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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

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So basically, like a co-worker.

Arguably, though I don't particularly need another co-worker. Also co-workers are not tools (except sometimes in the derogatory sense).

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

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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to write code, but depending on length of the break your knowledge of tools, frameworks, patterns would be fairly outdated.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 too…

This has nothing to do about ageism. This applies to any person of any age who has ego big enough to think that their knowledge of industry is relevant after they take prolonged break and be socially inept enough to brag about how they are still "in".

I don't disagree with your point about fundamentals, but in an industry where there seems to be new JS framework any time somebody sneezes - latest tools are very much relevant too. And of course the big thing is language changes. The events I'm describing happened in the late 00s-early 10s. When language updates picked up steam: Python, JS, PHP, C++. Somebody who used C++ 98 can't claim to have up to date knowledge in C++ in 2015.

So to answer your question - people were laughing at his ego, not the fact that he didn't know some hot new framework.

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

#493
post #310
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been an EM for the last 10 of my 25 year Software Engineering career. Coding is, frankly, boring to me anymore, even though I enjoyed doing it most of my career. I had this project I wanted to exist in world but couldn't be bothered to get started. Decided to figure out what this "vibe coding" nonsense is, and now there's a certain level of joy to all of this again. Being able to clearly define everything using…

In case anyone is curious, here was my epiphany project from 2 weeks ago: https://github.com/boj/the-project I then realized I could feed it everything it ever needed to know. Just create a docs/* folder and tell it to read that every session. Through discovery I learned about CLAUDE.md, and adding skills. Now I have an /analyst, /engineer, and /devops that I talk to all day with their own logic and limitations, as w…

Interesting!

I wonder if this line

> It will configure an auth_backend.rs and wire up a basic user

over a big enough number of projects will lead to at least 2-3 different user names.

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

#494
post #447

So what is he even coding there all the time? Does anybody have any info on what he is actually working on besides all the vibe-coding tweets? There seems to be zero output from they guy for the past 2 years (except tweets)

> There seems to be zero output from they guy for the past 2 years (except tweets)

Well, he made Nanochat public recently and has been improving it regularly [1]. This doesn't preclude that he might be working on other projects that aren't public yet (as part of his work at Eureka Labs).

1: https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat

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

#495
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 find the atrophy and zoning out or context switching problematic, because it takes a few seconds/ minutes in "thinking" and then BAM! I have 500 lines of all sorts of buggy and problematic code to review and get a sycophantic, not-enough-mature entity to correct.

At some point, I find myself needing to disconnect out of overwhelm and frustration. Faster responses isn't necessarily better. I want more observability in the development process so that I can be a party to it. I really have felt that I need to orchestrate multiple agents working in tandem, playing sort of a bad-cop, good-cop and a maybe a third trying to moderate that discussion and get a fourth to effectively incorporate a human in the mix. But that's too much to integrate in my day job.

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

#496

> You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work There has been a lot of research that shows that grit is far more correlated to success than intelligence. This is an interesting way to show something similar. AIs have endless grit (or at least as endless as your budget). They may outperform us simply because they don't ever get tired and give up. Full quote for context: Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch…

If you ever work with LLMs you know that they quite frequently give up. Sometimes it's a // TODO: implement logic or a "this feature would require extensive logic and changes to the existing codebase". Sometimes they just declare their work done. Ignoring failing tests and builds. You can nudge them to keep going but I often feel like, when they behave like this, they are at their limit of what they can achieve.

If I tell it to implement something it will sometimes declare their work done before it's done. But if I give Claude Code a verifiable goal like making the unit tests pass it will work tirelessly until that goal is achieved. I don't always like the solution, but the tenacity everyone is talking about is there

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been commissioned many times before to work on or salvage "rescue projects" with huge amounts of tech debt, I welcome that day. Still not there yet though I am starting to feel the vibes shifting. This isn't anything new of course. Previously it was with projects built by looking for the cheapest bidder and letting them loose on an ill-defined problem. And you can just imagine what kind of code that…

Are you not worried that the sibling comment is right and the solution to this will be "more AI" in the future? So instead of hiring a team of human experts to cleanup, management might just dump more money into some specialized AI refactoring platform or hire a single AI coordinator... Or maybe they skip to rebuild using AI faster, because AI is good at greenfield. Then they only need a specialized migration AI to a…

Well, in general worrying about the future is not useful. Regardless of what you think, it is always uncertain. I specifically stay away from taking part in such speculative threads here on HN.

What's interesting to me though is that very similar promises were being made about AI in the 80s. Then came the "AI Winter" after the hype cycle and promises got very far from reality. Generative AI is the current cycle and who knows, maybe it can fulfill all the promises and hype. Or maybe not.

There's a lot of irrationality currently and until that settles down, it is difficult to see what is real and useful and what is smoke and mirrors.

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

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is this a joke? Are you genuinely implying that no one has ever got an LLM to write code that does exactly what they want?

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

#499
post #447

So what is he even coding there all the time? Does anybody have any info on what he is actually working on besides all the vibe-coding tweets? There seems to be zero output from they guy for the past 2 years (except tweets)

He's building Eureka Labs[1], an AI-first education company (can't wait to use it). He's both a strong researcher[2] and an unusually gifted technical communicator. His recent videos[3] are excellent educational material.

More broadly though: someone with his track record sharing firsthand observations about agentic coding shouldn't need to justify it by listing current projects. The observations either hold up or they don't.

[1] https://x.com/EurekaLabsAI

[2] PhD in DL, early OpenAI, founding head of AI at Tesla

[3] https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos

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

#500

> You realize that stamina is a core bottleneck to work There has been a lot of research that shows that grit is far more correlated to success than intelligence. This is an interesting way to show something similar. AIs have endless grit (or at least as endless as your budget). They may outperform us simply because they don't ever get tired and give up. Full quote for context: Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch…

The tenacity aspect makes me worried about the paper clip AI misalignment scenario more than before.
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