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

Claude Sonnet 5

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 822 posts

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#671

Post by sisiissjz77 »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #566
pmarreck wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

I am another skilled senior, have been coding since I was 7, although you have a few more years of experience on me, and am commenting here just for the goldilocks moment, as I have read and reflected on both of your comments and find my reality is somewhere in the middle. On personal projects, where I am in charge of all the hats (product development, UI, UX, backend, security, server admin, etc) -- absolutely crazy…

It’s simultaneously simple and deceptively difficult to coax a growing system into staying sane. It reminds me of forcing a fractal into growth yet somehow letting it remain similar at all scales, manually.

Scaling in this sense is not operational (“servers”), but conceptual (“features”).

I don’t want to be a downer but I find many devs are not great at this. Very clever folks, but they tend to not see these issues clearly. They’ll nod and recognize when you talk about separating content from form and the importance of various design principles like high cohesion and loose coupling but completely disregard them once in contact with reality.

Part of the problem, as you nicely showed, is that technology is only a single slice of this problematic pie. Organizations in general are systems as well and they tend to be either badly architected, badly maintained or often both. Some technological issues are downstream from organizational issues and IME those can be become rather dominant variables in the equation and no amount of AI - save full AGI taking control of the company - is going to save us from those factors.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#673

Post by grim_io »

MillionOClock wrote: post #118
bredren wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I realized, can you provide more detail on how you've observed this? The /usage screen does not make it clear.

Not the original commenter, but personally I noticed my quota usage didn’t feel like it was being spent at a much lower rate when using Sonnet even on a relatively low thinking budget and based on a few comments here it seems I might not be the only one. Has anyone else noticed this? Wasn’t it different in the past? I thought I would be getting to use Sonnet much much more than Opus but it did not feel that way despi…

This is exactly what people have been talking about in this thread.

Sonnet is dumber and more expensive than Opus.

The token efficiency improvements in Opus are missing in Sonnet. Sonnet generates more output tokens and more reasoning tokens.

Any price advantage per token disappears due to volume.

It doesn't make sense to use Sonnet if you have access to Opus.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#674

Post by DanielHB »

jimbo808 wrote: post #610
pmarreck wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

I think I might have written a comment similar to yours maybe 6 months or a year ago. I'm not quite sure to respond to these sorts of replies. I have used LLMs/Claude Code quite extensively professionally and was a very early adopter, have built tooling around LLM/agentic development, and genuinely embraced it. They aren't useless, but the short term gains you think you're getting come at a very steep price that you…

I am consistently underwhelmed by the output, I can't really explain it besides LLMs have no taste about what is easier to read for humans.

I usually start a task with an LLM and then do small refactors using the LLM and then do some manual refactors before I am done. But often for more complex tasks the manual refactors are quite large.

Maybe it is because they can read walls of text so easily, so they output walls of text that are hard to read for humans.

I feel quite sad because a lot of my fellow colleagues are not putting this extra effort in to make things easier to understand by humans. PR review is basically me just doing this extra effort for them and their LLM implementing my comments.

And that is when I can even pinpoint the bad taste in the code structure, sometimes it is not something you can easily describe in a PR comment besides "no human would structure the code like this".

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#675

Post by vidarh »

jimbo808 wrote: post #610
pmarreck wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

I think I might have written a comment similar to yours maybe 6 months or a year ago. I'm not quite sure to respond to these sorts of replies. I have used LLMs/Claude Code quite extensively professionally and was a very early adopter, have built tooling around LLM/agentic development, and genuinely embraced it. They aren't useless, but the short term gains you think you're getting come at a very steep price that you…

I might have written a comment similar to yours maybe a year ago.

Yes, some skills will atrophy, but the learning curve for LLMs is also steep and you will acquire new skills that will pay off the costs many times over.

We see this in discussions like these where you have people running the gamut from using them as glorified auto-complete or babysitting them (usually a net loss in speed, though it'll feel less draining) via people running multiple agents in several different tabs (a gain) to people prompting for harnesses rather than tasks, and putting the agent in the resulting harness (where the multipliers come in) and even people at the peak of experience with them today are only scratching the surface.

I'm very aware that just as my assembler skills are not what they once were, my skills in the languages I'm now writing less will not be what they once were a few years down this line.

But I produced far more before I started using LLMs through the force multiplier of modern languages and frameworks than I did in assembler in the 80's and 90's, and I produce far more now with LLMs, and I will produce even more in the future by learning how to take advantage of new capabilities.

