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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#221

Post by [deleted] »

yoz-y wrote: post #187
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…

For me the problem with the vision is that stuff I’d like to exist is so far above the capabilities of AI (rather complex games) that I don’t even want to try it. And for stuff that I build and use they are pointless because they don’t accelerate me much. I found it great to write bash scripts, automation, ffmpeg command lines, OCR, refactoring… it’s a great autocomplete. Working in a large team I realized that even…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#222

Post by jonmc12 »

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…

Agreed. The constraints of software engineering are mostly idiomatic. I used to use my "Scribe" mind to crawl through library dependencies for days to solve some artificial sub-problem.

No software engineer is good enough to time-efficiently write the whole stack from machine code up - it will always be an arbitrary and idiomatic set of problems and this is what LLMs are so good at parsing.

Using "Scribe" cycles to define the right problem and carefully review code outputs seems like the way.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#223

Post by monkey26 »

hakunin wrote: post #107
monkey26 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fall into the 25 year of experience category. Probably a few more. For me, this agentic coding couldn’t have come at a better time. I still love thinking about solutions to problems and creating those solutions. I’m becoming less and less interested in the implementation details of those solutions. I tend to use Claude Code in 2 scenarios. YOLO where I don’t care what it looks like. One shot stuff I’ll never mainta…

We are in a similar length of experience, but weirdly as I got older, it's the opposite for me: I got more particular about clarity, readability, especially in the context of handling edge cases. The 10% of situations that require 90% of effort. My new hobby is a codebase that can read as a business rulebook.

I’m grateful for the likes of you out there.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#224

Post by varispeed »

sokoloff wrote: post #55
varispeed wrote: post #47

> 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. That's why developers are poorly paid and viewed as disposable cogs. It feels "easy" to many people and so they internally think it is immoral to get paid and corporations ruthlessly prey on that feeling. Reality is that development is hard and requires immense mental work, co…

TIL that “developers are poorly paid”.

TIL someone thinks a £60k dev job in London means you’re not being exploited - because you can afford a Tesco meal deal and a flatshare in Zone 4. Never mind your code prints money for people you’ll never meet, or that your “reward” is a Jira ticket and a perf review.

Developers went from garage-tinkerers to the backbone of the modern economy - and somehow ended up as overworked, disposable employees in open-plan office farms. The owners changed, the IDEs got fancier, but the deal stayed the same: build the machine, never own it.

You upskill constantly just to not fall behind. You work nights “for the launch.” You get gaslit into thinking stock options in a private company are equity. Then you’re laid off via email - while the founders post yacht selfies.

And the worst part? Most of you still believe you’re lucky. That’s the grift: teach engineers to think they’re “not like other workers” - then extract surplus value just like any other industry has done since the 19th century.

Developers are poorly paid - not because the salary is low, but because the upside is stolen. You created the wealth, they captured it.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#225

Post by jakelazaroff »

gavinray wrote: post #211
jakelazaroff wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

I'm trying hard not to judge, but the "Infinite Personal Jukebox" sounds nightmarish to me — and I don't just mean to me, personally, but for humanity as a whole.

You are describing a world in which music is devoid of any social context. No sharing songs with friends, no replaying the first song you danced to with a loved one, no seeing live performances, no researching who inspired your favorite artists — because in this world "inspiration" doesn't exist. Nothing will ever force you to reevaluate a genre you'd written off, or ponder tough questions — in fact, no media will ever challenge or surprise you in any way.

That is a world in which one of our most primal connective threads has been robbed of its social and emotional value. It's just elevator music for our own private elevators.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#227

Post by BadIron »

I started using Claude AI, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek for helping me to develop Windows applications using Delphi Pascal a few months ago. I absolutely love it. I learned Pascal when I was 16 (high school) and throughout college. I have never been a professional programmer in my life. I'm getting old. I want to start getting back into programming. AI has helped me tremendously. AI has helped me to develop many special procedures and functions which I could not figure out by myself anymore. I am a Vice President at a company that sells computer networking equipment. Still need to keep my day job. By the way, Claude AI is the best so far when it comes to Pascal. ChatGPT is disappointing, maybe it's better in other programming languages. DeepSeek depends, it's average.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#228

Post by yahoozoo »

serf wrote: post #183
ben_w wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda. While it's possible to do that, you've got an exponential cost increase for linear improvements — scale from a case where an AI makes 1 mistake to 2, double the output cost, 3 mistakes double again, 4 mistakes double again, etc.

Smart caching fixes a lot of the issues there. If a fork is marked somehow as successful then presumably the cache lookup next time will be less painful/costly. Of course that's dependent on how caching gets implemented/where/when/how, but it's not unsolvable for common occurrence questions/answers. As for getting the SOTA questions wrong : we as humans would likely also go through an iterative feedback loop until in…

Except LLMs aren’t humans. Why do we continue to say “well, yeah but humans ”? A major point/goal is for these to be better and less error prone than humans. It’s just coping at this point.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#229

Post by hakunin »

stavros wrote: post #186
hakunin wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right, but this dividing line only became prominent now that AI coding agents polarized the community across it. This in itself is interesting to me.

Yes, definitely, I just mean that all the groups can be condensed down to those two.

I guess there are some who would've enjoyed coding, but circumstances pulled them away from it. The word "intimacy" comes to mind. If you lose intimate relationship with code writing (or never gain one), you will be more okay with AI.

Perhaps I'm trying to point out that sometimes you lose it accidentally, while still instinctively thinking that you enjoy writing code.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#230

Post by hakunin »

radicalbyte wrote: post #218
hakunin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds very interesting, and at first I thought maybe you're an outlier, but the more I read people mention "solving puzzles", the more I notice a more fundamental difference in enjoying programming. For me it's not solving puzzles, but rather finding elegant/eloquent expression of something complex (feel like I'm more of a writer than an engineer). That's what makes me tick: clear code that can itself serve as a primary source of knowledge of how a business functions. If I work with an AI agent, I become an editor rather than a writer — a very different job.
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