Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 870 posts

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

#371

Post by barrell »

monkaiju wrote: post #347
atonse wrote: post #11

> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…

So far I haven't seen it actually be effective at "building" in a work context with any complexity, and this despite some on our team desperately trying to make that the case.

Agreed. I don’t care for engineering or coding, and would gladly give it up the moment I can. I’m also running a one man business where every hour counts (and where I’m responsible for maintaining every feature).

The fact of the matter is LLMs produce lower quality at higher volumes in more time than it would take to write it myself, and I’m a very mediocre engineer.

I find this seperation of “coding” vs “building” so offensive. It’s basically just saying some people are only concerned with “inputs”, while others with “outputs”. This kind of rhetoric is so toxic.

It’s like saying LLM art is separating people into people who like to scribble, and people who like to make art.

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

#372

Post by gverrilla »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #67
strogonoff wrote: post #22

LLM coding splits up engineers based on those who primarily like building and those who primarily like code reviews and quality assessment. I definitely don’t love the latter (especially when reviewing decisions not made by a human with whom I can build long-term personal rapport). After certain experience threshold of making things from scratch, “coding” (never particularly liked that term) has always been 99% build…

See, I don't take it that extreme: LLMs make fantastic , never-before seen quality autocompletes. I hacked together a Neovim plugin that prompts an LLM to "finish this function" on command, and it's a big time save for the menial plumbing type operations. Think things like "this api I use expects JSON that encodes some subset of SQL, I want all the dogs with Ls in their name that were born on a Tuesday". Given an exa…

Depends on the scope of the project. If it's small, and you direct it correctly, it can one-shot yes. Or 2-3-shot.

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

#373

Post by smhinsey »

ryandrake wrote: post #23
atonse wrote: post #11

> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…

I noticed the same thing, but wasn't able to put it into words before reading that. Been experimenting with LLM-based coding just so I can understand it and talk intelligently about it (instead of just being that grouchy curmudgeon), and the thought in the back of my mind while using Claude Code is always: "I got into programming because I like programming, not whatever this is..." Yes, I'm building stupid things fas…

This gets at the heart of the quality of results issues a lot of people are talking about elsewhere here. Right now, if you treat them as a system where you can tell it what you want and it will do it for you, you're building a sandcastle. Instead of that, also describe the correct data structures and appropriate algorithms to use against them, as well as the particulars of how you want the problem solved, it's a different situation altogether. Like most systems, the quality of output is in some way determined by the quality of input.

There is a strange insistence on not helping the LLM arrive at the best outcome in the subtext to this question a lot of times. I feel like we are living through the John Henry legend in real time

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

#374

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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

I asked Claude to analyze something and report back. It thought for a while said “Wow this analysis is great!” and then went back to thinking before delivering the report. They’re auto-sycophantic now!

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

#375

Post by scorpioxy »

overfeed wrote: post #365
daxfohl wrote: 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…

> Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted. I wouldn't have believed it a few tears ago if you told me the industry would one day, in lockstep, decide that shipping more tech-debt is awesome. If the unstated bet doesn't pay off, that is, AI development will outpace the rate it generates cruft, then there will be hell to pay.

As someone who's been commissioned many times before to work on or salvage "rescue projects" with huge amounts of tech debt, I welcome that day. Still not there yet though I am starting to feel the vibes shifting.

This isn't anything new of course. Previously it was with projects built by looking for the cheapest bidder and letting them loose on an ill-defined problem. And you can just imagine what kind of code that produced. Except the scale is much larger.

My favorite example of this was a project that simply stopped working due to the amount of bugs generated from layers upon layers of bad code that was never addressed. That took around 2 years of work to undo. Roughly 6 months to un-break all the functionality and 6 more months to clean up the core and then start building on top.

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

#376

Post by moss_dog »

felineflock wrote: post #369

xcancel? What is the purpose or benefit of providing a free mirror to x? Doesn't it end up sparing the x servers and causing their costs to decrease?

I prefer xcancel in part because Twitter doesn't let you view replies etc when not logged in.

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

#377

Post by teaearlgraycold »

wvenable wrote: post #184
daxfohl wrote: 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…

> These can be subtle because you're not looking for them After any agent run, I'm always looking the git comparison between the new version and the previous one. This helps catch things that you might otherwise not notice.

And after manually coding I often have an LLM review the diff. 90% of the problems it finds can be discounted, but it’s still a net positive.

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

#378

Post by robotmaxtron »

jrflowers wrote: post #169
fragmede wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The free market proposition is that competition (especially with Chinese labs and grok) means that Anthropic is welcome to do that. They're even welcome to illegally collude with OpenAi such that ChatGPT is similarly gimped. But switching costs are pretty low. If it turns out I can one shot an issue with Qwen or Deepseek or Kimi thinking, Anthropic loses not just my monthly subscription, but everyone else's I show th…

This is a good point. For example if you have access to a bunch of slot machines, one of them is guaranteed to hit the jackpot. Since switching from one slot machine to another is easy, it is trivial to go from machine to machine until you hit the big bucks. That is why casinos have such large selections of them (for our benefit).

last time I was at a casino I checked to see what company built the machines, imagine my surprise that it was (by my observation) a single vendor.

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

#379

Post by chanux »

gtowey wrote: post #105
daxfohl wrote: 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?

Is this from a page of dating apps playbook?

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

#380

Post by teaearlgraycold »

ctoth wrote: post #112
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)

> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true. I'm agreeing with you, to be clear. There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will con…

As a user of LLMs since GPT-3 there was noticeable stagnation in LLM utility after the release of GPT-4. But it seems the RLHF, tool calling, and UI have all come together in the last 12 months. I used to wonder what fools could be finding them so useful to claim a 10x multiplier - even as a user myself. These days I’m feeling more and more efficiency gains with Claude Code.
Post reply on HN