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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

#331

Post by lofaszvanitt »

The whole thing is about getting rid of experts and let the entry level idiots do all the work. The coders become expendable. And people do not see the chasm staring back at them :D. LLMs in their current form redistributes "intelligence" and expertise to the average joes for mere pennies. It should be much much more expensive, or it will disrupt the whole ecosystem. If it becomes even more intelligent it must be bludgeoned to death a.k.a. regulated like hell, otherwise the ensuing disruption will kill the job market and in the long term human values.

As an added plus: those, who already have wealth will benefit the most, instead of the masses. Since the distribution and dissemination of new projects is at the same level as before, meaning you would need a lot of money. So no matter how clever you are with an llm, if you don't have the means to distribute it you will be left in the dirt.

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

#332

Post by epidemiology »

peaseagee wrote: post #101
fooker wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It might become cheaper or it might not If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper. (But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)

That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?

Or riding in an uber?

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

#333

Post by samusiam »

techgnosis wrote: post #314
cyode wrote: 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…

Why are we pretending like the need for tenacity will go away? Certain problems are easier now. We can tackle larger problems now that also require tenacity.

Even right at this very moment where we have a high-tenacity AI, I'd argue that working with the AI -- that is to say, doing AI coding itself and dealing with the novel challenges that brings requires a lot of stubborn persistence.

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

#334

Post by jetsetk »

maximedupre wrote: post #45

> It hurts the ego a bit but the power to operate over software in large "code actions" is just too net useful It does hurt, that's why all programmers now need an entrepreneurial mindset... you become if you use your skills + new AI power to build a business.

That is motivational content, but not economics. Most startups will be noise, even more so than before. The value of being a founder ceases when everyone is a founder, when it becomes universal. You will need customers. Nobody wants to buy re-invented-the-wheel-74.0. It lacks character, it lacks soul. Without it, your product will be nothing but noise in a noisy world.

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

#335

Post by samusiam »

noosphr wrote: post #288
cyode wrote: 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…

I mean, not always. I've seen Claude step back and reconsider things after hitting a dead end, and go down a different path. There are also workflows, loops that can increase the likelihood of this occurring.

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

#336

Post by hyperadvanced »

Havoc wrote: post #309
noosphr wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Metacognition As A Service, you say?

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

#337

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

porise wrote: post #21

I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.

Also I never see anyone talking about code reviews, which is one of the primary ways that software engineering departments manage liability. We fired someone recently because they couldn’t explain any of the slop they were trying to get merged. Why tf would I accept the liability of managing code that someone else can’t even explain?

I guess this is fine when you don’t have customers or stakeholders that give a shit lol.

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

#338

Post by WarmWash »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #316
pesus wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of pre-faang engineers dont have the stash you're thinking about. What you meant was "right when I found a lucrative job that I love". What was going on in tech these last 15 years, unfortunately, probably was once in a lifetime.

It's crazy to think back in the 80's programmers had "mild" salaries despite programming back then being worlds more punishing. No libraries, no stack exchange, no forums, no endless memory and infinite compute. If you had a challenging bug you better also be proficient in reading schematics and probing circuits.

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

#339

Post by [deleted] »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #37
porise wrote: post #21

I wish the people who wrote this let us know what king of codebases they are working on. They seem mostly useless in a sufficiently large codebase especially when they are messy and interactions aren't always obvious. I don't know how much better Claude is than ChatGPT, but I can't get ChatGPT to do much useful with an existing large codebase.

Claude and Codex are CLI tools you use to give the LLM context about the project on your local machine or dev environment. The fact that you're using the name "ChatGPT" instead of Codex leads me to believe you're talking about using the web-based ChatGPT interface to work on a large codebase, which is completely beside the point of the entire discussion. That's not the tool anyone is talking about here.

[deleted]

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

#340

Post by AstroBen »

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.

How would you find yourself in that situation before AI?
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