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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

#251

Post by [deleted] »

nemothekid wrote: post #236
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…

I think I should write more about but I have been feeling very similar. I've been recently exploring using claude code/codex recently as the "default", so I've decided to implement a side project. My gripe with AI tools in the past is that the kind of work I do is large and complex and with previous models it just wasn't efficient to either provide enough context or deal with context rot when working on a large appli…

[deleted]

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

#252

Post by daxfohl »

samrus wrote: post #219
mikkupikku wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of it comes down to how well the user understands the problem, because that determines the quality of instructions and feedback given to the LLM. For instance, I know some people have had success with getting claude to do game development. I have never bothered to learn much of anything about game development, but have been trying to get claude to do the work for me. Unsuccessful. It works for people wh…

It works for hard problems when the person already solves it and just needs the grunt work done It also works for problems that have been solved a thousand times before, which impresses people and makes them think it is actually solving those problems

Which matches what they are. They're first and foremost pattern recognition engines extraordinaire. If they can identify some pattern that's out of whack in your code compared to something in the training data, or a bug that is similar to others that have been fixed in their training set, they can usually thwack those patterns over to your latent space and clean up the residuals. If comparing pattern matching alone, they are superhuman, significantly.

"Reasoning", however, is a feature that has been bolted on with a hacksaw and duct tape. Their ability to pattern match makes reasoning seem more powerful than it actually is. If your bug is within some reasonable distance of a pattern it has seen in training, reasoning can get it over the final hump. But if your problem is too far removed from what it has seen in its latent space, it's not likely to figure it out by reasoning alone.

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

#253

Post by ipaddr »

fooker wrote: post #187
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.

Luxury watches have gone up, 'clocks' as a technology is cheaper than ever. You can buy one for 90 cents on temu.

The landing cost for that 90 cent watch has gone way up. Shipping and to some degree taxes has pushed the price higher.

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

#254

Post by epolanski »

appstorelottery wrote: post #249

> 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 bein…

Don't be too worried about it.

1. Manual coding may be less relevant (albeit ability to read code, interpret it and understand it will be more) in the future. Likely already is.

2. Any skill you don't practice becomes "weaker". Gonna give you an example. I play chess since my childhood, but sometimes I go months without playing it, even years. When I get back I start losing elo fast. If I was in the top 10% of chess.com, I drop to top 30% in the weeks after. But after few months I'm back at top 10%. Takeaway: your relative ability is more or less the same compared to other practitioners, you're simply rusty.

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

#255

Post by nunez »

ryandrake wrote: post #23
atonse wrote: post #11

> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…

I noticed the same thing, but wasn't able to put it into words before reading that. Been experimenting with LLM-based coding just so I can understand it and talk intelligently about it (instead of just being that grouchy curmudgeon), and the thought in the back of my mind while using Claude Code is always: "I got into programming because I like programming, not whatever this is..." Yes, I'm building stupid things fas…

Same same. Writing the actual code is always a huge motivator behind my side projects. Yes, producing the outcome is important, but the journey taken to get there is a lot of fun for me.

I used Claude Code to implement a OpenAI 4o-vision powered receipt scanning feature in an expense tracking tool I wrote by hand four years ago. It did it in two or three shots while taking my codebase into account.

It was very neat, and it works great [^0], but I can't latch onto the idea of writing code this way. Powering through bugs while implementing a new library or learning how to optimize my test suite in a new language is thrilling.

Unfortunately (for me), it's not hard at all to see how the "builders" that see code as a means to an end would LOVE this, and businesses want builders, not crafters.

In effect, knowing the fundamentals is getting devalued at a rate I've never seen before.

[^0] Before I used Claude to implement this feature, my workflow for processing receipts looked like this: Tap iOS Shortcut, enter the amount, snap a pic of the receipt, type up the merchant, amount and description for the expense, then have the shortcut POST that to my expenses tracking toolkit which, then, POSTs that into a Google Sheet. This feature amounted the need for me to enter the merchant and amount. Unfortunately, it often took more time to confirm that the merchant, amount and date details OpenAI provided were correct (and correct it when details were wrong, which was most of the the time) than it did to type out those details manually, so I just went back to my manual workflow. However, the temptation to just glance at the details and tap "This looks correct" was extremely high, even if the info it generated was completely wrong! It's the perfect analogue to what I've been witnessing throughout the rise of the LLMs.

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

#256

Post by test6554 »

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…

Imagine a senior dev who just approves PRs, approves production releases, and prioritizes bug reports and feature requests. LLM watches for errors ceaslessly, reports an issue. Senior dev reviews the issue and assigns a severity to it. Another LLM has a backlog of features and errors to go solve, it makes a fix and submits a PR after running tests and verifying things work on its end.

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

#257

Post by oxag3n »

> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually... > Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.

Until you struggle to review it as well. Simple exercise to prove it - ask LLM to write a function in familiar programming language, but in the area you didn't invest learning and coding yourself. Try reviewing some code involving embedding/SIMD/FPGA without learning it first.

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

#258

Post by crazygringo »

einrealist wrote: post #55

> It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot. You send all the neces…

> Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot.

Running at their designed temperature.

> You send all the necessary data, including information that you would never otherwise share.

I've never sent the type of data that isn't already either stored by GitHub or a cloud provider, so no difference there.

> And you most likely do not pay the actual costs.

So? Even if costs double once investor subsidies stop, that doesn't change much of anything. And the entire history of computing is that things tend to get cheaper.

> You and your business become dependent on this major gatekeeper.

Not really. Switching between Claude and Gemini or whatever new competition shows up is pretty easy. I'm no more dependent on it than I am on any of another hundred business services or providers that similarly mostly also have competitors.

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

#259

Post by simianwords »

ipaddr wrote: post #248
simianwords wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is not true
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