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I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

maxemitchell.com

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Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#211

Post by ramchip »

kiitos wrote: post #158
kentonv wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "one degree removed from 100% pure vibe coding", then? The definition of vibe coding is letting the AI code without review...

> one degree removed You're letting Claude do your programming for you, and then sweeping up whatever it does afterwards. Bluntly, you're off-loading your cognition to the machine. If that's fine by you then that's fine enough, it just means that the quality of your work becomes a function of your tooling rather than your capabilities.

Personally, I spend _more_ time thinking with Claude. I can focus on the design decisions while it does the mechanical work of turning that into code.

Sometimes I give the agent a vague design ("make XYZ configurable") and it implements it the wrong way, so I'll tell it to do it again with more precise instructions ("use a config file instead of a CLI argument"). The best thing is you can tell it after it wrote 500 lines of code and updated all the tests, and its feelings won't be hurt one bit :)

It can be useful as a research tool too, for instance I was porting a library to a new language, and I told the agent to 1) find all the core types and 2) for each type, run a subtask to compare the implementation in each language and write a markdown file that summarizes the differences with some code samples. 20 min later I had a neat collection of reports that I could refer to while designing the API in the new language.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#212

Post by thorum »

maxemitchell wrote: post #146
thorum wrote: post #23

Humorous that this article has a strong AI writing smell - the author should publish the prompts they used!

I did human notes -> had Claude condense and edit -> manually edit. A few of the sentences (like the stinky one below) were from Claude which I kept if it matched my own thoughts, though most were changed for style/prose. I'm still experimenting with it. I find it can't match style at all, and even with the manual editing it still "smells like AI" as you picked up. But, it also saves time. My prompt was essentially "…

Makes sense, I could see the human touch on the article too, so I figured it was something like that.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#213

Post by lowsong »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #5

> Reading through these commits sparked an idea: what if we treated prompts as the actual source code? Imagine version control systems where you commit the prompts used to generate features rather than the resulting implementation. Please god, no, never do this. For one thing, why would you not commit the generated source code when storage is essentially free? That seems insane for multiple reasons. > When models ine…

I'm the first to admit that I'm an AI skeptic, but this goes way beyond my views about AI and is a fundamentally unsound idea.

Let's assume that a hypothetical future AI is perfect. It will produce correct output 100% of the time, with no bugs, errors, omissions, security flaws, or other failings. It will also generate output instantly and cost nothing to run.

Even with such perfection this idea is doomed to failure because it can only write code based on information in the prompt, which is written by a human. Any ambiguity, unstated assumption, or omission would result in a program that didn't work quite right. Even a perfect AI is not telepathic. So you'd need to explain and describe your intended solution extremely precisely without ambiguity. Especially considering in this "offline generation" case there is no opportunity for our presumed perfect AI to ask clarifying questions.

But, by definition, any language which is precise and clear enough to not produce ambiguity is effectively a programming language, so you've not gained anything over just writing code.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#214

Post by thi2 »

tptacek wrote: post #132
danielbln wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could enlighten the rest of us then. According to your favorite definition, what does senior mean, what does seniority mean, and what's a term for someone who knows what they're doing?

Seniority means you've held the role for a long time.

There is no real definition of a senior engineer. Just looking at years served seems is wrong imho.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#215

Post by ehutch79 »

tptacek wrote: post #176
Ataraxic wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junior devs using AI can get a lot better at using AI and learn those existing patterns it generates, but I notice, for myself, that if I let AI write a lot of the code I remember and thereby understand it later on less well. This applies in school and when trying to learn new things but the act of writing down the solution and working out the details yourself trains our own brain. I'd say that this has been a practi…

I'm sure there is when you're just getting your sea legs in some environment, but at some point most of the code you write in a given environment is rote. Rote code is both depleting and mutagenic --- if you're fluent and also interested in programming, you'll start convincing yourself to do stupid stuff to make the code less rote ("DRY it up", "make a DSL", &c) that makes your code less readable and maintainable. It…

If your code is that boilerplate you can do it by rote, you need to abstract it already. Or write a generator/snippet

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#216

Post by ehutch79 »

tptacek wrote: post #132
danielbln wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could enlighten the rest of us then. According to your favorite definition, what does senior mean, what does seniority mean, and what's a term for someone who knows what they're doing?

Seniority means you've held the role for a long time.

Time is required to be a senior engineer, but time does not _make_ you a senior engineer.

You need time to accumulate experience. You need experience, time in the proverbial trenches, to be a senior engineer.

You need to be doing different things too, not just implementing the same cookie cutter code repeatedly. If you are doing that, and havent automated it, you are not a senior engineer.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#217

Post by tptacek »

thi2 wrote: post #214
tptacek wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seniority means you've held the role for a long time.

There is no real definition of a senior engineer. Just looking at years served seems is wrong imho.

There's what "senior"-level developers say about themselves, and there's what's actually generally true about them. The two notions are, of course, not the same.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#218

Post by zeofig »

brador wrote: post #88

Many of you are failing to conprehend the potential scale of AI generated codebases. Take note - there is no limit. Every feature you or the AI can prompt can be generated. Imagine if you were immortal and given unlimited storage. Imagine what you could create. That’s a prompt away. Even now you’re still restricting your thinking to the old ways.

Think about this for a second

E = MC^2 + AI

A new equation for physics?

The potential of AI is unlimited.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#219

Post by tptacek »

ehutch79 wrote: post #215
tptacek wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there is when you're just getting your sea legs in some environment, but at some point most of the code you write in a given environment is rote. Rote code is both depleting and mutagenic --- if you're fluent and also interested in programming, you'll start convincing yourself to do stupid stuff to make the code less rote ("DRY it up", "make a DSL", &c) that makes your code less readable and maintainable. It…

If your code is that boilerplate you can do it by rote, you need to abstract it already. Or write a generator/snippet

See, I get what you're saying, but this is my whole thing. No. Abstracting code out or building a bespoke codegen system is not always or even usually an improvement on straight-line code that just does what it says it does.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#220

Post by handoflixue »

lowsong wrote: post #213
SrslyJosh wrote: post #5

> Reading through these commits sparked an idea: what if we treated prompts as the actual source code? Imagine version control systems where you commit the prompts used to generate features rather than the resulting implementation. Please god, no, never do this. For one thing, why would you not commit the generated source code when storage is essentially free? That seems insane for multiple reasons. > When models ine…

I'm the first to admit that I'm an AI skeptic, but this goes way beyond my views about AI and is a fundamentally unsound idea. Let's assume that a hypothetical future AI is perfect. It will produce correct output 100% of the time, with no bugs, errors, omissions, security flaws, or other failings. It will also generate output instantly and cost nothing to run. Even with such perfection this idea is doomed to failure…

We already have AI agents that can ask a human for help / clarification in those cases.

It could also analyze the company website, marketing materials, and so forth, and use that to infer the missing pieces. (Again, something that exists today)

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