241–250 of 409 posts
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> Writing code is the default behavior from pre-training what does this even mean? could you expand on it
He means that it is heavily biased to write code, not remove, condense, refactor, etc. It wants to generate more stuff, not less.
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the…
Claude is for getting shit done, it's not at its best at long research tasks.
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That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…
Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."
I don't :) Before I had IDE templates and Intellisense. Now I can just get any agentic AI to do it for me in 60 seconds and I can get to the actual work.
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You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding. I also find coding more fun with AI. The reason is that my main goal is to solve a problem, or someone else's problem, in a way that is satisfying. I don't much care about the code itself anymore. I care about the thing that it does when it's done. Having said that I used to be deep into coding and back then I am…
I think it ultimately comes down to whether you care more about the what, or more about the how. A lot of coders love the craft: making code that is elegant, terse, extensible, maintainable, efficient and/or provably correct, and so on. These are the kind of people who write programming languages, database engines, web frameworks, operating systems, or small but nifty utilities. They don't want to simply solve a prob…
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You are hitting the nail on the head. We are not being hired to write code. We are being hired to solve problems. Code is simply the medium.
but do you solve the problem if you just slap a prompt and iterate while the LLM gathers diffs ?
Sometimes you can, sometimes you have to break the problem apart and get the LLM to do each bit separately, sometimes the LLM goes funny and you need to solve it yourself.
Customers don't want you wasting money doing by hand what can be automated, nor do they want you ripping them off by blindly handing over unchecked LLM output when it can't be automated.
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I think we have different opinions on what's fun and what's boring!
You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding. I also find coding more fun with AI. The reason is that my main goal is to solve a problem, or someone else's problem, in a way that is satisfying. I don't much care about the code itself anymore. I care about the thing that it does when it's done. Having said that I used to be deep into coding and back then I am…
> You've really hit the crux of the problem and why so many people have differing opinions about AI coding.
Part of it perhaps, but there's also a huge variation in model output. I've been getting some surprisingly bad generations from ChatGPT recently, though I'm not sure if that's ChatGPT getting worse or me getting used to a much higher quality of code from Claude Code which seems to test itself before saying "done". I have no idea if my opinion will flip again now 5.2 is out.
And some people are bad communicators, an important skill for LLMs, though few will recognise it because everyone knows what they themselves meant by whatever words they use.
And some people are bad planners, likewise an important skill for breaking apart big tasks that LLMs can't do into small ones they can do.
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I would say notetaking would be a much bigger help than Claude at this point. There's a lot of methods to organize information that I believe would help you, better than an hallucination machine.
Notetaking with ADHD is another sort of hell to be honest. I absolutely can attest to what parent is saying, I have been developing software in Python for nearly a decade now and I still routinely look up the /basics/. LLM's have been a complete gamechanger to me, being able to reduce the friction of "ok let me google what I need in a very roundabout way my memory spit it out" to a fast and often inline llm lookup.
But figuring out what is the correct way in this particular language is the issue.
Now I can get the assistant to do it, look at it and go "yep, that's how you iterate over an array of strings".
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Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!" Claude writing code ge…
How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?
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Claude is very good at unfun-but-necessary coding tasks such as writing docstrings and type hints, which is a prominent instance of "laundry and dishes" for a dev.
“Sorry, the autogenerated api documentation was wrong because the ai hallucinated the docstring”
Please don't say you commit AI-generated stuff without checking it first?