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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

#741

Post by nonethewiser »

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…

> 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 go back to its original approach, or mix the two, or whatever. Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted.

Absolutely. At a certain level of usage, you just have to let it do it's thing.

People are going to take issue with that. You absolutely don't have to let it do its thing. In that case you have to be way more in the loop. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

But assuming you want it to basically do everything while you direct it, it becomes pointless to manage certain details. One thing in my experience is that Claude always wants to use ReactRouter. My personal preference is TanStack router, so I asked it to use it initially. That never really created any problems but after like the 3rd time of realizing I forget to specify it, I also realized that it's totally pointless. ReactRouter works fine and Claude uses it fine - its pointless to specify otherwise.

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

#742

Post by thefaux »

simonw wrote: post #503
chrisjj wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you an example of getting a coding chatbot to do exactly what you want?

https://gisthost.github.io/?a41ce6304367e2ced59cd237c576b817... - which built https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions exactly the way I wanted it to be built

The examples that you and others provide are always fundamentally uninteresting to me. Many, if not most, are some variant of a CRUD application. I have yet seen a single ai generated thing that I personally wanted to use and/or spend time with. I also can't help but wonder what we might have accomplished if we devoted the same amount of resources to developing better tools, languages and frameworks to developers instead of automating the generation of boiler plate and selling developer's own skills back to them. Imagine if open source maintainers instead had been flooded with billions of dollars in capital. What might be possible?

And also, the capacities of llms are almost besides the point. I don't use llms but I have no doubt that for any arbitrary problem that can be expressed textually and is computable in finite time, in the limit as time goes to infinity, an llm will be able to solve it. The more important and interesting questions are what _should_ we build with llms and what should we _not_ build with them. These arguments about capacity are distracting from these more important questions.

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

#744

Post by simonw »

thefaux wrote: post #742
simonw wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://gisthost.github.io/?a41ce6304367e2ced59cd237c576b817... - which built https://github.com/datasette/datasette-transactions exactly the way I wanted it to be built

The examples that you and others provide are always fundamentally uninteresting to me. Many, if not most, are some variant of a CRUD application. I have yet seen a single ai generated thing that I personally wanted to use and/or spend time with. I also can't help but wonder what we might have accomplished if we devoted the same amount of resources to developing better tools, languages and frameworks to developers ins…

Considering how much time developers spend building uninteresting CRUD applications I would argue that if all LLMs can do is speed that process up they're already worth their weight in bytes.

The impression I get from this comment is that no example would convince you that LLMs are worthwhile.

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

#745

Post by direwolf20 »

beng-nl wrote: post #499
gloosx wrote: post #447

So what is he even coding there all the time? Does anybody have any info on what he is actually working on besides all the vibe-coding tweets? There seems to be zero output from they guy for the past 2 years (except tweets)

He's building Eureka Labs[1], an AI-first education company (can't wait to use it). He's both a strong researcher[2] and an unusually gifted technical communicator. His recent videos[3] are excellent educational material. More broadly though: someone with his track record sharing firsthand observations about agentic coding shouldn't need to justify it by listing current projects. The observations either hold up or th…

If LLM coding is a 10x productivity enhancer, why aren't we seeing 10x more software of the same quality level, or 100x as much shitty software?

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

#746

Post by chrisjj »

chickensong wrote: post #719
chrisjj wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building. This is much less significant than the fact LLMs split engineers on those who primarily like quality v. those who primarily like speed.

That split has always existed. LLMs can be used on either side of the divide.

We see a ton of "AI let me code a program X faster than ever before."

We see almost no "AI let me code a program X better than ever before."

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

#747

Post by ericmcer »

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…

That is interesting because your mental abilities seem to be correlated with orchestrating a bunch of abstractions you have previously mastered. Are these tools making us stupid because we no longer need to master any of these things? Or are they making us smarter because the abstraction is just trusting AI to handle it for us?

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

#748

Post by direwolf20 »

mykowebhn wrote: post #424
cyode wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote stuck out to me as well, for a slightly different reason. The “tenacity” referenced here has been, in my opinion, the key ingredient in the secret sauce of a successful career in tech, at least in these past 20 years. Every industry job has its intricacies, but for every engineer who earned their pay with novel work on a new protocol, framework, or paradigm, there were 10 or more providing value by putting…

Fittingly, George Hinton toiled away for years in relative obscurity before finally being recognized for his work. I was always quite impressed by his "tenacity". So although I don't think he should have won the Nobel Prize because not really physics, I felt his perseverance and hard work should merit something.

... The person who embezzled from the SDC in 2018? https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/investigations/2024/04/19...

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

#749

Post by direwolf20 »

krupan wrote: post #216
jrflowers wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point. For example if you have access to a bunch of slot machines, one of them is guaranteed to hit the jackpot. Since switching from one slot machine to another is easy, it is trivial to go from machine to machine until you hit the big bucks. That is why casinos have such large selections of them (for our benefit).

"for our benefit" lol! This is the best description of how we are all interacting with LLMs now. It's not working? Fire up more "agents" ala gas town or whatever

gas is the transaction fees in Ethereum. It's a fitting name.

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

#750

Post by daxfohl »

cagenut wrote: post #740
daxfohl wrote: post #739

Now that it's real, is there a minimum bar of non-AI-generated code that should be required in any production product? Like if 100% of the code is AI generated (or even doom-tabbed) and something goes wrong in prod, (crash, record corruption, data leak, whatever) then what ? 99%? 50%? What's the bar where the risk starts outweighing the reward? When do we look around and say "maybe we should start slowing down before…

obviously you're not a devops eng, I think you're wildly under-estimating how much of business critical code pre-ai is completely orphaned anyway. the people who wrote it were contractors long gone, or employees that have moved companies/departments/roles, or of projects that were long since wrapped up, or of people who got laid off, or the people who wrote it simply barely understood it in the first place and certai…

I am a devops engineer and understand your point. But there's a huge difference: legacy code doesn't change. Yeah occasionally something weird will happen and you've got to dig into it, but it's pretty rare, and usually something like an expired certificate, not a logic bug.

What we're entering, if this comes to fruition, is a whole new era where massive amounts of code changes that engineers are vaguely familiar with are going to be deployed at a much faster pace than anything we've ever seen before. That's a whole different ballgame than the management of a few legacy services.

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