Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for calling out my inaccuracy. One thing I'm always appreciative for in HN is the level of pedantry day after day.
That's not what pedantry means.
Thank you for calling out my inaccuracy.
6 weeks of Claude Code
291–300 of 603 posts
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#292I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…
If you are a Senior Developer, who is comfortable giving a Junior tips, and then guiding them to fixing them (or just stepping in for a brief moment and writing where they missed something) this is for you. I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand.…
> I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand.
If this is the case then we better have full AI generated code within the next 10 years since those "juniors" will remain atrophied juniors forever and the old timers will be checking in with the big clock in the sky. IF we, as a field, believe that this can not possibly happen, then we are making a huge mistake leaning on a tool that requires "deep [orthogonal] experience" to operate properly.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're substantively different. Using a compiler requires you to have an internalized model of a state machine and, importantly, a formal language. C, assembler, java, etc. are all essentially different from using the softness of the English language to coerce results out of a black box
No, not at all. In both all you need is the ability to communicate to the machine in a way that the machine can convert your ideas into actions. The restricted language of a compiler is a handicap, not evidence of a skill - we've been saying forever that "Natural Language" compilers would be a game changer, and that's all that an AI really is Edit: It appears that this discussion is going to end up with a definition…
It is not coding if you use natural human language
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#294I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…
I haven't used Claude Code - but have been using Amp a lot recently. Amp always hits on target. They created something really special.
Has anyone here used both Claude Code and Amp and can compare the two's effectiveness? I know one is CLI and the other an editor extensions. I'm looking for comparisons beyond that. Thanks!
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#295I try to use claude code a lot, I keep getting very frustrated with how slow it is and how it always does things wrong. It does not feel like its saving my any mental energy on most tasks. I do gravitate towards it for some things. But then I am sometimes burned on doing that and its not pleasent. For example, last week i decided to play with nushell, i have a somewhat simple .zshrc so i just gave it to claude and as…
Have you tried context7 MCP? For things that are not mainstream (like Javascript, Typescript popularity), LLM might struggle. I usually have better result with using something like context7 where it can pull up more relevant, up to date examples.
I only use 2 MCP servers, and those are context7 and perplexity. For things like updated docs, I have it ask context7. For the more difficult technical tasks where I think it's going to stumble, I'll instruct Claude Code to ask perplexity and that usually resolves it. Or at least it'll surface up to me in our conversation so that we both are learning something new at that point.
For some new stuff I'm working on, I use Rails 8. I also use Railway for my host, which isn't as widely-used as a service like Heroku, for example. Rails 8 was just released in November, so there's very little training data available. And it takes time for people to upgrade, gems to catch up, conversations to bubble up, etc. Operating without these two MCP servers usually caused Claude Code to repeatedly stumble over itself on more complex or nuanced tasks. It was good at setting up the initial app, but when I started getting into things like Turbo/Stimulus, and especially for parts of the UI that conditionally show, it really struggled.
It's a lot better now - it's not perfect, but it's significantly better than relying solely on its training data or searching the web.
I've only used Claude Code for like 4 weeks, but I'm learning a lot. It feels less like I'm an IC doing this work, and my new job is (1) product manager that writes out clear PRDs and works with Claude Code to build it, (2) PR reviewer that looks at the results and provides a lot of guidance, (3) tester. I allocate my time 50%/20%/30% respectively.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not at all. In both all you need is the ability to communicate to the machine in a way that the machine can convert your ideas into actions. The restricted language of a compiler is a handicap, not evidence of a skill - we've been saying forever that "Natural Language" compilers would be a game changer, and that's all that an AI really is Edit: It appears that this discussion is going to end up with a definition…
It is not coding if you use natural human language
How so?
BASIC was supposed to be astep toward using a natural human language, and a number of Microsoft products were too.
As I said before, we've been wanting to use a Natural Human Language for programming for a long time.
Edit: adding a wikipedia reference because apparently I am the only person on the planet that has been looking for a way to use a Natural Human Language for programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_programming
Second Edit: Adding the following paragraph from the wikipedia page for emphasis
Researchers have started to experiment with natural language programming environments that use plain language prompts and then use AI (specifically large language models) to turn natural language into formal code. For example Spatial Pixel created a natural language programming environment to turn natural language into P5.js code through OpenAI's API. In 2021 OpenAI developed a natural language programming environment for their programming large language model called Codex.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#297I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…
Technically you’re not vibe coding. You’re using AI to do software engineering. Vibe coding is specifically the process of having AI produce code and plowing ahead without understanding it.
I know I’m being pedantic, but people mean very different things when they talk about this stuff, and I don’t think any credence should be given to vibe coding.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#298I get downvoted every time I praise Claude. But everyone in this thread is getting upvoted for saying the same things. Can someone explain to me the difference?
The Internet is fickle and full of dullards. It's always a toss of the dice.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't learn by themselves, but you can add instructions as they make mistakes that are effectively them learning. You have to write code review feedback for juniors, so that s not an appreciable difference. > Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer. And that person is going to quit and you have to start all over again. They also cost at least 100x the price.
> They also cost at least 100x the price. Because right now AI companies are losing their asses - it costs significantly more than what they are charging.
I've been telling people, this is Uber in 2014, you're getting a benefit and it's being paid for with venture capital money, it's about as good as it's going to get.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I noticed the issue with more Junior developers right away. Some developers, Junior or not, have yet to be exposed to environments where their PRs are put under HEAVY scrutiny. They are used to loosey-goosey and unfortunately they are not prepared to put LLM changes under the level of scrutiny they require. The worst is getting, even smallish, PRs with a bunch of changes that look extraneous or otherwise off. Af…
Our offshore devs keep doing this and it drives me nuts. No answers to my question, completely different code gets pushed.
> No answers to my question, completely different code gets pushed.