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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#211

Post by gavinray »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #181
gavinray wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have to get more granular than: > people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) I began programming at 9/10, and it's been one of only a few lifelong passions. But for me, the code itself was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things.

To me this is sort of like saying about music "The guitar was always just a means to an end. A tool you use to build something. I enjoy making things." That's true, but there's something qualitatively different about writing a song on a guitar vs. prompting to create a song in Suno. The guitar (or piano/Ableton/whatever) is an instrument , whereas Suno is… I'm not really sure. But that difference makes me totally dis…

I'm probably in the minority here, but I also produce House music as a hobby and I love the idea of generative AI as a production tool.

I paid $10 to try the latest Suno 4.5 model and one of the songs it produced was incredible (to me) and sounded so much like the music from my Pandora station I'd never have known it was AI.

https://suno.com/s/EjiWqoG3iR6OYXQA

I'm excited for the future of "Infinite Personal Jukebox" where you can hear an endless stream of music tailored exactly to your taste, and never hear the same song twice.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#212

Post by nunez »

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?"

The way I read it (and I agree with, so biased) is that OP hates that the focus of writing code is generally-perceived as a negative, hence the proliferation of code assistants, AND hates that focus is harder to obtain because of life stuff.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#213

Post by radicalbyte »

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?"

Coding as the fun stuff need you to be able to focus and due to responsibilities (which include a whole lot of system architecture, people management I do enjoy and can do well).

Basically you get to a point in your life and career where you have to decide whether you want to be the absolute best engineer, or whether you want to be building the best environment for building and retaining the best engineers. I kicked the can down the line but it was eventually having three kids which made me realise that the latter was my path. That and it was becoming increasingly harder to actually do #1 when you seem to be surrounded by incompetents taking the second path who, as they often never became competent engineers but seem to have a large influence on decisions as a group.

It's not that I like writing code exactly it's that the domain of the code I can write to a professional level doesn't overlap with the code I find interesting to write. Or in the case of web frameworks, worth spending two days understanding the new dialect of whatever the latest fad framework is so that I know what I'm doing and not copy/pasting or otherwise working from example.

What might make it hard to understand is that the vast majority of people who call themselves engineers don't do so to the level I consider professional; especially in the app / web development / start-up world.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#214

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #210
rstuart4133 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP, but from what he said I can tell you two things: 1. He is using computers to solve other peoples problems, and they are similar problems so all the code looks the same, and 2. He is NOT using computers to solve his own problems. Every top notch software engineer I've met does not write the same code more than a few times, because doing repetitive stuff is something a computer should be doing.

What a weird set of claims to make. I like how you worked backwards from "couldn't be a top not software engineer", whatever that means.

It’s the standard response anytime someone claims they get productivity boosts from ai. Either you are inexperienced or bad at your job.

On a board that would deride any other no true Scotsman take, this one happens on every ai discussion.

It’s no longer worth engaging with. I’m now just posting basic statements like “I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years and I find ai to be extremely helpful”. That way there is at least someone claiming the opposite. But you aren’t going to convince anyone as they already shut that door with their statements.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#215

Post by sarchertech »

ok123456 wrote: post #205
sarchertech wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, the number of arguments, and the number of lines in a given method/function/file. These are usually fine to find the festering portions. We also have no realistic way of being confident that letting a coworker/junior/intern make hours of changes will confidently not introduce bugs or load-bearing bugs.

Reducing cyclomatic complexity says very little about what we care about when we talk about simple code. It’s very possible, even likely to produce code with fewer branches that is much harder to reason about.

Cyclomatic complexity says almost nothing about architectural complexity. There’s a reason talking about cyclomatic complexity fell out of favor 20-30 years ago. We tried using it as a software quality metric and it failed.

There are no good, widely agreed upon metrics for software quality.

An optimizer that tries to reduce lines of code per function or file is going to overfit to the specific version of the system at the expense of readability and maintainability.

Both of these metrics will likely ensure you do the exact opposite of what you’d really want when you say you want to simplify the code.

>coworker/junior/intern

I would never in a million years allow anyone to go off by themselves and spend hours and hours unsupervised changing tens of thousands of lines of code with no goal but to simplify the code.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#216

Post by radicalbyte »

nunez wrote: post #212
gavmor wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?"

