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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

#481

Post by bandrami »

ithkuil wrote: post #399
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.

Don't worry. This will create the demand for even more powerful models that are able to untangle the mess created by previous models. Once we realize the kind of mess _those_ models created, well, we'll need even more capable models. It's a variation on the theme of Kernighan insight about the more "clever" you are while coding the harder it will be to debug. EDIT: Simplicity is a way out but it's hard under normal c…

"That's the brilliant part: when the winter comes the apes freeze to death!"

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

#482

Post by chrisjj »

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…

> > LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.

This is much less significant than the fact LLMs split engineers on those who primarily like quality v. those who primarily like speed.

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

#483

Post by withinboredom »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #457
sosomoxie wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gone years without coding and when I come back to it, it's like riding a bike! In each iteration of my coding career, I have become a better developer, even after a large gap. Now I can "code" during my gap. Were I ever to hand-code again, I'm sure my skills would be there. They don't atrophy, like your ability to ride a bike doesn't atrophy. Yes you may need to warm back up, but all the connections in your brai…

You might still have the skillset to write code, but depending on length of the break your knowledge of tools, frameworks, patterns would be fairly outdated. I used to know a person like that - high in the company structure who would claim he was a great engineer, but all the actual engineers would make jokes about him and his ancient skills during private conversations.

I’d push back on this framing a bit. There's a subtle ageism baked into the assumption that someone who stepped away from day-to-day coding has "ancient skills" worth mocking.

Yes, specific frameworks and tooling knowledge atrophy without use, and that’s true for anyone at any career stage. A developer who spent three years exclusively in React would be rusty on backend patterns too. But you’re conflating current tool familiarity with engineering ability, and those are different things.

The fundamentals: system design, debugging methodology, reading and reasoning about unfamiliar code, understanding tradeoffs ... those transfer. Someone with deep experience often ramps up on new stacks faster than you’d expect, precisely because they’ve seen the same patterns repackaged multiple times.

If the person you’re describing was genuinely overconfident about skills they hadn’t maintained, that’s a fair critique. But "the actual engineers making jokes about his ancient skills" sounds less like a measured assessment and more like the kind of dismissiveness that writes off experienced people before seeing what they can actually do.

Worth asking: were people laughing because he was genuinely incompetent, or because he didn’t know the hot framework of the moment? Because those are very different things.

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

#484

Post by TeMPOraL »

markb139 wrote: post #474

I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late last year I started a project that included reverse engineering some firmware that runs on an Intel 8096 based embedded processor. I’d never worked on that processor before. There are tools available, but they cost many $. So, I started to…

> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task.

Definitely. Making small, single-purpose utilities with LLMs is almost as easy these days as googling for them on-line - much easier, in fact, if you account for time spent filtering out all the malware, adware, "to finish the process, register an account" and plain broken "tools" that dominate SERP.

Case in point, last time my wife needed to generate a few QR codes for some printouts for an NGO event, I just had LLM make one as a static, single-page client-side tool and hosted it myself -- because that was the fastest way to guarantee it's fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners (surprisingly common pattern that sometimes becomes a nasty problem down the line; see e.g. a high-profile case of some QR codes on food products leading to porn sites after shortlink got recycled).

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

#485

Post by bandrami »

zamalek wrote: post #273
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 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". Not trusting the ML's output is step one here, that keeps you intellectually involved - but it's still a far cry from solving the majority of problems yourself (instead you only solve problems ML did a poor job at). Step two: I delineate interesting and uninteresting work, a…

> I do not bore myself with trivialities such as retrieving a customer from the DB in a REST call

Genuine question, why isn't your ORM doing that? I see a lot of use cases for LLMs that seem to be more expensive ways to do snippets and frameworks...

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

#486

Post by rustyhancock »

solumunus wrote: post #440
gritspants wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My disillusionment comes from the feeling I am just cosplaying my job. There is nothing to distinguish one cosplayer from another. I am just doordashing software, at this point, and I'm not in control.

I don’t get this at all. I’m using LLM’s all day and I’m constantly having to make smart architectural choices that other less experienced devs won’t be making. Are you just prompting and going with whatever the initial output is, letting the LLM make decisions? Every moderately sized task should start with a plan, I can spend hours planning, going off and thinking, coming back to the plan and adding/changing things,…

One challenge is, are those decisions making tangible differences?

We won't know until the code being produced especially greenfields hits any kind of maturity 5 years+ atleast?

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

#487

Post by chrisjj »

polishdude20 wrote: post #104
ryandrake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I have enjoyed about programming is being able to get the computer to do exactly what I want. The possibilities are bounded by only what I can conceive in my mind. I feel like with AI that can happen faster.

Have you an example of getting a coding chatbot to do exactly what you want?

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

#488

Post by TeMPOraL »

bandrami wrote: post #460
locknitpicker wrote: post #448

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. I agree with the sentiment but I would have framed it differently. The LLM is a tool, just like code completion or a code generator. Right now we focus mainly on how to use a tool, the coding agent, to ach…

Previous tools have been deterministic and understandable. I write code with emacs and can at any point look at the source and tell you why it did what it did. But I could produce the same program with vi or vscode or whatever, at the cost of some frustration. But they all ultimately transform keystrokes to a text file in largely the same way, and the compiler I'm targeting changes that to asm and thence to binary in…

> An LLM is always going to be a black box that is neither predictable nor visible (the unpredictability is necessary for how the tool functions; the invisibility is not but seems too late to fix now)

So basically, like a co-worker.

That's why I keep insisting that anthropomorphising LLMs is to be embraced, not avoided, because it gives much better high-level, first-order intuition as to where they belong in a larger computing system, and where they shouldn't be put.

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

#489

Post by stevenhuang »

asimovDev wrote: post #479
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…

To me this is similar to car enthusiasms. Some people absolutely love to build their project car, it's a major part of the hobby for them. Others just love the experience of driving, so they buy ready cars or just pay someone to work on the car.

Alternatively, others just want to get to their destination.

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

#490

Post by chrisjj »

thepasch wrote: post #471
ryandrake wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I got into it for the thrill of defining a problem in terms of data structures and instructions a computer could understand, entering those instructions into the computer, and then watching victoriously while those instructions were executed. You can still do that with Claude Code. In fact, Claude Code works best the more granular your instructions get.

> Claude Code works best the more granular your instructions get.

So best feed it machine code?

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