This really mirrors my experience trying to get LLMs to clean up kernel driver code, they seem utterly incapable of simplifying things.
The highest quality codebase
191–200 of 409 posts
Re: The highest quality codebase
#192Claude 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…
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 enjoy finding the problem and then telling Claude to fix it. Specifying the function and the problem. Then going to get a coffee from the breakroom to see it finished when I return. The junior dev has questions when I did that. Claude just fixes it.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#193Claude 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…
The current paradigm is we sorta-kinda got AGI by putting dodgy AI in a loop:
until works { try again }
The stuff is getting so cheap and so fast... a sufficient increment in quantity can produce a phase change in quality.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
My mother wouldn't be able to do what you did. She wouldn't even know where to start despite using LLMs all the time. Half of my CS students wouldn't know where to start either. None of my freshman would. My grad students can do this but not all of them. 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 do…
The person at the top of the thread only made a claim about "non-experts".
Your mom wouldn't vibe-code software that she wants not because she's not a software engineer, but because she doesn't engage with software as a user at the level where she cares to do that.
Consider these two vibe-coded examples of waybar apps in r/omarchy where the OP admits he has zero software experience:
- Weather app: https://www.reddit.com/r/waybar/comments/1p6rv12/an_update_t...
- Activity monitor app: https://www.reddit.com/r/omarchy/comments/1p3hpfq/another_on...
That is a direct refutation of OP's claim. LLM enabled a non-expert to build something they couldn't before.
Unless you too think there exists a necessary expertise in coming up with these prompts:
- "I want a menubar app that shows me the current weather"
- "Now make it show weather in my current location"
- "Color the temperatures based on hot vs cold"
- "It's broken please find out why"
Is "menubar" too much expertise for you? I just asked claude "what is that bar at the top of my screen with all the icons" and it told me that it's macOS' menubar.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#195Re: The highest quality codebase
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I didn't build the software in my comment. A clanker did. Vibe-coding is a claude code QA loop on the end result that anyone can do (the non-experts in his claim). An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user. Once again, where do my 20 years of software experience come up in a process where I don't eve…
> An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user Which is a prompt that someone with experience would write. Your average, non-technical person isn't going to prompt something like that, they are going to say "make it so I can change the settings" or something else super vague and struggle. We all know how difficult it is to define softwa…
Counter point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46234943
Your original claim:
> The hype is all about "this tech will enable non-experts to do things they couldn't do before"
Are you saying that a prompt like "make a macOS weather app for me" and "make an options menu that lets me set my location" are only something an expert can do?
I need to know what you think their expertise is in.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#197One of my favorite personal evals for llms is testing its stability as a reviewer. The basic gist of it is to give the llm some code to review and have it assign a grade multiple times. How much variance is there in the grade? Then, prompt the same llm to be a "critical" reviewer with the same code multiple times. How much does that average critical grade change? A low variance of grades across many generations and a…
I agree, I mostly use Claude for writing code, but I always get GPT5 to review it. Like you, I find it astonishingly consistent and useful, especially compared to Claude. I like to reset my context frequently, so I’ll often paste the problems from GPT into Claude, then get it to review those fixes (going around that loop a few times), then reset the context and get it to do a new full review. It’s very reassuring how consistent the results are.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding. I also find coding more fun with AI. The reason is that my main goal is to solve a problem, or someone else's problem, in a way that is satisfying. I don't much care about the code itself anymore. I care about the thing that it does when it's done. Having said that I used to be deep into coding and back then I am…
You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.
I believe wage work has a significant factor in all this.
Most are not paid for results, they're paid for time at desk and regular responsibilities such as making commits, delivering status updates, code reviews, etc. - the daily activities of work are monitored more closely than the output. Most ESOP grant such little equity that working harder could never observably drive an increase in its value. Getting a project done faster just means another project to begin sooner.
Naturally workers will begin to prefer the motions of the work they find satisfying more than the result it has for the business's bottom line, from which they're alienated.
Re: The highest quality codebase
#199LLMs have this strong bias towards generating code, because writing code is the default behavior from pre-training. Removing code, renaming files, condensing, and other edits is mostly a post-training stuff, supervised learning behavior. You have armies of developers across the world making 17 to 35 dollars an hour solving tasks step by step which are then basically used to generate prompt/responses pairs of desired…
> Writing code is the default behavior from pre-training
what does this even mean? could you expand on it
Re: The highest quality codebase
#200One of my favorite personal evals for llms is testing its stability as a reviewer. The basic gist of it is to give the llm some code to review and have it assign a grade multiple times. How much variance is there in the grade? Then, prompt the same llm to be a "critical" reviewer with the same code multiple times. How much does that average critical grade change? A low variance of grades across many generations and a…
How is this different than testing the temperature?
It isn't, and it reflects how deeply LLMs are misunderstood, even by technical people