Claude Code is a slot machine • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#241

Post by tptacek » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 5:15 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #239

tptacek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand what you're saying. But in the programming environments I work in, the rote stuff that LLMs are automating is marginally better than the rote stuff I would write given the same parameters. Obviously, we could all do better if only we were writing the right Lisp macros. ;)

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#242

Post by troupo » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 5:36 AM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #202

troupo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools. There aren't. Every new "one true way of doing it" that changes every few days runs into these problems.

Every iteration of the tools improves the output quality, many of the problems from a year ago are not problems today.

And new problems appear. This remains a fact of life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702776

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#243

Post by groby_b » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 5:46 AM UTC

hakunin wrote: post #51

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…

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

I think you're wrong with those groups.

I'll use myself as counterexample, but I know a sufficiently large number of people like me who also love AI to suggest the pattern's wrong.

Programming for 4 decades, happy to language lawyer with my C++ compiler, and love puzzle solving.

And yet, I see AI as a tremendous gift. It's brought back the early exploratory feeling and joy. It's also taken care of a lot of tedium (no, migrating to a new library/api never was fun)

And, best of all, how to use AI well/correctly to produce prod quality code is one of the biggest puzzles out there. It's a great time!

But I don't think your characterization is entirely wrong, because the 'Ugh! AI!" continent is indeed strong in your second group. Specifically, people who have that long seniority and enjoyed being "the expert" - i.e more knowledgeable about a topic than many. AI is compressing that gap.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#244

Post by danielbln » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:06 AM UTC

troupo wrote: post #242

danielbln wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every iteration of the tools improves the output quality, many of the problems from a year ago are not problems today.

And new problems appear. This remains a fact of life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702776

Definitely, but isn't that progress? We solve problems and new problems appear, which we also solve. Rinse and repeat until the sun blows up.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#245

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:28 AM UTC

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #110

hakunin wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they…

I'll add another category: people who've coded in many languages but never specialised. I've earned money by coding in c, php, c#, flex, arduino-c, rust and python. And I've hacked at projects written in a few more. Like a lot of people here, my earliest memories of coding are of me and my siblings typing games printed in a BASIC book, on a z80 clone, for 30-60 minutes, and then playing until we had to go to bed, or…

This is me.

I want to solve a problem, I know how to solve the problem, but I don't want to spend 30 minutes figuring out how to do the thing in Language X with Framework Y.

I know _what_ I need to do, but can't remember _how_ it's done in this specific language. The AI knows and can either tell me straight away by examining the project or I can just have it do it and review the solution.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#246

Post by eric-burel » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:29 AM UTC

dwaltrip wrote: post #193

eric-burel wrote: post #160

Can we collectively stop upvoting low quality 300 words random opinions about llm based dev? As a professional in the field I find the qualify of what's posted on HN really super low in this area, compared to posts eg related to cloud infrastructure or software engineering. There are better posts and sources than that.

The post may not have a ton of meat, but it resonates and seems ripe for discussion. It’s quite timely as we all try to figure out how and when to use these tools. Your comment doesn’t add much. Where’s the substance to your critique?

For instance this one is a great, valuable read about AI and developers productivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 Post that are just opinions doesn't really fuel discussions as they don't bring enough raw material to build on. Some opinions are still worthy because they are original, but here I see nothing new.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#247

Post by prmph » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:30 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #95

peab wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went into computer science because I liked the puzzle aspect of it. In highschool, I took a computer class and all we did was solve programming competition questions, and I loved it. Software engineering is very different. There's a lot of debugging and tedious work that I don't enjoy, which AI makes so much better. I don't care about CSS, I don't want to spend 4 hours trying to figure out how to make the button ce…

I love software engineering. I love algorithms and complexity and data structures and distributed systems. But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.

> But if I could press a button and make finished software appear, I would.

You cannot and never will, because of shannon entropy.

How many non-trivially distinct programs are definable by the few words of the prompt on such a button?

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#248

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:33 AM UTC

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…

It's like the Blank Page Problem for writers. It's really hard to start.

But if you have a shitty page of text, you can edit it to make it better.

With LLM tools I can get from idea to (shitty) proof-of-concept solution really fast. Then I can start dogfooding it and improve and rewrite.

But sometimes the shitty solution is enough for my purposes. It works and doesn't actively break shit. My problem was solved and I don't need to optimise the silly TUI yt-dlp wrapper it just made me.

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#249

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:34 AM UTC

moregrist wrote: post #179

kregasaurusrex wrote: post #84

On Friday I was converting a constrained solver from python to another language, and ran into some difficulty with subsituting an optimzer that's a few lines of easily written Scipy; but barely being supported in another language. One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. But another AI tool was really struggling with getting the right…

> One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. So slow, untested, and likely buggy, especially as the inputs become less well-conditioned? If this was a jr dev writing code I’d ask why they didn’t use . Neither llm outcome seems very ideal to me, tbh.

With mathematical things you can always write comprehensive and complete unit tests to check the AIs work.

TDD (and exhaustive unit tests in general) are a good idea with LLMs anyway. Just either tell it not to touch test, or in Claude's case you can use Hooks to _actually_ prevent it from editing any test file.

Then shove it at the problem and it'll iterate a solution until the tests pass. It's like the Excel formula solver, but for code :D

Re: Claude Code is a slot machine

#250

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 6:39 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #161

qsort wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I partially agree, your first paragraph is exactly how I feel. Boilerplate and trivial stuff absolutely should be automated. It's also true that people have been pushing a narrative where programming is some dark art and you should use Methodology X or Theory Y. Bro, chill, you're writing a website. On the other hand software development in the high sense, i.e. producing solutions for actual problems that rea…

> "producing solutions for actual problems that real people have, is certainly intellectually demanding and also something that allows for several standard deviations in skill level" Absolutely agreed, but I think the idea is that coding tools (or languages, or libraries, or frameworks) frees us to do the actually hard, skill-intensive bits of this, because the thing that's intellectually demanding isn't marshaling a…

This is exactly why we moved from Assembly code to higher level languages and then to using frameworks.

Nobody is paying you to make a CRUD web app in Assembly, they're paying you to solve a problem.

You're not getting any extra points for using plain vi(m) with no autocomplete to write a Java application. Making stuff the hard way is just stupid performative crap.

LLMs are just the next iteration of autocomplete -> intellisense -> language servers.

Now instead of autocompleting a method or property, they can autocomplete full unit tests and functions by looking at the patterns across the codebase.