I have Claude refining a system that wasn't tractable a few years ago in another terminal as I'm writing this. I don't care if it would take me a bit longer to get back up to speed on a C codebase again if I was stripped of all access to LLMs any more than I care if it'd take me a bit longer to get up to speed on programming assembler on a Commodore 64.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#677

Post by giancarlostoro »

arcatech wrote: post #305
giancarlostoro wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to meet the devs who can spin up full feature web apps in under 15 minutes with all the bells and whistles I've gotten Claude to spin up and code. I don't think the AI haters understand the level of time cutting that you can achieve with a very simple and reasonably crafted prompt. I'm talking back-end, with database models, classes, queries, accompanying front-end layouts, with real dynamic data, running. S…

And the trade off for that productivity is relying on a completely untrustworthy company/product that gets more expensive and uncertain by the week while your skills erode.

You cant claim that you need to skill up and then that you cant also review code, this makes no sense to me. The perl clutching against AI is something else.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#678

Post by kakacik »

pmarreck wrote: post #557
jimbo808 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're actively trying to use lobbying power to make open weight models illegal. So I'm just not going to use their services at all anymore. I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior, and the hidden cost in terms of technical debt and skill atrophy is just being swept under the rug. I'll be okay without their bullshit generator.

> I don't think they're a net gain if you're a skilled senior I'm a skilled senior (I'm 54 and been coding since I was about 8; I've been 100% AI-generated code for at least 6 months now and have produced a combination of speed and quality that has astonished me; my velocity is apparent at https://github.com/pmarreck/ ) and this has been a massive net gain, so your claim is now officially in sheer defiance of reality…

You very conveniently avoided skill atrophy, the biggest issue for existing engineers to deal with (not even going into topic of cancelling whole hiring-junior-and-raise-senior approach which is just shortsighted and retarded to be polite, but general greed has overtaken the field so its not shocking this went out of window). Everybody using llms excessively is measurably doing worse, ie students. I have hard time believing out industry is somehow immune to that and refuse to do the experiment on myself if avoidable, which it sort of is for me.

Its like drug that will give you few years of great high, and ruin rest of your life afterwards. Use it by all means, I don't care about your output, nobody here does, you do you.

I do care about my long term skills, which aren't about piping some llm outputs. My employer ain't dumb fuck who is pushing for llms at all costs as much as possible. Anyway, most of my day work are processes, discussions, pushing things through - llms can't do a shit here, its personal conversations, connections, often psychical contact to get things done on time. Startup world would be different but I am as far from that unstable environment as I am from say gaming industry, just not worth my time outside SV area.

So I just use llms to verify my coding results, they are fine for that, but I do the creativity. Its by far the best part of my software dev work, why the heck would I be automating that away? Its like automating sex away so you can have more time... reading HN or some other way to just waste time, dumb approach from all angles.

Of course this changes if one is working on personal projects, self-employed, small startup etc but most folks here are not in that category.

Re: Claude Sonnet 5

#680

Post by versteegen »

tyg13 wrote: post #492
easygenes wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a heavy enough user that I have both the OAI and Anth $200 plans. I always use at least 50% of my weekly Opus quota at Extra setting (meaning I use double the limit of the $100 plan, at minimum). Max I rarely touch because it is twice as slow and the incremental capability gain is minimal. Usually if Opus can't sort something well at Extra, the answer isn't to use Max but to hand the issue off to GPT-5.5 at XHigh…

I too have settled into a kind of dual Claude/GPT model setup. I will often use one to review the other's work, or critique the other's plan in some way. Sometimes I'll have Claude implement a feature one way, then have GPT do it the other way, then have them both review each other's implementation. Then synthesize a final plan from the previous implementations+reviews. I might just be having fun with models, but I h…

> Sometimes I'll have Claude implement a feature one way, then have GPT do it the other way, then have them both review each other's implementation. Then synthesize a final plan from the previous implementations+reviews.

I've done variants of this a number of times, but feel like it was a generally waste of my time to then have to compare them and write up which parts I liked or disliked: if the output is something substantial, each will have its pros and cons. Clear-cut wins aren't very common. Of course it could work well if we automated the whole thing with an orchestrator; you just need a model with actual good taste (according to your own preferences) ... so we'll have to compare all the models to find that one

Post reply on HN