Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

words.filippo.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 217 posts

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#191

Post by simonw »

Razengan wrote: post #186
simonw wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this Claude Code or Claude.ai or some other tool that used Claude under the hood? Different harnesses have different search capabilities. If I'm doing something that benefits from search I tend to switch to ChatGPT because I know it has a really good search feature available to it. I don't trust Claude's as much.

I used the Claude website and Mac desktop app for a relatively standard iOS SwiftUI project. I used Claude Code with VS Code for some Godot stuff, and even there it sometimes gave outdated and outright made-up APIs (functions that seemed like they should exist but did not etc.)

Unfortunately LLMs mostly suck at Swift and SwiftUI from what I've heard - they still change pretty often and as a result there aren't enough fresh examples in the training data.

As primarily a Python/JavaScript programmer I don't have that problem!

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#192

Post by Wowfunhappy »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #188
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving up abstraction layers really only succeeds with a solid working knowledge of the lower layers. Otherwise, you're just flying blind, operating on faith. A common source of bugs is precisely a result of developers failing to understand the limits of the abstractions they are using.

So we can all only succeed if we know how CPUs handle individual instructions?

I'm not sure whether I agree with GP, but I think you may be misinterpreting their point. I can have an understanding of CPUs in general without knowing individual instructions, and I do think knowing about things like CPU cache is useful even when writing e.g. Python.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#193

Post by RA_Fisher »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #187
RA_Fisher wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By moving up a level in the abstraction layer similar to moving from Assembly to C++ to Python (to LLM). There’s speed in delegation (and checking as beneficial).

Moving up abstraction layers really only succeeds with a solid working knowledge of the lower layers. Otherwise, you're just flying blind, operating on faith. A common source of bugs is precisely a result of developers failing to understand the limits of the abstractions they are using.

We only need to do that when it’s practical for the task at hand. Some tasks are life-and-death, but many have much lower stakes.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#194

Post by RA_Fisher »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #192
AbstractH24 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can all only succeed if we know how CPUs handle individual instructions?

I'm not sure whether I agree with GP, but I think you may be misinterpreting their point. I can have an understanding of CPUs in general without knowing individual instructions, and I do think knowing about things like CPU cache is useful even when writing e.g. Python.

Yes, for sure! And being able to orchestrate AI to use that knowledge provides leverage for fulfilling tasks.

Eventually, yes, I think we'll delegate to AI in more and more complete ways, but it's a process that takes some time.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#196

Post by AbstractH24 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #192
AbstractH24 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can all only succeed if we know how CPUs handle individual instructions?

I'm not sure whether I agree with GP, but I think you may be misinterpreting their point. I can have an understanding of CPUs in general without knowing individual instructions, and I do think knowing about things like CPU cache is useful even when writing e.g. Python.

I see what you’re getting at and it makes sense.

Goes to the larger idea that strategic and logic is important for scalability and long term success. Not just execution. Something LLMs miss often (mostly because people fail to communicate it to them).

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#197

Post by jamamp »

pton_xd wrote: post #33

> Full disclosure: Anthropic gave me a few months of Claude Max for free. They reached out one day and told me they were giving it away to some open source maintainers. Related, lately I've been getting tons of Anthropic Instagram ads; they must be near a quarter of all the sponsored content I see for the last month or so. Various people vibe coding random apps and whatnot using different incarnations of Claude. Or j…

Unfortunately that might also be due to how Instagram shows ads, and not necessarily Anthropic's marketing push. As soon as you click on or even linger on a particular ad, Instagram notices and doubles down on sending you more ads from the same provider as well as related ads. My experience is that Instagram has 2-3 groups of ad types I receive which slowly change over the months as the effectiveness wanes over time.

The fact that you are receiving multiple kinds of ads from Anthropic does signify more of a marketing push, though.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#198

Post by jama211 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #192
AbstractH24 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can all only succeed if we know how CPUs handle individual instructions?

I'm not sure whether I agree with GP, but I think you may be misinterpreting their point. I can have an understanding of CPUs in general without knowing individual instructions, and I do think knowing about things like CPU cache is useful even when writing e.g. Python.

Sure, but the comment being worried about a lack of “flexing your muscles” is perfectly countered by moving up an abstraction layer then, as you don’t have to constantly get into the weeds of coding to maintain an understanding _in general_ without knowing individual instructions.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#199

Post by pessimizer »

nikanj wrote: post #170

I'm surprised it didn't fix it by removing the code. In my experience, if you give Claude a failing test, it fixes it by hard-coding the code to return the value expected by the test or something similar. Last week I asked it to look at why a certain device enumeration caused a sigsegv, and it quickly solved the issue by completely removing the enumeration. No functionality, no bugs!

I've got a paste in prompt that reiterates multiple times not to remove features or debugging output without asking first, and not to blame the test file/data that the program failed on. Repeated multiple times, the last time in all caps. It still does it. I hope maybe half as often, but I may be fooling myself.

Re: Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography

#200

Post by wrs »

Yesterday I tried something similar with a website (Go backend) that was doing a complex query/filter and showing the wrong results. I just described the problem to Claude Code, told it how to run psql, and gave it an authenticated cookie to curl the backend with. In about three minutes of playing around, it fixed the problem. It only needed raw psql and curl access, no specialized tooling, to write a bunch of bash commands to poke around and compare the backend results with the test database.
Post reply on HN