Snorting the AGI with Claude Code

There is no amount of static material that will perfectly conform to the shape and contours of every mind that consumes that static material such that they can learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it.

Having a thing that is interactive and which can answer questions is a very useful thing. A slide deck that sits around for the next person is probably not that great, I agree. But if you desperately want a slide deck, then an agent like Claude which can create it on demand is pretty good. If you want summaries of changes over time, or to know "what's the overall approach at a jargon-filled but still overview level explanation of how feature/behavior X is implemented?", an agent can generate a mediocre (but probably serviceable) answer to any of those by reading the repo. That's an amazing swiss-army knife to have in your pocket.

I really used to be a hater, and I really did not trust it, but just using the thing has left me unable to deny its utility.

Assuming attention to detail is one of the best signs people give a fuck about craftsmanship, isn’t the fact the Anthropic legal terms are logically impossible to satisfy a bad sign for their ability to be trusted as careful stewards of ASI?

Not exactly “three laws safe” if we can’t use the thing for work without violating their competitive use prohibition

> Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.

Judging from the tone of the article, they’re using the term AGI in a jokey way and not taking themselves too seriously, which is refreshing.

I mean like, it wouldn’t be refreshing if the article didn’t also have useful information, but I do actually think a slide deck could be a useful way to understand a codebase. It’s exactly the kind of nice-to-have that I’d never want a junior wasting time on, but if it costs like $5 and gets me something minorly useful, that’s pretty cool.

Part of the mind-expanding transition to using LLMs involves recognizing that there are some things we used to dislike because of how much effort they took relative to their worth. But if you don’t need to do the thing yourself or burn through a team member’s time/sanity doing it, it can make you start to go “yeah fuck it, trawl the codebase and try to write a markdown document describing all of the features and requirements in a tabular format. Maybe it’ll go better than I expect, and if it doesn’t then on to something else.”

Damn, that sucks. My experience has been the exact opposite; maybe you need to adjust your approach and set expectations up-front, or get management involved? (I've had a similar experience to you with my teenage kids, but that's a whole other situation.)

My M.S. advisor gave me this advice on when I should ask for help, which I've passed on to lots of junior engineers: It's good to spend type struggling to understand something, and depending on the project it's probably good to exert yourself on your own somewhere between an hour and a day. If you give up after 5 minutes, you won't learn, but if you spend a week with no progress, that's also not good.

Maybe it's the senior devs who should be the ones to worry?

Seniors' attitudes on HN are often quick to dismiss AI assisted coding as something that can't replace the hard-earned experience and skill they've built up during their careers. Well maybe, maybe not. Senior devs can get a bit myopic in their specializations. Whereas a junior Dev doesn't have so much baggage, maybe the fertile brains of youth are better in times of rapid disruption where extreme flexibility of thought is the killer skill.

Or maybe the whole senior/junior thing is a red herring and pure coding and tech skills are being deflated all across the board. Perhaps what is needed now is an entirely new skill set that we're only just starting to grasp.