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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

#301

> The most common category is that the models make wrong assumptions on your behalf and just run along with them without checking. If current LLMs are ever deployed in systems harboring the big red button, they WILL most definitely somehow press that button.

US MIC are already planning on integrating fucking Grok into military systems. No comment.

the US is going to stop the chinese by mass production of illegal pornography?

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

#302
> You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work

There has been a lot of research that shows that grit is far more correlated to success than intelligence. This is an interesting way to show something similar.

AIs have endless grit (or at least as endless as your budget). They may outperform us simply because they don't ever get tired and give up.

Full quote for context:

Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. It's a "feel the AGI" moment to watch it struggle with something for a long time just to come out victorious 30 minutes later. You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work and that with LLMs in hand it has been dramatically increased.

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

#303
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)?

I've been an EM for the last 10 of my 25 year Software Engineering career. Coding is, frankly, boring to me anymore, even though I enjoyed doing it most of my career. I had this project I wanted to exist in world but couldn't be bothered to get started.

Decided to figure out what this "vibe coding" nonsense is, and now there's a certain level of joy to all of this again. Being able to clearly define everything using markdown contexts before any code is even written has been a great way to brain dump those 25 years of experience and actually watch something sane get produced.

Here are the stats Claude Code gave me:

  Overview                                                                                       
  ┌───────────────┬────────────────────────────┐                                                 
  │    Metric     │           Value            │                                                 
  ├───────────────┼────────────────────────────┤                                                 
  │ Total Commits │ 365                        │                                                 
  ├───────────────┼────────────────────────────┤                                                 
  │ Project Age   │ 7 days (Jan 20 - 27, 2026) │                                                 
  ├───────────────┼────────────────────────────┤                                                 
  │ Open Issues   │ 5                          │                                                 
  ├───────────────┼────────────────────────────┤                                                 
  │ Contributors  │ 1                          │                                                 
  └───────────────┴────────────────────────────┘                                                 
  Lines of Code by Language                                                                      
  ┌───────────────────────────┬───────┬────────┬───────────┐                                     
  │         Language          │ Files │ Lines  │ % of Code │                                     
  ├───────────────────────────┼───────┼────────┼───────────┤                                     
  │ Rust (Backend)            │    94 │ 31,317 │     51.8% │                                     
  ├───────────────────────────┼───────┼────────┼───────────┤                                     
  │ TypeScript/TSX (Frontend) │   189 │ 29,167 │     48.2% │                                     
  ├───────────────────────────┼───────┼────────┼───────────┤                                     
  │ SQL (Migrations)          │    34 │  1,334 │         — │                                     
  ├───────────────────────────┼───────┼────────┼───────────┤                                     
  │ CSS                       │     — │  1,868 │         — │                                     
  ├───────────────────────────┼───────┼────────┼───────────┤                                     
  │ Markdown (Docs)           │    37 │  9,485 │         — │                                     
  ├───────────────────────────┼───────┼────────┼───────────┤                                     
  │ Total Source              │   317 │ 60,484 │      100% │                                     
  └───────────────────────────┴───────┴────────┴───────────┘

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

#305
Am working on an iPhone app and impressed with how well Claude is able to generate decent/working code with prompts in plain English. I don’t have previous experience in building apps or swift but have a C++ background. Working in smaller chunks and incrementally adding features rather than a large prompt for the whole app seems more practical, is easier to review and build confidence.

Adding/prompting features one by one, reviewing code and then testing the resulting binary feels like the new programming workflow

Prompt/REview/Test - PRET.

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

#306
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 ran into a new problem today: "reading atrophy".

As in if the LLM doesn't know about it, some devs are basically giving up and not even going to RTFM. I literally had to explain to someone today how something works by...reading through the docs and linking them the docs with screenshots and highlighted paragraphs of text.

Still got push back along the lines of "not sure if this will work". It's. Literally. In. The. Docs.

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

#307
post #105
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?

I was thinking more of deliberate backdoor in code. RCE is an obvious example, but another one could be bias. "I'm sorry ma'am, computer says you are ineligable for a bank account." These ideas aren't new. They were there in 90s already when we still thought about privacy and accountability regarding technology, and dystopian novels already described them long, long ago.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just sad. Right when I found love in what I do, my work has no value anymore.

Aren't you still better off than the rest of us who found what they love + invested decades in it before it lost its value. Isn't it better to lose your love when you still have time to find a new one?

Depends on if their new love provides as much money as their old one, which is probably not likely. I'd rather have had those decades to stash and invest.

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

#309
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote stuck out to me as well, for a slightly different reason. The “tenacity” referenced here has been, in my opinion, the key ingredient in the secret sauce of a successful career in tech, at least in these past 20 years. Every industry job has its intricacies, but for every engineer who earned their pay with novel work on a new protocol, framework, or paradigm, there were 10 or more providing value by putting…

There is an old saying back home: an idiot never tires, only sweats. Claude isn't tenacious. It is an idiot that never stops digging because it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'. Chain of thought's whole raison d'etre was so the model could get out of the local minima it pushed itself in. The issue is that after a year it still falls into slightly deeper local minima. This is fi…

> it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'.

Recently had an AI tell me this code (that it wrote) is a mess and suggested wiping it and starting from scratch with a more structure plan. That seems to hint at some meta cognition outlines

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

#310
post #303
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)?

I've been an EM for the last 10 of my 25 year Software Engineering career. Coding is, frankly, boring to me anymore, even though I enjoyed doing it most of my career. I had this project I wanted to exist in world but couldn't be bothered to get started. Decided to figure out what this "vibe coding" nonsense is, and now there's a certain level of joy to all of this again. Being able to clearly define everything using…

In case anyone is curious, here was my epiphany project from 2 weeks ago: https://github.com/boj/the-project

I then realized I could feed it everything it ever needed to know. Just create a docs/* folder and tell it to read that every session.

Through discovery I learned about CLAUDE.md, and adding skills.

Now I have an /analyst, /engineer, and /devops that I talk to all day with their own logic and limitations, as well as the more general project CLAUDE.md, and dozens of docs/* files we collaborate on.

I'm at the point I'm running happy.engineering on my phone and don't even need to sit in front of the computer anymore.

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