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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

#261
post #257

> 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 l…

People would struggle to review code in a completely unfamiliar domain or part of the stack even before LLMs.

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

#262
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.

1. Write good documentation, architecture, how things work, code styling, etc.

2. Put your important dependencies source code in the same directory. E.g. put a `_vendor` directory in the project, in it put the codebase at the same tag you're using or whatever: postgres, redis, vue, whatever.

3. Write good plans and requirements. Acceptance criteria, context, user stories, etc. Save them in markdown files. Review those multiple times with LLMs trying to find weaknesses. Then move to implementation files: make it write a detailed plan of what it's gonna change and why, and what it will produce.

4. Write very good prompts. LLMs follow instructions well if they are clear "you should proactively do X", is a weak instruction if you mean "you must do X".

5. LLMs are far from perfect, and full of limits. Karpathy sums their cons very well in his long list. If you don't know their limits you'll mismanage the expectations and not use them when they are a huge boost and waste time on things they don't cope well with. On top of that: all LLMs are different in their "personality", how they adhere to instruction, how creative they are, etc.

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

#263

> 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?

They have to pivot to something else

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the people who dont want to be entrepreneurs?

They have to pivot to something else

Or stay ahead of the curve as long as possible, e.g. work on the loop/ralphing

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

#265
post #238
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true. I'm agreeing with you, to be clear. There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will con…

> The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0]. Everybody who bet against Moore's Law was wrong ... until they weren't. And AI is the reaction to Moore's Law having broken. Nobody gave one iota of damn about trying to make programming easier until the chips couldn't double in speed anymore.

This is exactly backwards: Dennard scaling stopped. Moore’s Law has continued and it’s what made training and running inference on these models practical at interactive timescales.

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

#266
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might become cheaper or it might not If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper. (But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)

Not true. Bitcoin has continued to rise in cost since its introduction (as in the aggregate cost incurred to run the network). LLMs will face their own challenges with respect to reducing costs, since self-attention grows quadratically. These are still early days, so there remains a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of optimizations, but all of that becomes negligible in the face of quadratic attention.

For Bitcoin that’s by design!

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

#267
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

>"Reasoning", however, is a feature that has been bolted on with a hacksaw and duct tape.

What do you mean by this? Especially for tasks like coding where there is a deterministic correct or incorrect signal it should be possible to train.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code base I work on at $dayjob$ is legacy, has few files with 20k lines each and a few more with around 10k lines each. It's hard to find things and connect dots in the code base. Dont think LLMs able to navigate and understand code bases of that size yet. But have seen lots of seemingly large projects shown here lately that involve thousands of files and millions of lines of code.

I’ve found that LLMs seem to work better on LLM-generated codebases. Commercial codebases, especially private internal ones, are often messy. It seems this is mostly due to the iterative nature of development in response to customer demands. As a product gets larger, and addresses a wider audience, there’s an ever increasing chance of divergence from the initial assumptions and the new requirements. We call this tech…

Surely because LLM generated code is part of the training data for the model, so code/patterns it can work with is closer to its training data.

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

#269

> 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.…

Thanks for your comment, it set me at ease. I know from experience that you're right on point 2. As for point one, I also tend to agree. AI is such a paradigm shift & rapid/massive change doesn't come without stress. I just need to stay cool about it all ;-)

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

#270
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You don't get to make "technology gets more expensive over time" statements for deprecated technologies. Getting a bespoke flintstone axe is also pretty expensive, and has also absolutely no relevance to modern life. These discussions must, if they are to be useful, center in a population experience, not in unique personal moments.

I purchased a 5T drive in 2019 and the price is higher now despite newer better drives going on the market since. Not much has down in price over the last few years.

Price volatility exists.

Meanwhile the overall price of storage has been going down consistently: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

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