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6 weeks of Claude Code

blog.puzzmo.com

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Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#491

Post by regentbowerbird »

scrollaway wrote: post #473
glitchc wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's happening is that we are being bombarded by marketing on all fronts. These gushing statements are no different from the testimonials and advertorials from the days of yore.

It’s absolute lunacy to think everyone lauding Claude code is paid marketing/shilling. What’s actually happening is there’s a divide being created between engineers that know how to use it, and engineers that don’t or want to convince themselves that it’s useless or whatever. Group 2 will not fare well in the coming months.

> Group 2 will not fare well in the coming months.

If it's a matter of months then latecomers will be up to speed in months as well, which isn't really that long a time.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#492

Post by ezekiel68 »

unshavedyak wrote: post #25
jeswin wrote: post #19

Claude Code is ahead of anything else, in a very noticeable way. (I've been writing my own cli tooling for AI codegen from 2023 - and in that journey I've tried most of the options out there. It has been a big part of my work - so that's how I know.) I agree with many things that the author is doing: 1. Monorepos can save time 2. Start with a good spec. Spend enough time on the spec. You can get AI to write most of t…

> 2. Start with a good spec. Spend enough time on the spec. You can get AI to write most of the spec for you, if you provide a good outline. Curious how you outline the spec, concretely. A sister markdown document? How detailed is it? etc. > 3. Make sure you have tests from the beginning. This is the most important part. Tests (along with good specs) are how an AI agent can recurse into a good solution. TDD is back.…

I will start with a basic markdown outline and then use a prompt describing more of the system in just flowing (yet coherent) thought and, crucially, I'll ask the model to "Organize the spec in such a way that an LLM can best understand it and make use of it." The result is a much more succinct document with all the important pieces.

(or -- you can write a spec that is still more fleshed out for humans, if you need to present this to managers. Then ask the LLM to write a separate spec document that is tailored for LLMs)

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#493

Post by sibeliuss »

a5c11 wrote: post #477
scrollaway wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolute lunacy to think everyone lauding Claude code is paid marketing/shilling. What’s actually happening is there’s a divide being created between engineers that know how to use it, and engineers that don’t or want to convince themselves that it’s useless or whatever. Group 2 will not fare well in the coming months.

There is also a group of engineers who like to... engineer stuff? I really do enjoy writing codes by myself, it gives me dopamine. The reason I've learnt talking to machines is that I don't like talking to people, so I don't fancy talking to machines like they were human beings.

You can still do both. Its just all of the grunt work is no longer grunt work, and all the tech debt you've been putting off is no longer an issue, and all of the ideas you've been meaning to try out but don't have the time can suddenly be explored in an afternoon, and so on and so forth.

For new features, by all means code it by hand. Maybe that is best! But a codebase is much more than new features. Invaluable tool.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#494

Post by ako »

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…

I don't agree, to me switching from hand coded source code to ai coded source code is like going from a hand-saw to an electric-saw for your woodworking projects. In the end you still have to know woodworking, but you experiment much more, so you learn more.

Or maybe it's more like going from analog photography to digital photography. Whatever it is, you get more programming done.

Just like when you go from assembly to c to a memory managed language like java. It did some 6502 and 68000 assembly over 35 years ago, now nowbody knows assembly.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#495

Post by exographicskip »

js2 wrote: post #313
giancarlostoro wrote: post #169

Earlier 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…

This is a good call! Do you have claude use atomic commits or do you manually copy/paste the output?

Saving your summary instructions as a CLAUDE.md

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#496

Post by wrs »

pmg101 wrote: post #398
ChuckMcM wrote: post #328

Earlier 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?

“Wasting” effort on juniors is where seniors come from. So that first approach is only valid at a sole proprietorship, at an early stage startup, or in an emergency.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#497

Post by GiorgioG »

conradkay wrote: post #361
Raidion wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been telling people, this is Uber in 2014, you're getting a benefit and it's being paid for with venture capital money, it's about as good as it's going to get.

True but the tech is improving so fast that in a year we can probably get equivalent performance for 10-100x cheaper

Incorrect, the hardware is not improving so fast that it's getting 10-100x cheaper.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#498

Post by base698 »

floppyd wrote: post #124

Anybody had similarly good experience with Gemini CLI? I'm only a hobbyist coder, so paying for Claude feels silly when Gemini is free (at least for now), but so far I've only used it inside Cline-like extensions

I’ve used both. Claude more extensively. I’ve had good results with Gemini too, however it seems easier to get stuck in a loop. Happens with Claude too but not quite as frequent.

By loop I mean you tell it no don’t implement this service, look at this file instead and mimic that and instead it does what it did before.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#499

Post by baal80spam »

Eggpants wrote: post #265

Ah yet another attempt to push the “$200/month is a bargain!!!” narrative. Sad. I get it. No one is really making any money yet, including openAI. As the VC money dries up this is only going to get worse. Like ads in responses worse. this_variable_name_is_sponsored_by_coinbase bad. Which these vibe chuckleheads will claim is no big deal because only losers read code.

> Ah yet another attempt to push the “$200/month is a bargain!!!” narrative.

Well - compared to a real developer (even junior one), it's peanuts.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#500

Post by ChuckMcM »

pmg101 wrote: post #398
ChuckMcM wrote: post #328

Earlier 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?

Yes, there are companies that opt for broken organizations for a variety of reasons. The observation though is this; Does this lead to a world where the 'minimum' programmer is what we consider today to be a 'Senior Dev' ? It echoes the transition of machinists to operators of CAD/CAM workstations to operate machining centers, rather than hands on the dials of a mill or lathe. It certainly seems like it might make entering the field through a "coder camp" would no longer be practical.
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