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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

#61

> Coding workflow. Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December Anyone wondering what exactly is he actually building? What? Where? > The mistakes have changed a lot - they are not simple syntax errors anymore, they are subtle conceptual errors that a slightly…

Lots of very scared, angry developers in these comment sections recently...

Also note that I'm a heavy LLM user, not anti ai for sure

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

#63
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.

They build Claude Code fully with Claude Code.

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

#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 go back to its original approach, or mix the two, or whatever. Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted.

What I've seen is that after the initial dopamine rush of being able to do things that would have taken much longer manually, a few iterations of this kind of interaction has slowly led to a disillusionment of the whole project, as AI keeps pushing it in a direction I didn't want.

I think this is especially true if you're trying to experiment with new approaches to things. LLMs are, by definition, biased by what was in their training data. You can shock them out of it momentarily, whish is awesome for a few rounds, but over time the gravitational pull of what's already in their latent space becomes inescapable. (I picture it as working like a giant Sierpinski triangle).

I want to say the end result is very akin to doom scrolling. Doom tabbing? It's like, yeah I could be more creative with just a tad more effort, but the AI is already running and the bar to seeing what the AI will do next is so low, so....

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

#66
post #48
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? You can select Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and others.

it's not a model limit anymore, it's tools , skills, background agents, etc. It's an entire agentic environment.

Github copilot has support for this stuff as well. Agent skills, background/subagents, etc.

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

#67

LLM coding splits up engineers based on those who primarily like building and those who primarily like code reviews and quality assessment. I definitely don’t love the latter (especially when reviewing decisions not made by a human with whom I can build long-term personal rapport). After certain experience threshold of making things from scratch, “coding” (never particularly liked that term) has always been 99% build…

See, I don't take it that extreme: LLMs make fantastic, never-before seen quality autocompletes. I hacked together a Neovim plugin that prompts an LLM to "finish this function" on command, and it's a big time save for the menial plumbing type operations. Think things like "this api I use expects JSON that encodes some subset of SQL, I want all the dogs with Ls in their name that were born on a Tuesday". Given an example of such API (or if the documentation ended up in its training), LLMs will consistently one-shot stuff like that.

Asking it to do entire projects? Dumb. You end up with spaghetti, unless you hand-hold it to a point that you might as well be using my autocomplete method.

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

#68

Honestly, how long do you guys think we have left as SWEs with high pay? Like the SWE job will still exist, but with a much lower technical barrier of entry, it strikes me that the pay is going to decrease a lot. Obviously BigCo codebases are extremely complex, more than Claude Code can handle right now, but I'd say there's definitely a timer running here. The big question for my life personally is whether I can reac…

It's counterintuitive but something becoming easier doesn't necessarily mean it becomes cheap. Programming has arguably been the easiest engineering discipline to break into by sheer force of will for the past 20+ years, and the pay scales you see are adapted to that reality already.

Empowering people to do 10 times as much as they could before means they hit 100 times the roadblocks. Again, in a lot of ways we've already lived in that reality for the past many years. On a task-by-task basis programming today is already a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, and we just grew our desires and the amount of controls and process we apply. Problems arise faster than solutions. Growing our velocity means we're going to hit a lot more problems.

I'm not saying you're wrong, so much as saying, it's not the whole story and the only possibility. A lot of people today are kept out of programming just because they don't want to do that much on a computer all day, for instance. That isn't going to change. There's still going to be skills involved in being better than other people at getting the computers to do what you want.

Also on a long term basis we may find that while we can produce entry-level coders that are basically just proxies to the AI by the bucketful that it may become very difficult to advance in skills beyond that, and those who are already over the hurdle of having been forced to learn the hard way may end up with a very difficult to overcome moat around their skills, especially if the AIs plateau for any period of time. I am concerned that we are pulling up the ladder in a way the ladder has never been pulled up before.

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

#69

It's been a bit like the boiling frog analogy for me I started by copy pasting more and more stuff in chatgpt. Then using more and more in-IDE prompting, then more and more agent tools (Claude etc). And suddenly I realise I barely hand code anymore For sure there's still a place for manual coding, especially schemas/queries or other fiddly things where a tiny mistake gets amplified, but the vast majority of "basic wo…

I find myself even for small work, telling CC to fix it for me is better as it usually belongs to a thread of work, and then it understands the big picture better.

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

#70
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.

Almost always, notes like these are going to be about greenfield projects. Trying to incorporate it in existing codebases (esp when the end user is a support interaction or more away) is still folly, except for closely reviewed and/or non-business-logic modifications. That said, it is quite impressive to set up a simple architecture, or just list the filenames, and tell some agents to go crazy to implement what you w…

I'm using it on a large set of existing codebases full of extremely ugly legacy code, weird build systems, tons of business logic and shipping directly to prod at neckbreaking growth over the last two years, and it's delivering the same type of value that Karpathy writes about.
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