The way I read it (and I agree with, so biased) is that OP hates that the focus of writing code is generally-perceived as a negative, hence the proliferation of code assistants, AND hates that focus is harder to obtain because of life stuff.

That's it, it's life phase makes focus impossible, and coding is a massive drug when you're in the zone. And I was very very good a few years ago when in the zone working on highly concurrent (and distributed) systems. I felt like superman compared to everyone else I worked with as I could build things no-one else could.

There are plenty of people on this site who must be able to relate to that (and who are much better than I am - I was a Championship player playing for a League Two club and there are Galactico's active here).

That's long gone and now I'm turning into Eddy Howe (a football manager) not Steve Bull (who was an excellent striker who played for Wolves his entire career in the lower leagues but really should have moved to a good club because he was too good for them).

I wonder sometimes if that's the hump that top class sports stars have to go through when they retire from playing, it took me a few years to understand and accept.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#217

Post by b_e_n_t_o_n »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #136
b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're starting to have a conversation about what healthy social media usage looks like and its place in life. Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation and a shift back towards being genuine. I fully understand the irony here btw. Hopefully it doesn't take 2 decades of AI usage to have that conversation tho.

> Maybe it's just my algorithm but I see a lot of content about moderation I'm not sure if this is supposed to be ironic but it gave me a good chuckle nonetheless. There's also a lot of talk about drinking more moderately down at my local bar.

To be fair, those seem like natural places to have these conversations.

Fwiw I'm seeing a lot of people on social media talking about drinking less too. So I had to unfollow them.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#218

Post by radicalbyte »

hakunin wrote: post #81
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…

I haven't seen many folks who actually hands-on programmed this long willingly and grown to hate it. Instead one is usually trying to become something else (CTO, executive, etc) but due to financial difficulties, struggle to make connections and promote themselves, had to keep writing code. Are you sure this wasn't more of your case? That said, I haven't programmed for 35 years yet (approaching 30 in my case), so I d…

Nope not at all. The first ~10 years were as a kid, so not professionally. Professionally I'm at the top of my niche and decided to work as a consultant instead of starting doing my own startup or starting an agency as I wasn't able to commit and have a family, and I loved writing code (and was bloody good at it, and at making my teams much much better by leading by example & helping them grow).

I spent the pandemic being one of the key players in the pandemic response, writing a lot of code but also helping a load of teams over different countries collaborate, and anything else I could do to make everything work. Oh and bringing up kids at the same time.

Now I'm at a startup, finally, and getting the engineering team off of the ground. Still trying to code (it's really hard to give up chasing the highs) a bit but there's less time for it and no time for the really hard deep dives (and I'm not willing to ignore my family to no-life it as others can do).

With that context, yeah, it's not as enjoyable. Sure I could try and transition back to a full-time coding roll and yeah, I'd be working on fun puzzles and enjoying it, but that means my impact is more limited. It's a better use of my skills + experience to be doing what I'm doing. Pays more too but both pay well :-)

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#219

Post by camgunz »

kasey_junk wrote: post #214
tptacek wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird set of claims to make. I like how you worked backwards from "couldn't be a top not software engineer", whatever that means.

It’s the standard response anytime someone claims they get productivity boosts from ai. Either you are inexperienced or bad at your job. On a board that would deride any other no true Scotsman take, this one happens on every ai discussion. It’s no longer worth engaging with. I’m now just posting basic statements like “I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years and I find ai to be extremely helpful”. That way t…

I agree; I think there's a huge veil of perception thing happening here like. I've worked directly with dozens of coders and indirectly with hundreds, and like, no one does their job like I do? It's like we all show up to the job site, you have a drill, another person has a hammer, and I have a feather duster and a bottle of glue, and we all have the exact same job. No wonder what makes the drill person more productive doesn't do shit for the feather duster/glue person.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#220

Post by camgunz »

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 agree with this take, insofar as I interpret it as "we do a lot of bullshit that doesn't matter". Like, do you remember people arguing Rails vs Django, or even worse Rails vs Sinatra? I do and did, and my meager defense is that I was young and naive. The list of "I can't believe we spent any time building/doing any of that" is just so, so long. I mean, how many times are we gonna reimplement node ffs.
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