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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

#781

Post by drdeca »

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…

I like this commentary on that passage : https://detective-pony.tumblr.com/post/96180330151/pages-21-...

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

#782

Post by oblio »

runarberg wrote: post #771
oblio wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before LLMs it was incredibly tedious or expensive or both to get legal guidance for stuff like taxes, where I live. Now I can orient myself much better before I ask an actual tax expert pointed questions, saving a lot of time and money. The list of things they can provide is endless. They're not a creator, they're an accelerator. And time matters. My interests are myriad but my capacity to pass the entry bar manuall…

If this resembles the feeling you had when you first used the internet, it is drastically different from when I used the internet. When I first used the internet, it was not about doing things faster, it was about doing things which were previously simply unavailable to me. A 12 year old me was never gonna fax my previous classmate who moved to Australia, but I certainly emailed her. We are not talking about a creato…

I didn't have friends in other countries.

I could however greatly enrich my general knowledge in ways I couldn't do with books I had access to.

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

#783

Post by cagenut »

daxfohl wrote: post #750
cagenut wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

after a decade of follow-the-sun deployments by php contractors from vietnam to costa rica where our only qa was keeping an eye on the 500s graph, ai can't scare me.

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

#784

Post by whiplash451 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #774
gyomu wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble This is a mix of the “in the future, everyone will have a 3D printer at home and just 3D print random parts they need” and “anyone can trivially build Dropbox with rsync themselves” arguments. Tech savvy users who know how to use LLMs aren’t how vendors of small utilities stay in business. They stay in business because they sell things to users who are truly clueless w…

I don't know. It's one thing to tell Joe or Jane User to "Get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." But if Joe or Jane can just cut-and-paste that advice into a prompt and get their own personal Dropbox...

Except when that new Dropbox fails Joe or Jane on that Saturday evening, their only recourse is to ask the AI for help, and the AI starts spinning “oh yeah, mmm, I think I found where the problem is. Cut and paste these debugging lines in that function and let me know what the output is…”

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

#785

Post by beepbooptheory »

dempedempe wrote: post #737
beepbooptheory wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one reads the dialogue, Socrates is not the one "saying" this, but he is telling a story of what King Thamus said to the Egyptian god Theuth, who is the inventor of writing. He is asking the king to give out the writing, but the king is unsure about it. Its what is known as one of the Socratic "myths," and really just contributes to a web of concepts that leads the dialogue to its ultimate terminus of aporia (bein…

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...

Phaedo != Phaedrus. One is the "writing" one, the other one is, well, about Socrates' execution (also extremely good dialogue!).

The one at issue:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...

The public domain translations are pretty old either way. John Cooper's big book is probably still the best but im out of the game these days.

AI guys would probably love this if any of them still have the patience to read/comprehend something very challenging. Probably one of the more famous essays on the Phaedrus dialogue. Its the first long essay of this book:

https://xenopraxis.net/readings/derrida_dissemination.pdf

Roughly: Plato's subordination of writing in this text is symptomatic of a broader kind of `logocentrism` throughout all of western canonical philosophy. Derrida argues the idea of the "externality" of writing compared to speech/logos is not justified by anything, and in fact everything (language, thought) is more like a kind "writing."

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

#786

Post by markb139 »

gyomu wrote: post #645
markb139 wrote: post #474

I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late last year I started a project that included reverse engineering some firmware that runs on an Intel 8096 based embedded processor. I’d never worked on that processor before. There are tools available, but they cost many $. So, I started to…

> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble This is a mix of the “in the future, everyone will have a 3D printer at home and just 3D print random parts they need” and “anyone can trivially build Dropbox with rsync themselves” arguments. Tech savvy users who know how to use LLMs aren’t how vendors of small utilities stay in business. They stay in business because they sell things to users who are truly clueless w…

Im definitely going to build some small tools when I need them. One tool I use occasionally, but not so often I want to subscribe is Insomnia.

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

#787

Post by dyauspitr »

thevillagechief wrote: post #601
pards wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I happen to rent and can't keep This is my fear - what happens if the AI companies can't find a path to profitability and shut down?

Don't threaten us with a good time.

That’s not a good time, I love these things. I’ve been able to indulge myself so much. Possibly good for job security but would suck in every other way.

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

#788

Post by CamperBob2 »

whiplash451 wrote: post #784
CamperBob2 wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. It's one thing to tell Joe or Jane User to "Get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." But if Joe or Jane can just cut-and-paste that advice into a prompt and get their own personal Dropbox...

Except when that new Dropbox fails Joe or Jane on that Saturday evening, their only recourse is to ask the AI for help, and the AI starts spinning “oh yeah, mmm, I think I found where the problem is. Cut and paste these debugging lines in that function and let me know what the output is…”

Meanwhile, this year, that happens less often than it did last year... and it actually isn't how AI-assisted development works at all. Agentic models do the cutting-and-pasting by themselves, evaluate the results by themselves, and almost always succeed at fixing the problem by themselves.

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

#789

Post by Draiken »

infecto wrote: post #604
striking wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just brain atrophy, I think. I think part of it is that we're actively making a tradeoff to focus on learning how to use the model rather than learning how to use our own brains and work with each other. This would be fine if not for one thing: the meta-skill of learning to use the LLM depreciates too. Today's LLM is gonna go away someday, the way you have to use it will change. You will be on a forever trea…

I think you have to be aware of how you use any tool but I don’t think this is a forever treadmill. It’s pretty clear to me since early on that the goal is for you the user to not have to craft the perfect prompt. At least for my workflow it’s pretty darn close to that for me.

If it ever gets there, then anyone can use it and there's no "skill" to be learned at all.

Either it will continue to be this very flawed non-deterministic tool that requires a lot of effort to get useful code out of it, or it will be so good it'll just work.

That's why I'm not gonna heavily invest my time into it.

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

#790

Post by Applejinx »

barrell wrote: post #371
monkaiju wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far I haven't seen it actually be effective at "building" in a work context with any complexity, and this despite some on our team desperately trying to make that the case.

Agreed. I don’t care for engineering or coding, and would gladly give it up the moment I can. I’m also running a one man business where every hour counts (and where I’m responsible for maintaining every feature). The fact of the matter is LLMs produce lower quality at higher volumes in more time than it would take to write it myself, and I’m a very mediocre engineer. I find this seperation of “coding” vs “building” s…

Would you accept 'people who like to make art, and people who like to commission somebody to make art and give them lots of notes in the process'?
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