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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

#71

Post by 1123581321 »

keerthiko wrote: post #51
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.

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…

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.

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

#72

Post by daxfohl »

uejfiweun wrote: post #31

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…

Supply and demand. There will continue to be a need for engineers to manage these systems and get them to do the thing you actually want, to understand implications of design tradeoffs and help stakeholders weigh the pros and cons. Some people will be better at it than others. Companies will continue to pay high premiums for such people if their business depends on quality software.

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

#73

Post by tietjens »

uejfiweun wrote: post #31

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…

I think to give yourself more context you should ask about the patterns that led to SWEs having such high pay in the last 10-15 years and why it is you expected it to stay that way.

I personally think the barrier is going to get higher, not lower. And we will be back expected to do more.

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

#74

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

atonse wrote: post #11

> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…

> I enjoy both and have ended up using AI a lot differently than vibe coders. I rarely use it for generating implementations, but I use it extensively for helping me understand docs/apis and more importantly, for debugging. AI saves me so much time trying to figure out why things aren’t working and in code review.

I had felt like this and still do but man, at some point, I feel like the management churn feels real & I just feel suffering from a new problem.

Suppose, I actually end up having services literally deployed from a single prompt nothing else. Earlier I used to have AI write code but I was interested in the deployment and everything around it, now there are services which do that really neatly for you (I also really didn't give into the agent hype and mostly used browsers LLM)

Like on one hand you feel more free to build projects but the whole joy of project completely got reduced.

I mean, I guess I am one of the junior dev's so to me AI writing code on topics I didn't know/prototyping felt awesome.

I mean I was still involved in say copy pasting or looking at the code it generates. Seeing the errors and sometimes trying things out myself. If AI is doing all that too, idk

For some reason, recently I have been disinterested in AI. I have used it quite a lot for prototyping but I feel like this complete out of the loop programming just very off to me with recent services.

I also feel like there is this sense of if I buy for some AI thing, to maximally extract "value" out of it.

I guess the issue could be that I can have vague terms or have a very small text file as input (like just do X alternative in Y lang) and I am now unable to understand the architectural decisions and the overwhelmed-ness out of it.

Probably gonna take either spec-driven development where I clearly define the architecture or development where I saw something primagen do recently which is that the AI will only manipulate code of that particular function, (I am imagining it for a file as well) and somehow I feel like its something that I could enjoy more because right now it feels like I don't know what I have built at times.

When I prototype with single file projects using say browser for funsies/any idea. I get some idea of what the code kind of uses with its dependencies and functions names from start/end even if I didn't look at the middle

A bit of ramble I guess but the thing which kind of is making me feel this is that I was talking to somebody and shwocasing them some service where AI + server is there and they asked for something in a prompt and I wrote it. Then I let it do its job but I was also thinking how I would architect it (it was some detect food and then find BMR, and I was thinking first to use any api but then I thought that meh it might be hard, why not use AI vision models, okay what's the best, gemini seems good/cheap)

and I went to the coding thing to see what it did and it actually went even beyond by using the free tier of gemini (which I guess didn't end up working could be some rate limit of my own key but honestly it would've been the thing I would've tried too)

So like, I used to pride myself on the architectural decisions I make even if AI could write code faster but now that is taken away as well.

I really don't want to read AI code so much so honestly at this point, I might as well write code myself and learn hands on but I have a problem with build fast in public like attitude that I have & just not finding it fun.

I feel like I should do a more active job in my projects & I am really just figuring out what's the perfect way to use AI in such contexts & when to use how much.

Thoughts?

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

#75

Post by js8 »

iwontberude wrote: post #19
jopsen wrote: post #8

> - How much of society is bottlenecked by digital knowledge work? Any qualified guesses? I'm not convinced more traders on wall street will allocate capital more effectively leading to economic growth. Will more programmers grow the economy? Or should we get real jobs ;)

Most of this countries challenges are strictly political. The pittance of work software can contribute is most likely negligible or destructive (e.g. software buttons in cars or palantir). In other words were picked all the low hanging fruit and all that left is to hang ourselves.

I actually disagree. Having software (AI) that can cut through the technological stuff faster will make people more aware of political problems.

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

#76

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

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 want to say it's 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....

