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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

#401

Post by cocacolacowboy »

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…

[dead]

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

#402

Post by fy20 »

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.

At my dayjob my team uses it on our main dashboard, which is a pretty large CRUD application. The frontend (Vue) is a horrible mess, as it was originally built by people who know just enough to be dangerous. Over time people have introduced new standards without cleaning up the old code - for example, we have three or four different state management techologies.

For this the LLM struggles a bit, but so does a human. The main issues are it messes up some state that it didnt realise was used elsewhere, and out test coverage is not great. We've seen humans make exactly the same kind of mistakes. We use MCP for Figma so most of the time it can get a UI 95% done, just a few tweaks needed by the operator.

On the backend (Typescript + Node, good test coverage) it can pretty much one-shot - from a plan - whatever feature you give it.

We use opus-4.5 mostly, and sometimes gpt-5.2-codex, through Cursor. You aren't going to get ChatGPT (the web interface) to do anything useful, switch to Cursor, Codex or Claude Code. And right now it is worth paying for the subscription, you don't get the same quality from cheaper or free models (although they are starting to catch up, I've had promising results from GLM-4.7).

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

#403

Post by rurp »

striking wrote: post #118
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…

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…

I have deliberately moderated my use of AI in large part for this reason. For a solid two years now I've been constantly seeing claims of "this model/IDE/Agent/approach/etc is the future of writing code! It makes me 50x more productive, and will do the same for you!" And inevitabely those have all fallen by the wayside and been replaced by some new shiny thing. As someone who doesn't get intrinsic joy out of chasing the latest tech fad I usually move along and wait to see if whatever is being hyped really starts to take over the world.

This isn't to say LLMs won't change software development forever, I think they will. But I doubt anyone has any idea what kind of tools and approaches everyone will be using 5 or 10 years from now, except that I really doubt it will be whatever is being hyped up at this exact moment.

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

#404

Post by yojat661 »

Havoc wrote: post #319
adamddev1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep using these analogies but I think these are fundamentally different things. 1. hand arithmetic -> using a calculator 2. assembly -> using a high level language 3. writing code -> making an LLM write code Number 3 does not belong. Number 3 is a fundamentally different leap because it's not based on deterministic logic. You can't depend on an LLM like you can depend on a calculator or a compiler. LLMs are t…

There are definitely parallels though. eg you could swap out your compiler for a different one that produces slightly different assembly. Similarly a LLM may implement things differently…but if it works do we care? Probably no more than when you buy software you don’t care precisely what compiler optimisation were used. The precise deterministicness isn’t a key feature

With the llm, it might work or it might not. If it doesn't work, then you have to keep iterating and hand holding it to make it work. Sometimes that process is less optimal than writing the code manually. With a calculator, you can be sure that the first attempt will work. An idiot with a calculator can still produce correct results. An idiot with an llm often cannot outside trivial solutions.

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

#405

Post by maxdo »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #241
maxdo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing vibe code interviews for nearly a year now. Most people are surprisingly bad with AI tools. We specifically ask them to bring their preferred tool, yet 20–30% still just copy-paste code from ChatGPT. fun stats: corelation is real, people who were good at vibe code, also had offer(s) with other companies that didn't run vibe code interviews.

Copy pasting from chatgpt is the most secure option.

Not going from home is the most secure way of going out.

It doesn’t work you can’t be productive without agent capable of doing queries to db etc

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

#406

Post by layla5alive »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #292
d0mine wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> far-fetched Remember Google? Once it was far-fetched that they would make the search worse just to show you more ads. Now, it is a reality. With tokens, it is even more direct. The more tokens users spend, the more money for providers.

Only if you are paying per token on the API. If you are paying a fixed monthly fee then they lose money when you need to burn more tokens and they lose customers when you can’t solve your problems within that month and max out your session limits and end up with idle time which you use to check if the other providers have caught up or surpassed your current favourite.

Indeed, unlimited plan seems like the only way that makes sense to not have it be guaranteed to be abused by the provider

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

#407

Post by fulafel »

fooker wrote: post #94
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…

> 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)

I don't think computation is going to become more expensive, but there are techs that have become so: Nuclear power plants. Mobile phones. Oil extraction.

(Oil rampdown is a survival imperative due to the climate catastrophe so there it's a very positive thing of course, though not sufficient...)

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

#408

Post by [deleted] »

AstroBen wrote: post #341
toephu2 wrote: post #165

I think in less than a year writing code manually will be akin to doing arithmetic problems by hand. Sure you can still code manually, but it's going to be a lot faster to use an LLM (calculator).

This is true if your calculator sometimes gave the wrong answer and you had to check each time

[deleted]

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

#409

Post by overfeed »

daxfohl wrote: post #384
overfeed wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

I'm yet to encounter an AI-bull who admits the LLM tendency towards creating tech debt- outside of footnotes stating it can be fixed by better prompting (with no examples), or solved by whatever tool they are selling

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

#410

Post by bedrio »

nemothekid wrote: post #236
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…

I think I should write more about but I have been feeling very similar. I've been recently exploring using claude code/codex recently as the "default", so I've decided to implement a side project. My gripe with AI tools in the past is that the kind of work I do is large and complex and with previous models it just wasn't efficient to either provide enough context or deal with context rot when working on a large appli…

I'm worried about that too. If the error is reproducible, the model can eventually figure it out from experience. But a ghost bug that I can't pattern? The model ends up in a "you're absolutely right" loop as it incorrectly guesses different solutions.
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