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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

#671

Post by manbash »

netcraft wrote: post #618

> Tenacity. It's so interesting to watch an agent relentlessly work at something. They never get tired, they never get demoralized, they just keep going and trying things where a person would have given up long ago to fight another day. This is true to an extent for sure and they will go much longer than most engineers without getting "tired", but I've def seen both sonnet and opus give up multiple times. They've upd…

Oh, definitely. Also, they end up getting stuck in a loop, adding and removing the same code endlessly.

And then someone comes and "improves" their agent with additional "do not repeat yourself" prompts scattered all over the place, to no avail.

"Asinine" describes my experience perfectly.

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

#672

Post by jatari »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #241
maxdo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing vibe code interviews for nearly a year now. Most people are surprisingly bad with AI tools. We specifically ask them to bring their preferred tool, yet 20–30% still just copy-paste code from ChatGPT. fun stats: corelation is real, people who were good at vibe code, also had offer(s) with other companies that didn't run vibe code interviews.

Copy pasting from chatgpt is the most secure option.

Also the method that will result in the higher quality codebase.

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

#673

Post by sponaugle »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #556
akoboldfrying wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a machine. You're literally a wet, analog device converting some forms of energy into other forms just like any other machine as you work, rest, type out HN comments, etc. There is nothing special about the carbon atoms in your body -- there's no metadata attached to them marking them out as belonging to a Living Person. Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only bec…

If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties. >Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention Evolu…

"If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties."

Yet.

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

#674

Post by suddenlybananas »

sponaugle wrote: post #673
suddenlybananas wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties. >Other living-person-machines treat "you" differently than other clusters of atoms only because evolution has taught us that doing so is a mutually beneficial social convention Evolu…

"If humans are machines, they are still a subset of machines and they (among other animals) are the only ones who can be demotivated and so it is still a mistake to assume an entirely different kind of machine would have those properties." Yet.

Sure but the entire context of the discussion is surprisial that they don't.

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

#675

Post by Aperocky »

Is it really brain atrophy if I never learned to code in ASM in my entire career as compiler has been doing that for me?

A part of me really want to say yes and wear it as a badge to have been coding before LLMs were a thing, but at the same time, it's not unprecedented.

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

#676

Post by sponaugle »

piskov wrote: post #283
sleazebreeze wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would struggle to review code in a completely unfamiliar domain or part of the stack even before LLMs.

That’s why you need to write code to learn it. No-one has ever learned skill just by reading/observing

"No-one has ever learned skill just by reading/observing" - Except of course all of those people in Cosmology who, you know, observe.

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

#677

Post by Miraste »

sosomoxie wrote: post #612
runarberg wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever learnt a foreign language (say Mongolian, or Danish) and then never spoken it, nor even read anything in it for over 10 years? It is not like riding a bike, it doesn’t just come back like that. You have to actually relearn the language, practice it, and you will suck at it for months. Comprehension comes first (within weeks) but you will be speaking with grammatical errors, mispronunciations, etc. for m…

I have not and I'm actually really bad at learning human languages, but know a dozen programming languages. You would think they would be similar, but for some reason it's really easy for me to program in any language and really hard for me to pick up a human language.

Learning human languages is not a similar process to learning programming languages at all. I've never been sure why so many people think it is.

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

#678

Post by sponaugle »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #298
rishabhaiover wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just sad. Right when I found love in what I do, my work has no value anymore.

Aren't you still better off than the rest of us who found what they love + invested decades in it before it lost its value. Isn't it better to lose your love when you still have time to find a new one?

"it lost its value".

It has not lost its value yet, but the future will shift that value. All of the past experience you have is an asset for you to move with that shift. The problem will not be you losing value, it will be you not following where the value goes.

It might be a bit more difficult to love where the shift goes, but that is no different than loving being a artist which often shares a bed with loving being poor. What will make you happier?

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

#679

Post by oldandboring »

carimura wrote: post #541
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…

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.

When I come into a new project and I find all this... "stuff" in use, often what I later find is actually happening with a lot of it is:

- nobody remembers why they're using it

- a lot of it is pinned to old versions or the original configuration because the overhead of maintaining so much tooling is too much for the team and not worth the risk of breaking something

- new team members have a hard time getting the "complete picture" of how the software is built and how it deploys and where to look if something goes wrong.

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

#680

Post by ex-aws-dude »

Aperocky wrote: post #675

Is it really brain atrophy if I never learned to code in ASM in my entire career as compiler has been doing that for me? A part of me really want to say yes and wear it as a badge to have been coding before LLMs were a thing, but at the same time, it's not unprecedented.

The thing is the compiler does exactly what you want it to 99.999…% of the time so you never have to drop down into ASM

That’s not really true in this case

I think a person with zero coding knowledge would have a lot tougher time using these tools successfully

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