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Claude Code is a slot machine

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Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#231

Post by Wowfunhappy »

yahoozoo wrote: post #228
serf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because humans take longer than Claude, and most of them want to be paid more than $200 per month. I don't just have access to another human at my beck and call at all hours.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#232

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #225
gavinray wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd posit Spotify already is an "infinite personal jukebox" for a lot of people.

We can have both. People will still want that social context, and will go to concerts and so on. But not for every song.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#233

Post by MattGaiser »

yahoozoo wrote: post #228
serf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That isn't needed, as LLMs are way cheaper. Even if they never advance beyond strong new grad, their cheapness is enormous value add on its own. GitHub will presently sell you 1500 AI generated PRs a month for $40. You used to have to pay a human 10K a month, even if it was small stuff.

All kinds of software that are worth as little as 10K a year are now worth building, as making and supporting them is so trivial.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#234

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Uh, so in the end you pretty much ended up in a management role instead of coding and seems like you’re much happier that way.

So not far off from the comment you replied to.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#235

Post by jimbokun »

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"…

But with Suno YOU didn’t produce shit.

Suno did.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#236

Post by jimbokun »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #232
jakelazaroff wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd posit Spotify already is an "infinite personal jukebox" for a lot of people. We can have both. People will still want that social context, and will go to concerts and so on. But not for every song.

Things are bad already so we should make them worse?

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#237

Post by kamaal »

righthand wrote: post #132
garciasn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see AI-accelerated codegen as doing all of the boring shit I hated: do while error == true; Write code Run code Read error Attempt to fix error Run code Read error Search Google for error Attempt to fix error Run code Read error done --- Claude does all of this for me now, allowing me to concentrate on the end goal, not the minutiae. It hasn't at all changed my workflow; it just does all of the horribly mundane par…

If you enjoy being a custodian no one is going to chastise you for that. As you have stated there are many nightmares to clean up and all teams need a person who wants to do the clean up. This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.…

I think writing code was never slow. Or atleast never the slowest part of the overall process.

Vibe coding might be fast, but thats only if you wish to pretend that coders deploy to production directly within minutes of writing code without product discussions, automated builds, CI/CD, code review, production testing, UAT, regression testing, security testing etc.

In reality when you factor in all these things, which are absolutely necessary if you don't want you product to break every new release and lose users permanently. You have to do the same drills as you always did.

To that end, unless you are building something very large, coding velocity is largely irrelevant.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#238

Post by righthand »

kamaal wrote: post #237
righthand wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you enjoy being a custodian no one is going to chastise you for that. As you have stated there are many nightmares to clean up and all teams need a person who wants to do the clean up. This will keep you out of the bleeding edge feature/product space because you lack a honed skill in actually developing the app. Your skill is now to talk to an LLM and fix nightmare code, not work on new stuff that needs expertise.…

I think writing code was never slow. Or atleast never the slowest part of the overall process. Vibe coding might be fast, but thats only if you wish to pretend that coders deploy to production directly within minutes of writing code without product discussions, automated builds, CI/CD, code review, production testing, UAT, regression testing, security testing etc. In reality when you factor in all these things, which…

I would also argue that the OPs comment describes “hacking” not “writing code”.

They could escape that loop by employing software development skillsets, for example TDD or perhaps using the debugger instead of pounding away at a compiler.

Usually when people pound at a compiler it’s because they don’t know what they’re doing or how software even works.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#239

Post by jimbokun »

tptacek wrote: post #119
IanCal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I massively agree. Huge amounts of coding isn’t wild new inventions, it’s not unknowable work like so many seem to suggest when asked to estimate time. Frankly it’s not even conceptually hard, it’s just that computers are fast and accurate and dumb so you need to be annoyingly precise. Imagine if a human refuses to read a manual because a comma should have been a semicolon. Plenty of people are smart enough to do it,…

If you made all this work go away with a new functional programming language, like if finally someone contrived the perfect type system where you could just declaratively lay out all the rote bits and evaluate them to the imperative steps you wanted taken, everyone would be thrilled. There would be people going around dunking on all the developers who didn't use that language. Instead, it's the opposite.

But that’s the problem.

The LLMs are still generating all that rote shit, that at some point must be maintained and read and understood. Potentially at a higher rate than any human could.

A lot of what AI coders are being praised for could be accomplished just as well with some good Lisp macros with much less technical debt.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#240

Post by jakelazaroff »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #232
jakelazaroff wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd posit Spotify already is an "infinite personal jukebox" for a lot of people. We can have both. People will still want that social context, and will go to concerts and so on. But not for every song.

I mean, I agree with that, but then what is the problem for AI to solve here (other than Spotify needing to pay royalties to those pesky musicians)?
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