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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

#561

Post by suddenlybananas »

danielvaughn wrote: post #39
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.

It's important to understand that he's talking about a specific set of models that were release around november/december, and that we've hit a kind of inflection point in model capabilities. Specifically Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model. I never paid any attention to different models, because they all felt roughly equal to me. But Opus 4.5 is really and truly different. It's not a qualitative difference, it's more like it…

People have said this about every single model release.

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

#562

Post by phrotoma »

alansaber wrote: post #558
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 wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things." I would argue this is ok for front-end. For back-end? very, very bad- if you can't get a usable output do it by hand.

"rip it out" is a phrase I've been saying more often to the robots.

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

#563

Post by alansaber »

jedberg wrote: post #476
Loeffelmann wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you ever work with LLMs you know that they quite frequently give up. If you try to single shot something perhaps. But with multiple shots, or an agent swarm where one agent tells another to try again, it'll keep going until it has a working solution.

Yeah exactly this is a scope problem, actual input/output size is always limited> I am 100% sure CC etc are using multiple LLM calls for each response, even though from the response streaming it looks like just one.

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

#564

Post by apercu »

rurp wrote: post #403
striking wrote: post #118

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. 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…

HN is where I keep hearing the “50× more productive” claims the most. I’ve been reading 2024 annual reports and 2025 quarterlies to see whether any of this shows up on the other side of the hype.

So far, the only company making loud, concrete claims backed by audited financials is Klarna and once you dig in, their improved profitability lines up far more cleanly with layoffs, hiring freezes, business simplification, and a cyclical rebound than with Gen-AI magically multiplying output. AI helped support a smaller org that eliminated more complicated financial products that have edge cases, but it didn’t create a step-change in productivity.

If Gen-AI were making tech workers even 10× more productive at scale, you’d expect to see it reflected in revenue per employee, margins, or operating leverage across the sector.

We’re just not seeing that yet.

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

#565

Post by gloosx »

ayewo wrote: post #494
gloosx wrote: 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

So, it's generative pre-trained transformers again?

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

#566

Post by Kostic »

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 assume you're living in a city. You're already renting out a lot of things to others (security, electricity, water, food, shelter, transportation), what is different with white collar work?

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

#567

Post by [deleted] »

raducu wrote: post #453
striking wrote: post #118

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. 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…

> let myself atrophy, run on a treadmill forever, for something You're lucky to afford the luxury not to atrophy. It's been almost 4 years since my last software job interview and I know the drills about preparing for one. Long before LLMs my skills naturally atrophy in my day job. I remember the good old days of J2ME of writing everything from scratch. Or writing some graph editor for universiry, or some speculative…

[deleted]

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

#569

Post by direwolf20 »

nathias wrote: post #526
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 about brain atrophy, it's skill atrophy

is that not the sam thing?

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

#570

Post by draxil »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #488
bandrami wrote: post #460

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…

Sort of except it seems the more the co-worker does the job it atrophies my ability to understand.. So soon we'll all be that annoyingly ignorant manager saying, "I don't know, I want the button to be bigger". Yay?
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