Yea exactly, Like we are just waiting so that it gets completed and after it gets completed then what? We ask it to do new things again.

Just as how if we are doom scrolling, we watch something for a minute then scroll down and watch something new again.

The whole notion of progress feels completely fake with this. Somehow I guess I was in a bubble of time where I had always end up using AI in web browsers (just as when chatgpt 3 came) and my workflow didn't change because it was free but recently changed it when some new free services dropped.

"Doom-tabbing" or complete out of the loop AI agentic programming just feels really weird to me sucking the joy & I wouldn't even consider myself a guy particular interested in writing code as I had been using AI to write code for a long time.

I think the problem for me was that I always considered myself a computer tinker before coder. So when AI came for coding, my tinkering skills were given a boost (I could make projects of curiosity I couldn't earlier) but now with AI agents in this autonomous esque way, it has come for my tinkering & I do feel replaced or just feel like my ability of tinkering and my interests and my knowledge and my experience is just not taken up into account if AI agent will write the whole code in multi file structure, run commands and then deploy it straight to a website.

I mean my point is tinkering was an active hobby, now its becoming a passive hobby, doom-tinkering? I feel like I have caught up on the feeling a bit earlier with just vibe from my heart but is it just me who feels this or?

What could be a name for what I feel?

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

#77

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Okkef wrote: post #27
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.

Try Claude code. It’s different. After you tried it, come back.

I think its not Claude code per se itself but rather the (Opus 4.5 model?) or something in an agentic workflow.

I tried a website which offered the Opus model in their agentic workflow & I felt something different too I guess.

Currently trying out Kimi code (using their recent kimi 2.5) for the first time buying any AI product because got it for like 1.49$ per month. It does feel a bit less powerful than claude code but I feel like monetarily its worth it.

Y'know you have to like bargain with an AI model to reduce its pricing which I just felt really curious about. The psychology behind it feels fascinating because I think even as a frugal person, I already felt invested enough in the model and that became my sunk cost fallacy

Shame for me personally because they use it as a hook to get people using their tool and then charge next month 19$ (I mean really Cheaper than claude code for the most part but still comparative to 1.49$)

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

#78

Post by TheGRS »

I do feel a big mood shift after late November. I switched to using Cursor and Gemini primarily and it was big change in my ability to get my ideas into code effectively. The Cursor interface for one got to a place that I really like and enjoy using, but its probably more that the results from the agents themselves are less frustrating. I can deal with the output more now.

I'm still a little iffy on the agent swarm idea. I think I will need to see it in action in an interface that works for me. To me it feels like we are anthropomorphizing agents too much, and that results in this idea that we can put agents into roles and them combine them into useful teams. I can't help seeing all agents as the same automatons and I have trouble understanding why giving an agent with different guideliens to follow, and then having them follow along another agent would give me better results than just fixing the context in the first place. Either that or just working more on the code pipeline to spot issues early on - all the stuff we already test for.

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

#79

Post by coffeeaddict1 »

atonse wrote: post #11

> LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. I’ve always said I’m a builder even though I’ve also enjoyed programming (but for an outcome, never for the sake of the code) This perfectly sums up what I’ve been observing between people like me (builders) who are ecstatic about this new world and programmers who talk about the craft of programming…

But how can you be a responsible builder if you don't have trust in the LLMs doing the "right thing"? Suppose you're the head of a software team where you've picked up the best candidates for a given project, in that scenario I can see how one is able to trust the team members to orchestrate the implementation of your ideas and intentions, with you not being intimately familiar with the details. Can we place the same trust in LLM agents? I'm not sure. Even if one could somehow prove that LLM are very reliable, the fact an AI agents aren't accountable beings renders the whole situation vastly different than the human equivalent.

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

#80

Post by Macha »

> - What does LLM coding feel like in the future? Is it like playing StarCraft? Playing Factorio? Playing music?

Starcraft and Factorio are exactly what it is not. Starcraft has a loooot of micro involved at any level beyond mid level play, despite all the "pro macros and beats gold league with mass queens" meme videos. I guess it could be like Factorio if you're playing it by plugging together blueprint books from other people but I don't think that's how most people play.

At that level of abstraction, it's more like grand strategy if you're to compare it to any video game? You're controlling high level pushes and then the units "do stuff" and then you react to the results.

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