Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 870 posts

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

#271

Post by password4321 »

gtowey wrote: post #105
daxfohl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find in these instances there's at least a 50% chance it has taken a shortcut somewhere: created a new, bigger bug in something that just happened not to have a unit test covering it, or broke an "implicit" requirement that was so obvious to any reasonable human that nobody thought to document it. These can be subtle because you're not looking for them, because no human would ever think to do such a thing. Th…

The value extortion plan writes itself. How long before someone pitches the idea that the models explicitly almost keep solving your problem to get you to keep spending? Would you even know?

First time I've seen this idea, I have a tingling feeling it might become reality sooner rather than later.

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

#273

Post by zamalek »

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 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".

Not trusting the ML's output is step one here, that keeps you intellectually involved - but it's still a far cry from solving the majority of problems yourself (instead you only solve problems ML did a poor job at).

Step two: I delineate interesting and uninteresting work, and Claude becomes a pair programmer without keyboard access for the latter - I bounce ideas off of it etc. making it an intelligent rubber duck. [Edit to clarify, a caveat is that] I do not bore myself with trivialities such as retrieving a customer from the DB in a REST call (but again, I do verify the output).

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

#274

Post by polytely »

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 feel like I'm still a couple steps behind in skill level as my lead and is trying to gain more experience I do wonder if I am shooting myself in the foot if I rely too much on AI at this stage. The senior engineer I'm trying to learn from can very effectively use ai because he has very good judgement of code quality, I feel like if I use AI too much I might lose out on chance to improve my judgement. It's a hard dilemma.

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

#275

Post by [deleted] »

fragmede wrote: post #146
gtowey wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value extortion plan writes itself. How long before someone pitches the idea that the models explicitly almost keep solving your problem to get you to keep spending? Would you even know?

The free market proposition is that competition (especially with Chinese labs and grok) means that Anthropic is welcome to do that. They're even welcome to illegally collude with OpenAi such that ChatGPT is similarly gimped. But switching costs are pretty low. If it turns out I can one shot an issue with Qwen or Deepseek or Kimi thinking, Anthropic loses not just my monthly subscription, but everyone else's I show th…

[deleted]

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

#276

Post by chrisjj »

sleazebreeze wrote: post #261
oxag3n wrote: 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.

No, because they wouldn't be so foolish as to try it.

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

#277

Post by xnyan »

ipaddr wrote: post #186
arthurbrown wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bought any RAM lately? Phone? GPU in the last decade?

The latest iphone has gone down in price? It's double. I guess the marketing is working.

"Pens are not cheaper, look at this Montblanc" is not a good faith response.

'84 Motorola DynaTAC - ~$12k AfI (adjusted for inflation)

'89 MicroTAC ~$8k AfI

'96 StarTAC ~$2k AfI

`07 iPhone ~$673 AfI

The current average smartphone sells for around $280. Phones are getting cheaper.

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

#278

Post by chrisjj »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #87
keerthiko wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost always, notes like these are going to be about greenfield projects. Trying to incorporate it in existing codebases (esp when the end user is a support interaction or more away) is still folly, except for closely reviewed and/or non-business-logic modifications. That said, it is quite impressive to set up a simple architecture, or just list the filenames, and tell some agents to go crazy to implement what you w…

That was true for me, but is no longer. It's been especially helpful in explaining and understanding arcane bits of legacy code behavior my users ask about. I trigger Claude to examine the code and figure out how the feature works, then tell it to update the documentation accordingly.

> I trigger Claude to examine the code and figure out how the feature works, then tell it to update the documentation accordingly.

And how do you verify its output isn't total fabrication?

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

#279

Post by groby_b »

solomonb wrote: post #162
groby_b wrote: post #130

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.

okay how about the Francis Scott Key Bridge? https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacemen...

You will get a different bridge. With very different technology. Same as "I can't repair my grandfather clock cheaply".

In general, there are several things that are true for bridges that aren't true for most technology:

* Technology has massively improved, but most people are not realizing that. (E.g. the Bay Bridge cost significantly more than the previous version, but that's because we'd like to not fall down again in the next earthquake) * We still have little idea how to reason about the cost of bridges in general. (Seriously. It's an active research topic) * It's a tiny market, with the major vendors forming an oligopoly * It's infrastructure, not a standard good * The buy side is almost exclusively governments.

All of these mean expensive goods that are completely non-repeatable. You can't build the same bridge again. And on top of that, in a distorted market.

But sure, the cost of "one bridge, please" has gone up over time.

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

#280

Post by aixpert »

pron wrote: post #272

People who just let the agent code for them, how big of a codebase are you working on? How complex (i.e. is it a codebase that junior programmers could write and maintain)?

rust compiler and redox operating system with modified Qemu for Mac Vulcan metal pipeline ... probably not junior stuff

you might think I'm kidding but Search redox on github, you will find that project and the anonymous contributions

Post reply on HN