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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

#381

Post by wcedmisten »

culi wrote: post #355
jwr wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I successfully use Claude Code in a large complex codebase. It's Clojure, perhaps that helps (Clojure is very concise, expressive and hence token-dense).

Perhaps it's harder to "do Closure wrong" than it is to do JavaScript or Python or whatever other extremely flexible multi-paradigm high-level language

Having spent 3 years of my career working with Clojure, I think it actually gives you even more rope to shoot yourself with than Python/JS.

E.g. macros exist in Clojure but not Python/JS, and I've definitely been plenty stumped by seeing them in the codebase. They tend to be used in very "clever" patterns.

On the other hand, I'm a bit surprised Claude can tackle a complex Clojure codebase. It's been a while since I attempted using an LLM for Clojure, but at the time it failed completely (I think because there is relatively little training data compared to other mainstream languages). I'll have to check that out myself

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

#382

Post by gverrilla »

sota_pop wrote: post #345

> Slopacolypse Really… REALLY not looking forward to getting this word spammed at me the next 6-12 months… even less so seeing the actual manifestation. > TLDR This should be at the start? I actually have been thinking of trying out ClaudeCode/OpenCode over this past week… can anyone provide experience, tips, tricks, ref docs? My normal workflow is using Free-tier ChatGPT to help me interrogate or plan my solution/ a…

Claude code official docs are quite nice - that's where I started.

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

#383

Post by scorpioxy »

daxfohl wrote: post #176
striking wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of it is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other. This would be fine if not for one thing: the meta-skill of learning to use the LLM depreciates too. Today's LLM is gonna go away someday, the way you have to use it will change. You will be on a forever trea…

Businesses too. For two years it's been "throw everything into AI." But now that shit is getting real, are they really feeling so coy about letting AI run ahead of their engineering team's ability to manage it? How long will it be until we start seeing outages that just don't get resolved because the engineers have lost the plot?

From what I am seeing, no one is feeling coy simply because of the cost savings that management is able to show the higher-ups and shareholders. At that level, there's very little understanding of anything technical and outages or bugs will simply get a "we've asked our technical resources to work on it". But every one understands that spending $50 when you were spending $100 is a great achievement. That's if you stop and not think about any downsides. Said management will then take the bonuses and disappear before the explosions start with their resume glowing about all the cost savings and team leadership achievements. I've experienced this first hand very recently.

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

#384

Post by daxfohl »

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.

> unstated bet

(except where it's been stated, championed, enforced, and ultimated in no unequivocal terms by every executive in the tech industry)

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

#385

Post by jumploops »

mh2266 wrote: post #358
jumploops wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found that LLMs seem to work better on LLM-generated codebases. Commercial codebases, especially private internal ones, are often messy. It seems this is mostly due to the iterative nature of development in response to customer demands. As a product gets larger, and addresses a wider audience, there’s an ever increasing chance of divergence from the initial assumptions and the new requirements. We call this tech…

are LLM codebases not messy? Claude by default, unless I tell it not to, will write stuff like: // we need something to be true somethingPasses = something() if (!somethingPasses) { return false } // we need somethingElse to be true somethingElsePasses = somethingElse() if (!somethingElsePasses) { return false } return true instead of the very simple boolean logic that could express this in one line, with the "this c…

Yeah to be clear it will have the same issues as a flyby contributor if prompted to.

Meaning if you ask it “handle this new condition” it will happily throw in a hacky conditional and get the job done.

I’ve found the most success in having it reason about the current architecture (explicitly), and then to propose a set of changes to accomplish the task (2-5 ways), review, and then implement the changes that best suit the scope of the larger system.

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

#386

Post by daxfohl »

scorpioxy wrote: post #383
daxfohl wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses too. For two years it's been "throw everything into AI." But now that shit is getting real, are they really feeling so coy about letting AI run ahead of their engineering team's ability to manage it? How long will it be until we start seeing outages that just don't get resolved because the engineers have lost the plot?

From what I am seeing, no one is feeling coy simply because of the cost savings that management is able to show the higher-ups and shareholders. At that level, there's very little understanding of anything technical and outages or bugs will simply get a "we've asked our technical resources to work on it". But every one understands that spending $50 when you were spending $100 is a great achievement. That's if you sto…

Of all the looming tipping points whereby humans could destroy the fabric of their existence, this one has to be the stupidest. And therefore the most likely.

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

#387

Post by dexdal »

jumploops wrote: post #385
mh2266 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are LLM codebases not messy? Claude by default, unless I tell it not to, will write stuff like: // we need something to be true somethingPasses = something() if (!somethingPasses) { return false } // we need somethingElse to be true somethingElsePasses = somethingElse() if (!somethingElsePasses) { return false } return true instead of the very simple boolean logic that could express this in one line, with the "this c…

Yeah to be clear it will have the same issues as a flyby contributor if prompted to. Meaning if you ask it “handle this new condition” it will happily throw in a hacky conditional and get the job done. I’ve found the most success in having it reason about the current architecture (explicitly), and then to propose a set of changes to accomplish the task (2-5 ways), review, and then implement the changes that best suit…

The failure mode is missing constraints, not “coding skill”. Treat the model as a generator that must operate inside an explicit workflow: define the invariant boundaries, require a plan/diff before edits, run tests and static checks, and stop when uncertainty appears. That turns “hacky conditional” behaviour into controlled change.

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

#388

Post by bob1029 »

einrealist wrote: post #55

> 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. Somewhere, there are GPUs/NPUs running hot. You send all the neces…

Humans run hot too. Once you factor in the supply chain that keeps us alive, things become surprisingly equivalent.

Eating burgers and driving cars around costs a lot more than whatever # of watts the human brain consumes.

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

#389

Post by energy123 »

A big wow moment coming up is going to be GPT 5.* in Codex with Cerebras doing inference. The inference speed is going to be a big unlock, because many tasks are intrinsically serial.

It's going to feel literally like playing God, where you type in what you want and it happens ~instantly.

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

#390

Post by namcheapisdumb »

root_axis wrote: post #222
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)

Not true. Bitcoin has continued to rise in cost since its introduction (as in the aggregate cost incurred to run the network). LLMs will face their own challenges with respect to reducing costs, since self-attention grows quadratically. These are still early days, so there remains a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of optimizations, but all of that becomes negligible in the face of quadratic attention.

> bitcoin

so close! that is a commodity

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