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Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

hollandtech.net

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Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#31

Post by tquinn35 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #4
retrac wrote: post #2

For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output. When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was li…

>Code is mediocre in many places. As if code written by devs at major corporations is't mediocre at best. Nokia's Symbian OS took days to build. Days. With a D. Not minutes, not hours but days. One of our devs shipped code to prod with a memory leak thanks to including a library that had "do not use this library in production because it causes a memory leak" written everywhere as warning. So I don't wanna hear about…

I agree with what you’re saying but I think the difference is many managers and above think that AI is infallible or at least much less so than it actually is and that causes problems.

Everyone is aware that humans write poor code and treat the code as so. Not so with AI code. I’ve seen devs and managers cut corners in testing/reviewing code cause AI wrote it and they think it’s solid. Sure you could blame anyone cutting corners, and that would be technically correct, but the notion is so deeply embedded in many managers and higher ups that’s it’s hard to fight back. AI companies push this narrative and many individuals who do not routinely use it believe it. There is a manager at my company who loves to reference a video anthropic released last year claiming that Claude could build an app start to finish essentially unaided. He believes it’s the lack of user skill that’s the issue and not a false claim by a startup trying to make as much money as possible.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#33

Post by sumitkumar »

amarant wrote: post #18

Re: "the attaboy problem". I strongly disagree that this is a problem. What we have is a anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. You actually can get it to point out issues in your design, if you just put enough humility and uncertainty in your prompt formulation, but more importantly, we have all seen that Claude makes mistakes. The title of this post is that it's a poor architect. Imagin…

The problem is because of the RL and system prompts by the providers which tend to placate the user using certain language tones and register for response. This objectively messes up the generation while steering it into acceptable responses.

Most of the conversational skill and perceived intelligence of these models in hidden in RL/system prompts.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#34

Post by gchamonlive »

operatingthetan wrote: post #29
amarant wrote: post #18

Re: "the attaboy problem". I strongly disagree that this is a problem. What we have is a anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. You actually can get it to point out issues in your design, if you just put enough humility and uncertainty in your prompt formulation, but more importantly, we have all seen that Claude makes mistakes. The title of this post is that it's a poor architect. Imagin…

>anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. Suggesting it should be 'subservient' is also anthropomorphizing. I think your callout is correct, but you still can't help but refer to it in terms we use for other people or living entities. This is by design from the AI companies.

> Suggesting it should be 'subservient' is also anthropomorphizing.

Not really, you can program a machine to give out orders humans can interpret, so humans can serve a machine that isn't anthropomorphized.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#35

Post by oremj »

I find interview loops great for catching edge cases and refining my hand written specs.

I don’t doubt the problems in this article exist and I’ve seen them, in my experience the vast majority of people are still shipping the same quality or better than before they has Claude. Personally, I feel like I’m probably developing at about 1.5x the speed of not using AI tooling. It’s not a silver bullet, but it can be a great assistant.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#36

Post by sandeepkd »

Your search results from these systems are as good as your queries and it takes experience in itself to get good with queries. AI is just a tool like any other, however its really impactful and can cut both ways.

Tangentially, the usage of Architect keyword sounds out of place here, I don't like saying it but from what I seen the industry has destroyed the role of architects gradually over the time. There are specialists however you do not have generalists who are good at different parts of the system at scale anymore.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#37

Post by irishcoffee »

operatingthetan wrote: post #29
amarant wrote: post #18

Re: "the attaboy problem". I strongly disagree that this is a problem. What we have is a anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. You actually can get it to point out issues in your design, if you just put enough humility and uncertainty in your prompt formulation, but more importantly, we have all seen that Claude makes mistakes. The title of this post is that it's a poor architect. Imagin…

>anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. Suggesting it should be 'subservient' is also anthropomorphizing. I think your callout is correct, but you still can't help but refer to it in terms we use for other people or living entities. This is by design from the AI companies.

My drill, hammer, and chainsaw are also subservient, they just have a much cruder form of communication, noise.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#38

Post by [deleted] »

mpweiher wrote: post #22
bluegatty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where AI has deterministic inputs and outputs it is extremely good to the point I think that there's a theoretical issue around computational there. Like - it can do the work for us. It jives with post training and verifiable rewards. The reason AI doesn't do well at 'architecture' is 1) are are bad at it and have given it a lot of mush and 2) we don't have good abstractions for it. The result is - you stick to 'v…

> The reason AI doesn't do well at 'architecture' is [...] 2) we don't have good abstractions for it. Maybe it's time for an architecture-oriented programming language? https://objective.st https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689492.3690052

[deleted]

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#39

Post by awesome_dude »

amarant wrote: post #18

Re: "the attaboy problem". I strongly disagree that this is a problem. What we have is a anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. You actually can get it to point out issues in your design, if you just put enough humility and uncertainty in your prompt formulation, but more importantly, we have all seen that Claude makes mistakes. The title of this post is that it's a poor architect. Imagin…

AI uses a high confidence tone - likely because its training data is heavy on authoritative texts/reference books.

And it does get people into a lot of trouble.

I have got into trouble with it when it is extremely confident about something I am not very familiar with (as recently as two weeks ago with Claude). I have also had long drawn out "arguments" when I have known it's wrong based on my experience and intuition, and it has steadfastly refused to take my point (last week)

I have learnt to ask it why it was doing something that has turned out to be incorrect, as a post-mortem, and it's all apologetic and subservient and "never going to do that again" (but still does as soon as the context window shifts [eg. run git commands, or, yesterday, kept telling me to use commands that were explicitly communicated to Claude as not being available, and completely wrong - I was shifting from one tech stack to another and Claude kept telling me the original commands, not the new ones])

I'm expecting Claude to be a better search engine - I have spent literal years (if not decades) knowing that asking the right question is what's required to get the right answer, and LLM's natural language processing is what's supposed to make that easier than using Google or grep, or even Stack Overflow - but the reality is that I still have to be on my toes, especially when I am drifting into territory I am unfamiliar with.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#40

Post by chongli »

amarant wrote: post #18

Re: "the attaboy problem". I strongly disagree that this is a problem. What we have is a anthropomorphism problem. AI is a tool. It needs to be subservient. You actually can get it to point out issues in your design, if you just put enough humility and uncertainty in your prompt formulation, but more importantly, we have all seen that Claude makes mistakes. The title of this post is that it's a poor architect. Imagin…

It needs to be subservient

It doesn’t. Computer interfaces had no superfluous subservient text for their entire history prior to LLMs. Some of these interfaces have been highly efficient as tools, arguably more efficient than more recent software in many cases.

When people complain about LLMs being subservient, they’re not complaining about the tool fulfilling their request. They’re complaining about being forced to read a lot of superfluous, overly polite, or even self-deprecating language. There’s nothing in the entire history of tools (going back to Neolithic times) that would indicate that we need that. All of that stuff is an artifact of social interaction between humans in the presence of cultural norms.

When you’re alone in your shop with your tools, you don’t need your bandsaw to apologize to you for nicking your finger.

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