28
rustc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?

If before I did a thing in 60 minutes and now Claude Code does it in 5 minutes I will not spend 55 minutes reviewing that code. I will maybe spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and refining the code with the help of Claude Code and then the rest of the time I will go for another feature/bugfix.

Worth adding that sometimes I will spend an ~equivalent amount of time doing something in Claude Code, but the result is better.

Case in point recently I was working on a mobile app where I had to check for a whole litany of user permissions and present UI to the user if any particular permission was missing, including instructions on how to rectify it.

Super annoying to do manually, but Claude Code was not only able to exhaustively enumerate all possible combos of missing permissions, but also automatically create the UIs for each edge case. I reviewed all of it for accuracy, which took some time.

I probably would've missed some of the more obscure edge cases on my own.

Overall maybe not much faster than doing it myself, but I'm pretty sure the results were substantially better.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#165

Post by bgwalter »

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…

OP is not a programmer and the comment is the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702811

There's nothing wrong with not being a programmer, but it is still kind of funny that "hackers" and their backers approve the script kiddie way by voting.

I don't think the 2) category is universal. There are many people in that category who know that following corporate hype will be rewarded, but I'm not sure they all like vibe coding.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#166

Post by globular-toast »

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…

Me neither, that's why I write higher level abstractions or use libraries and languages other people have written. I don't get how you were writing so much boring stuff manually before LLMs. What do you do?

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#167

Post by sarchertech »

ok123456 wrote: post #147
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 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.

Unfortunately we have no agreed upon metrics for simplified code.

And we have no realistic way of taking a drastically refactored application that was the result of hours of changes by an LLM and being confident that it doesn’t introduce bugs or remove load bearing bugs.

Static analysis and test suites aren’t good enough for pushing very large changes to production.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#168

Post by ankit219 »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #134
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.

i meant in a way that programming is always synthesis. (to my brain) combining stuff from multiple places is good, but not great synthesis you can do on your own. Many developer feel there is not much of a difference between the two. No comment on whether there is a need for the existence.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#169

Post by bongodongobob »

gavmor wrote: post #104
radicalbyte wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

> 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?"

Most non startup corporate programming jobs are just adding/removing features, add a checkbox here, squash this business logic bug, add a new dept code here, etc. You never build anything new, it's just piddly maintenance stuff.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#170

Post by stavros »

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 not really much of an insight that people who like programming itself don't want to outsource it to an AI, whereas people who like building things do.
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