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Will Claude Code ruin our team?

justinjackson.ca

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Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#71

Post by threethirtytwo »

jghn wrote: post #41
threethirtytwo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice. I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It…

> I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. > The thing with being a PM or a designer is that this skill is learnable. This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.

>This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.

For designers, all you need to do is look at the google logo. That's the epitome of skill in design. It's trivial to come up with a multi colored word and have it fit in a sort of clean aesthetic.

For PMs it's much more harder to prove it to you. So I won't go about this useless endeavor. Suffice to say it's not really automatically "absurd". It's more likely you have some sort of identity and connection with being a PM and you're proud of that identity and your attack here is a defense.

If you truly were disagreeing with me in an unbiased way, you wouldn't just call it "absurd".

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#72

Post by threethirtytwo »

gregoryl wrote: post #49
threethirtytwo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice. I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It…

Are you mistaking your interactions with low level trades roles (the guy who's making bank fixing power sockets on the weekend) with say, the people maintaining factory electrical systems? or designing them?

Nah more like the guy who wires up the whole house.

Factory electrical systems are on another level than your typical 110V AC. But given what I know I would say that the factory electrician sits right at the borderline between comparable to SWE and anyone can learn it.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#73

Post by threethirtytwo »

krackers wrote: post #58
threethirtytwo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There are intricacies to every job but these are intricacies that are learnable. It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice. I thought programming was the same thing for a long time but have grown to find out that this is not the case. There are many people who cannot learn programming in a reasonable amount of time and therefore are unable to pick up the skill. It…

>designer is that this skill is learnable Why do you think this? Being a designer is ultimately a matter of "good taste" and intuition for HIG (that you learn to systematize and formalize) and not everyone has this to start off with. Lack of good taste is how you get stuff like liquid glass. People can learn to compensate for lack of good intuition, but it's the same as someone without innate mathematical aptitude co…

>This is an absurd take. Everyone looks at the other side and says, "Yeah I could do that". Few can.

Clearly Apple pays someone tons of money and calls them a designer and pays you nothing because your anti liquid glass opinion is shit to them. Coming here and talking as if your opinion on what "good design" is the end all be all lacks nuance and perspective.

Overall design at it's core is text placement along with media like pictures or graphs. And then putting it along with interactive buttons. It's a form of art, and this art is significantly easier than say figure drawing or painting with realism. The main reason is because the shapes used are simple, no complex shading, no need to really think about how light shines on a complex surface or how clothe interacts with the human body. Just some flat colors some typography, placement of some buttons to transition to other pages and that's it.

People are biased, but all you need to do is stare at the mona lisa, and then at the spotify logo and it's totally obvious that one took skill and the other took just just some thought. Design is easy. Liquid glass ironically is the one modern design trope that would actually take skill to render by hand, but of course we have algorithms doing it so it's more the skill of the programmer than an artist.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#74

Post by thunky »

chamomeal wrote: post #42
paulhebert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take. I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills. Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design. I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference…

I’m kinda getting off topic here but anecdotally: I’ve tried to get so many of my friends to learn programming. I love it, and I think a lot of em would love it too. But they hit a hard wall with the patience needed to self learn. Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really…

Your friends struggle with learning programming because they don't care enough about learning it. You're the only one that cares.

Same can be said for any skill.

Threads like this bother me a bit because it makes programmers seem so smug, like they are this gifted class that is able to wizard the machine where mere mortals cannot.

Its intellectual elitism.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#76

Post by paulhebert »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #68
paulhebert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take. I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills. Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design. I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference…

Easy. I met people who tried really hard to learn how to code and failed. Design on the other hand especially modern design is easy. It's just text placement, geometric shapes and proper colors that synergize. This isn't like anatomical drawings or oil paintings. It's not just easy, it's obviously easy. What needs to be learned is how to use the tools and do it with speed which does take time and training, but again…

This shows a deep misunderstanding of what design is.

What you’ve described is “visual design” which is a subset of the design field.

There are many sub-specialties, but at its core design is about problem-solving, communication, and empathy.

There are a lot of bad designers who are great at making things pretty.

A good designer spends more time researching, understanding the problem space, interviewing users, brainstorming, etc., than pushing pixels around.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#77

Post by paulhebert »

menaerus wrote: post #63
paulhebert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh as someone who has a career doing both design and engineering I disagree with this take. I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills. Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design. I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference…

Maybe you can learn to be mediocre or good enough designer or similarly good enough or mediocre engineer. But I don't think you can actually learn to be a great designer or great engineer - it just takes a different set of skills and evolutionary and genetic material which isn't available to all the people. Some people are simply not good enough in logical and abstract reasoning, math, and similar range of skills whi…

As someone who considers themselves a good engineer and a good designer (and does both professionally) I hope that last bit isn’t true

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#78

Post by toomanyrichies »

peter_mcrae wrote: post #11
toomanyrichies wrote: post #5

As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to. I recognize the necessary evil that is Zoom calls and face-to-face time in the larger context of running a business, but I also know what…

When the product marketer, product manager, and designer are the same person there is no alignment meeting.

They meet with customers as often as they meet with each other. Another one of those necessary evils IMO- it's not fun but it needs to get done.

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#79

Post by orphea »

oezi wrote: post #31
suzzer99 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?" Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.

Well in 2 years AI will have so advanced that none of this matters.

Are you sure that AI companies will keep the current progress?

Re: Will Claude Code ruin our team?

#80

Post by GOD_Over_Djinn »

xlbuttplug2 wrote: post #47
what wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not hard to 5x your productivity when you were close to zero to start with.

Is that you, boss? People with a lower multiplier are either in the minority of developers solving genuinely hard/novel problems or, more likely, they've just not figured out how to tap into AI's potential. Granted, to your point, a decent chunk of the HN crowd belongs to the former and can't relate to us paycheck stealers.

I always hear people say this, but it’s not clear to me what exactly is so difficult about using AI that otherwise-competent developers “can’t figure it out”
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