The question is, can I fire 80 out of 100 engineers and purchase Claude Code subscription instead?
6 weeks of Claude Code
401–410 of 603 posts
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#402As one of the curious minority who keeps trying agentic coding but not liking it, I've been looking for explanations why my experience differs from the mainstream. I think it might lie in this nugget: > I believe with Claude Code, we are at the > “introduction of photography” period of > programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t > have the same appeal anymore when a single > concept can just appear and you shape it…
I don't think it's a complete good comparison. In the past painting was the only way to depict real world events, but painting is also art, and it often doesn't necessarily depict reality, but the artist's interpretation of it. That is why people still paint.
So yeah if you like coding as an art form, you can still keep doing that. It's probably just a bit harder to make lots of money with it. But most people code to make a product (which in itself could be a form of art). And yeah if it's faster to reach your goals of making a product with the help of AI, then the choice is simple of course.
But yeah in a way I'm also sad that the code monkey will disappear, and we all become more like the lead developer who doesn't really program anymore but only guides the project, reviews code and makes technical decisions. I liked being the code monkey, not having to deal a lot with all the business stuff. But yeah, things change you know.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not at all. In both all you need is the ability to communicate to the machine in a way that the machine can convert your ideas into actions. The restricted language of a compiler is a handicap, not evidence of a skill - we've been saying forever that "Natural Language" compilers would be a game changer, and that's all that an AI really is Edit: It appears that this discussion is going to end up with a definition…
It is not coding if you use natural human language
I think after all the goalpost moving, we have to ask - why the bitflip does it matter what we call it?
Some people are getting a lot of work done using LLMs. Some of us are using it on occasion to handle thing we don't understand deeply but can trivially verify. Some of us are using it out of laziness because it helps with boilerplate. Everyone who is using it outside of occasional tests is doing it because they find it useful to write code. If it's not coding, then I personally couldn't care less. Only a True Scotsman should case.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand. If this is the case then we better have full AI generated code within the next 10 years since those "juniors" will remain atrophied juniors forever and the old timers will be checking in with the big cloc…
IT education and computer science (at least part of it) will need a stronger focus on software engineering and software architecture skills to teach developers how to be in control of an AI dev tool.
The fastest way is via struggle. Learn to do it yourself first. Understand WHY it does not work. What's good code? What's bad code? What are conventions?
There are no shortcuts - you are not an accountant just because you have a calculator.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#405The real power of Claude Code comes when you realise it can do far more than just write code. It can, in fact, control your entire computer. If there's a CLI tool, Claude can run it. If there's not a CLI tool... ask Claude anyway, you might be surprised. E.g. I've used Claude to crop and resize images, rip MP3s from YouTube videos, trim silence from audio files, the list goes on. It saves me incredible amounts of tim…
You probably want to give Claude a computer. I'm not sure you always want to give it your computer unless you're in the loop.
We have Linux instances running an IDE running in cloud vms that we can access through the browser at https://brilliant.mplode.dev. Personally I think this is closer to the ideal UX for operating an agent (our environment doesn't install agents by default yet, but you should be able to just install them manually). You don't have to do anything to set up terminal access or ssh except sign in and wait for your initial instance to start, and once you have any instance provisioned it automatically pauses and resumes based on whether your browser has it open. It's literally Claude + A personal Linux instance + an IDE that you can just open from a link
Pretty soon I should be able run as many of these at a time as I can afford, and control all of their permissions/filesystems/whatever with JWTs and containers. If it gets messed up or needs my attention I open it with the IDE as my UI and can just dive in and fix it. I don't need a regular Linux desktop environment or UI or anything. Just render things in panes of the IDE or launch a container serving a webapp doing what I want and open it instead of the IDE. Haven't ever felt this excited about tech progress
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm on the tail end of my 35+ year developer career, but one thing I always do with any LLM stuff is this: I'll ask it to solve something generally I know I COULD solve, I just don't feel like it. Example: Yesterday I was working with an Open API 3.0 schema. I know I could "fix" the schema to conform to a sample input, I just didn't feel like it because it's dull, I've done it before, and I'd learn nothing. So I aske…
I'm looking forward to the day that LLMs automatically put knowledge like this into Anki or something like it.
I found that big part of learning on Anki is creating the cards myself. Using cards from others / generated cards via LLM is not the same.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#407I recently tried a 7-day trial version of Claude Code. I had 3 distinct experiences with it: one obviously positive, one bad, and one neutral-but-trending-positive. The bad experience was asking it to produce a relatively non-trivial feature in an existing Python module. I have a bunch of classes for writing PDF files. Each class corresponds to a page template in a document (TitlePage, StatisticsPage, etc). Under the…
Your bad experience is because AI can’t really reason in general. It gets some kinda reasoning via a transformer, but that’s nothing like the reasoning that goes into the problem you described. LLMs are great at translation. Turn this English into code, essentially. But ask it to solve a novel problem like that without a description of the solution, how will it approach it? If there’s an example in its training set m…
However, most problems (novel problems, problems not in the training set) can be decomposed into simpler, known problems. At the moment the AI isn't great at driving this decomposition, so that has to be driven by a meat bag.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are a Senior Developer, who is comfortable giving a Junior tips, and then guiding them to fixing them (or just stepping in for a brief moment and writing where they missed something) this is for you. I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand.…
I've also found it good at catching mistakes and helping write commit messages. "Review the top-most commit. Did I make any mistakes? Did I leave anything out of the commit message?" Sometimes I let it write the message for me: "Write a new commit message for the current commit." I've had to tell it how to write commit messages though. It likes to offer subjective opinions, use superlatives and guess at why something…
What I can recommend is to tell it that for all documentation, readmes and PR descriptions to keep it "tight, no purple-prose, no emojis". That cuts everything down nicely to to-the-point docs without GPTisms and without the emoji storm that makes it look like yet another frontend framework Readme.
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
An observation. If we stipulate that this is true that a 'senior developer' benefits from Claude Code but a junior developer do not. Then I'm wondering if that creates this gap where you have a bunch of newly minted '10x' engineers who are doing the work that a bunch of junior devs helped with, and now you're not training any new junior devs because they are unemployable. Is that correct?
It already was the case wasn't it, that you could either get one senior dev to build your thing in a week, or give them a team of juniors and it would take the whole team 4 weeks and be worse. Yet somehow companies continued to opt for the second approach. Something to do with status from headcount?
>> Something to do with status from headcount?
And usually projected as ensuring bus factor > 1
Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its all great until >> I thought I would see a pretty drastic change in terms of Pull Requests, Commits and Line of Code merged in the last 6 weeks. I don’t think that holds water though The chart basically shows same output with claude than before. Which kinda represents what I felt when using LLMs. You "feel" more productive and you definitely feel "better" because you don't do the work now, you babysit the model a…
Not for me. I just reversed engineered a bluetooth protocol for a device which would taken me at least a few days capturing streams of data wireshark. Now i dumped entire dumps inside a llm and it gave me much more control finding the right offsets etc. It took me only a day.
That's not really coding though is it.
No point comparing apples with oranges, most of us don't program by reverse engineering using wireshark.