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6 weeks of Claude Code

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Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#441

Post by cpursley »

airstrike wrote: post #26
qaq wrote: post #24

Another really nice use case building very sophisticated test tooling. Normally a company might not allocate enough resources to a task like that but with Claude Code it's a no brainer. Also can create very sophisticated mocks like say db mock that can parse all queries in the codebase and apply them to in memory fake tables. Would be total pain to build and maintain by hand but with claude code takes literally minut…

In my experience LLMs are notoriously bad at tests, so this is, to me, one of the worst use cases possible.

In JS, yes. It stacks with good testing stories, it’s quite good.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#442

Post by itsalotoffun »

dt3ft wrote: post #401

The question is, can I fire 80 out of 100 engineers and purchase Claude Code subscription instead?

People really aren't going to like this, but OP is directionally correct.

At 100 dev shop size you're likely to have plenty of junior and middling devs, for whom tools like CC will act as a net negative in the short-mid term (mostly by slowing down your top devs who have to shovel the shit that CC pushes out at pace and that junior/mids can't or don't catch). Your top devs (likely somewhere around 1/5 of your workforce) will deliver 80% of the benefit of something like CC.

We're not hiring junior or even early-mid devs since around Mar/Apr. These days they cost $200/mo + $X in API spend. There's a shift in the mind-work of how "dev" is being approached. It's.. alarming, but it's happening.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#443

Post by bluefirebrand »

zmmmmm wrote: post #279
phito wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's alright until you have a bug the LLM can't solve, then you have to go in the code yourself and you realize what a mess it has made.

Perhaps you set a very high quality bar, but I don't see the LLMs creating messy code. If anything, they are far more diligent in structuring it well and making it logically sequenced and clear than I would be. For example, very often I name a variable slightly incorrectly at the start and realise it should be just slightly different at the end and only occasionally do I bother to go rename it everywhere. Even with a…

> Perhaps you set a very high quality bar

Yes, of course. Do you not? Aren't you embarrassed to admit that you use AI because you don't care about quality?

I would be ashamed to think "you set a high quality bar" is some kind of critique

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#444

Post by bluefirebrand »

danielbln wrote: post #357
dbalatero wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, we only have centuries of humans doing hard things that require ongoing practice to stay sharp. Ask anyone who does something you can't fake, like playing the piano, what taking months off does to their abilities. To be fair, you can get them back much faster than someone that never had the skills to begin, but skills absolutely atrophy if you are not actively engaged with them.

My assembly skills have atrophied terribly, and that's ok.

Using LLMs is not moving up a level of abstraction, it is removing your own brain from the abstraction altogether

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#445

Post by shortrounddev2 »

aryonoco wrote: post #254
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, coding can be done by machines. But if you're telling a machine what to program, you're not coding. The machine is. Youre no longer a programmer, you're just a user.

Unless you’re writing pure assembly, aren’t we all using machines to generate code?

I suppose a more rigorous definition would be useful. We can probably make it more narrow as time goes on

To me, the essence of coding is about using formal languages and definable state machines (i.e, your toolchain) to manipulate the state of a machine in a predictable way.

C, C++, even with their litany of undefined behavior, are still formal languages, and their compilers can still be predicted and understood (no matter how difficult that is). If the compiler does something unexpected, its because you, the programmer, lacked the knowledge of either the language or the compiler's state.

Vibe coding uses natural languages, and interacts with programs whose state is not only unknown, but unknowable. The machine, for the same input, may produce wildly different output. If the machine produces unexpected code, its not because of a lack of knowledge on the part of it programmer - its because the machine is inherently unpredictable and requires more prodding in soft, fuzzy, natural language.

Telling something what outcomes you want, even if described in technical terms only a programmer would understand, is not coding. It's essentially just being a project manager.

Now you may ask - who cares about this no true Scotsman fallacy? If its coding or not coding, we are still producing a program which serves the product needs of the customer.

Personally, I did not learn to code because I give a shit about the product needs of the customer, or the financial wellbeing of the business. I enjoy coding for its own sake - because it is fun to use systems of well defined rules to solve problems. Learning and using C++ is fun, for me; it seems every day i learn something new about the language and how the compiler behaves and I've been using C++ for several years (and I started learning it when I was 12!)

Describing the outcome or goal of a project in natural human language sounds like a nightmare, to be honest. I became a software engineer so I could minimize the amount of natural language required to succeed in life. Natural language has gotten me (and, I suspect, people like me) in trouble over and over again throughout adolescence, but I've never written a piece of code that was misunderstood or ambiguous enough for people to become threatened by or outraged by it.

I think the disconnect is that some people care about products, and some people care about code.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#446

Post by benreesman »

vaidhy wrote: post #433
sitkack wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unemployment in India is going to be catastrophic. Geopolitical.

You know senior developers can also be off-shored, right?

Blowing away the junior -> senior pipeline would, on average, hit every country the same.

Though it raises an interesting point: if a country like India or China did make the investment in hiring, paying, and mentoring junior people but e.g. the US didn't, then you could see a massive shift in the global center of gravity around software expertise in 10 years (plus or minus).

Someone is going to be the best at planning for and investing in the future on this, and someone is going to maximally wishful thinking / short-term thinking this, and seductive-but-not-really-there vibe coding is probably going to be a major pivot point there.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#447

Post by danielbln »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #444
danielbln wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My assembly skills have atrophied terribly, and that's ok.

Using LLMs is not moving up a level of abstraction, it is removing your own brain from the abstraction altogether

I wish, but as it stands right now LLMs have to be driven and caged ruthlessly. Conventions, architecture, interfaces, testing, integration. Yes, you can YOLO it and just let it cook up _something_, but that something will an unmaintainable mess. So I'm removing my brain from the abstraction level of code (as much as I dare), but most definitely not from everything else.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#448

Post by thunky »

Archer6621 wrote: post #424
ako wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is the best thing about AI, it allows you to do and try so much more in the limited time you have. If you have an idea, build it with AI, test it, see where it breaks. AI is going to be a big boost for education, because it allows for so much more experimentation and hands-on.

By using AI, you learn how to use AI, not necessarily how to build architecturally sound and maintainable software, so being able to do much more in a limited amount of time will not necessarily make you a more knowledgeable programmer, or at least that knowledge will most likely only be surface-level pattern recognition. It still needs to be combined with hands-on building your own thing, to truly understand the nut…

> By using AI, you learn how to use AI, not necessarily how to build architecturally sound and maintainable software

> will not necessarily make you a more knowledgeable programmer

I think we'd better start separating "building software" from programming, because the act of programming is going to continue to get less and less valuable.

I would argue that programming has been very overvalued for a while even before AI. And the industry believes it's own hype with a healthy dose of elitism mixed in.

But now AI is removing the facade and it's showing that the idea and the architecture is actually the important part, not the coding if it.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#449

Post by amadeuspagel »

Using two different VS code profiles is an interesting idea beyond AI. I get confused every time I have different projects open because code always looks the same. Maybe it would make sense to have a different theme for every project.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#450

Post by pmg101 »

itsalotoffun wrote: post #423
pmg101 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

n=1 but my experience is the ratio of what'd I'd class "senior" devs (per the example given) to everyone else is comfortably 10:1.

Do you mean that for every 11 devs, 10 of them are "senior" as per the example? Or that only 1 is?
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