Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 870 posts

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

#651

Post by sifar »

aswegs8 wrote: post #619
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…

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they…

Well, the wisdom part is true.

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

#652

Post by bojo »

UnlockedSecrets wrote: post #392
bojo wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How much did this type of project cost you to make?

What kind of costs are you thinking?

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

#653

Post by jofla_net »

hollowturtle wrote: post #58
TaupeRanger wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not angry nor scared, I value my hard skills a lot, I'm just wondering why people believe religiously everything AI related. Maybe I'm a bit sick with the excessive hype

FOMO really

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

#654

Post by jatari »

wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB wrote: post #640
throw10920 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing/reading and AI are so categorically different that the only way you could compare them is if you fundamentally misunderstand how both of them work. And "other people in the past predicted doom about something like this and it didn't happen" is a fallacious non-argument even when the things are comparable.

yes, but people just really like to predict dooms and they also like to be convinced that they live in some special era in human history

We are very clearly living through a moment in history that will be studied intensely for thousands of years.

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

#655

Post by oblio »

andy_ppp wrote: post #635
throw10920 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing/reading and AI are so categorically different that the only way you could compare them is if you fundamentally misunderstand how both of them work. And "other people in the past predicted doom about something like this and it didn't happen" is a fallacious non-argument even when the things are comparable.

I read grandparent comment as saying people have been claiming that the sky is falling forever… AI will be both good for learning and development and bad. It’s always up to the individual if it benefits them or atrophies their minds.

I'm not a big fan of LLMs, but while using it for day to day tasks, I get the same feeling I had when I first started the internet (I was lucky to start with broadband internet).

That feeling was one of empowerment: I was able to satisfy my curiosity about a lot of topics.

LLMs can do the same thing and save me a lot of time. It's basically a super charged Google. For programming it's a super charged auto complete coupled with a junior researcher.

My main concern is independence. LLMs in the hands of just a bunch of unchecked corporations are extremely dangerous. I kind of trusted Google, and even that trust is eroding, and LLMs can be extremely personal. The lack of trust ranges from risk of selling data and general data leaks, to intrusive and worse, hidden ads, etc.

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

#656

Post by phito »

bob1029 wrote: post #644
phito wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because we see a bunch of people completely ignoring the missing 20% and flooding the world with complete slop. The push back is required to keep us sane, we need people reminding others that it's not at 100% yet even if it sometimes feels like it.

This kind of thought policing is getting to be exhausting. Perhaps we need a different kind of push back. Do you know what my use case is? Do you know what kind of success rate I would actually achieve right now? Please show me where my missing 20% resides.

Thought policing, lol. People are just sharing their perspectives, no need to take it personally. Glad it's working well for you.

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

#657

Post by 1123581321 »

mh2266 wrote: post #357
1123581321 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These models do well changing brownfield applications that have tests because the constraints on a successful implementation are tight. Their solutions can be automatically augmented by research and documentation.

I don't exactly disagree with this but I have seen models simply deleting the tests , or updating the tests to pass and declaring the failures were "unrelated to my changes", so it helpfully fixed them

I’ve had to deal with this a handful of times. You just have to make it restore the test, or keep trying to pass a suite of explicit red-green method tests it wrote earlier.

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

#658

Post by ryandrake »

KronisLV wrote: post #554
carimura wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya I agree it's totally crazy.... but, do most app deployments need even half that stuff? I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing.

> I feel like most apps at most companies can just build an app and deploy it using some modern paas-like thing. Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy. But obviously that’s not Serious Business™ and won’t give you zero downt…

> Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy.

That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC. How did we get to the point where applications by default came with all of this shit?

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

#659

Post by jofla_net »

wellpast wrote: post #317

I coded up a crossword puzzle game using agentic dev this weekend. Claude and Codex/GPT. Had to seriously babysit and rewrite much of it, though, sure, I found it “cool” what it could do. Writing code in many cases is faster to me than writing English (that is how PLs are designed, btw!) LLM/agentic is very “neat” but still a toy to the professional, I would say. I doubt reports like this one. For those of us buildin…

>Writing code in many cases is faster to me than writing English

True, I feel as though i'd have to become Stienbeck to get it to do what i "really" wanted, with all the true nuance.

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

#660

Post by oldandboring »

aftergibson wrote: post #472
raducu wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is a very good point. Years ago working in a LAMP stack, the term LAMP could fully describe your software engineering, database setup and infrastructure. I shudder to think of the acronyms for today's tech stacks.

And yet many the same people who lament the tooling bloat of today will, in a heartbeat, make lame jokes about PHP. Most of them aren't even old enough to have ever done anything serious with it, or seen it in action beyond Wordpress or some spaghetti-code one-pager they had to refactor at their first job. Then they show up on HN with a vibe-coded side project or blog post about how they achieved a 15x performance boost by inventing server-side rendering.
Post reply on HN