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A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

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Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#241

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

maxdo wrote: post #36
vibeprofessor wrote: post #12

The AGI vibes with Claude Code are real, but the micromanagement tax is heavy. I spend most of my time babysitting agents. I expect interviews will evolve into "build project X with an LLM while we watch" and audit of agent specs

I've been doing vibe code interviews for nearly a year now. Most people are surprisingly bad with AI tools. We specifically ask them to bring their preferred tool, yet 20–30% still just copy-paste code from ChatGPT. fun stats: corelation is real, people who were good at vibe code, also had offer(s) with other companies that didn't run vibe code interviews.

Copy pasting from chatgpt is the most secure option.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#243

Post by BeetleB »

porise wrote: post #21

I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.

> They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious.

What type of documents do you have explaining the codebase and its messy interactions, and have you provided that to the LLM?

Also, have you tried giving someone brand new to the team the exact same task and information you gave to the LLM, and how effective were they compared to the LLM?

> I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.

As others have pointed out, from your comment, it doesn't sound like you've used a tool dedicated for AI coding.

(But even if you had, it would still fail if you expect LLMs to do stuff without sufficient context).

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#244

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

maximedupre wrote: post #45

> It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful It does hurt, that's why all programmers now need an entrepreneurial mindset... you become if you use your skills + new AI power to build a business.

What about the people who dont want to be entrepreneurs?

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#245

Post by rishabhaiover »

BeetleB wrote: post #237
cyode wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote stuck out to me as well, for a slightly different reason. The “tenacity” referenced here has been, in my opinion, the key ingredient in the secret sauce of a successful career in tech, at least in these past 20 years. Every industry job has its intricacies, but for every engineer who earned their pay with novel work on a new protocol, framework, or paradigm, there were 10 or more providing value by putting…

This is a major concern for junior programmers. For many senior ones, after 20 (or even 10) years of tenacious work, they realize that such work will always be there, and they long ago stopped growing on that front (i.e. they had already peaked). For those folks, LLMs are a life saver. At a company I worked for, lots of senior engineers become managers because they no longer want to obsess over whether their algorith…

That's just sad. Right when I found love in what I do, my work has no value anymore.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#246

Post by bsder »

oasisbob wrote: post #50
bee_rider wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if “antidotal example” is a pun or a typo but I quite like it.

That is fun. Not sure if it's an American pronunciation thing, but I had to stare at that long and hard to see the problem and even after seeing it couldn't think of how you could possibly spell the correct word otherwise.

> Not sure if it's an American pronunciation thing

It's a bad American pronunciation thing like "Febuwary" and "nuculer".

If you pronounce the syllables correctly, "an-ec-dote", "Feb-ru-ar-y", "nu-cle-ar" the spellings follow.

English has it's fair share of spelling stupidities, but if people don't even pronounce the words correctly there is no hope.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#247

Post by epolanski »

> What happens to the "10X engineer" - the ratio of productivity between the mean and the max engineer? It's quite possible that this grows a lot.

No doubt that good engineers will know when and how to leverage the tool, both for coding and improving processes (design-to-code, requirement collection, task tracking, basic code reviewal, etc) improving their own productivity and of those around them.

Motivated individuals will also leverage these tools to learn more and faster.

And yes, of course it's not the only tool one should use, of course there's still value in talking with proper human experts to learn from, etc, but 90% of the time you're looking for info the LLM will dig it from you reading at the source code of e.g. Postgres and its test rather than asking on chats/stack overflow.

This is a trasformative technology that will make great engineers even stronger, but it will weed out those who were merely valued for their very basic capability of churning something but never cared neither about engineering nor coding, which is 90% of our industry.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#248

Post by ipaddr »

simianwords wrote: post #190
ipaddr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clocks prices have gone up since 2020. Unless a cheaper better way to make clocks has emerged inflation causes prices to grow.

not true, clocks have gone down after accounting for inflation. verified using ChatGPT.

You can't account for inflation because the price increase is inflation.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#249

Post by appstorelottery »

> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually.

I've been increasingly using LLM's to code for nearly two years now - and I can definitely notice my brain atrophy. It bothers me. Actually over the last few weeks I've been looking at a major update to a product in production & considered doing the edits manually - at least typing the code from the LLM & also being much more granular with my instructions (i.e. focus on one function at a time). I feel in some ways like my brain is turning into slop & I've been coding for at least 35 years... I feel validated by Karpathy.

Re: A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

#250

Post by epolanski »

daxfohl wrote: post #65

I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and g…

> Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and go back to its original approach, or mix the two, or whatever.

Context management, proper prompting and clear instructions, proper documentation are still relevant.

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