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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

#791

Post by striking »

Kostic wrote: post #566
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 assume you're living in a city. You're already renting out a lot of things to others (security, electricity, water, food, shelter, transportation), what is different with white collar work?

My apartment has been here for years and will be here for many more. I don't love paying rent on it but it certainly does get maintained without my having to do anything. And the rest of the infrastructure of my life is similarly banal. I ride Muni, eat food from Trader Joe's, and so on. These things are not going away and they don't require me to rewire my brain constantly in order to make use of them. The city infrastructure isn't stealing my ability to do my work, it just fills in some gaps that genuinely cannot be filled when working alone and I can trust it to keep doing that basically forever.

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

#792

Post by runarberg »

oblio wrote: post #782
runarberg wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Prior to the internet I used my school library for that (or when I was very young, books at my grandparent’s house). So for me personally that wasn’t a new capability. It wasn’t until I started using Wikipedia around 2004 (when I was 17 years old) that the internet replaced (or rather complemented) libraries for that function.

But I can definitely see how for many people with less access to libraries (or worse quality libraries then what I had access to) the internet provided a new avenue for gaining knowledge which wasn’t available before.

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

#793

Post by whiplash451 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #788
whiplash451 wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair

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

#794

Post by sally_glance »

scorpioxy wrote: post #497
sally_glance wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not worried that the sibling comment is right and the solution to this will be "more AI" in the future? So instead of hiring a team of human experts to cleanup, management might just dump more money into some specialized AI refactoring platform or hire a single AI coordinator... Or maybe they skip to rebuild using AI faster, because AI is good at greenfield. Then they only need a specialized migration AI to a…

Well, in general worrying about the future is not useful. Regardless of what you think, it is always uncertain. I specifically stay away from taking part in such speculative threads here on HN. What's interesting to me though is that very similar promises were being made about AI in the 80s. Then came the "AI Winter" after the hype cycle and promises got very far from reality. Generative AI is the current cycle and w…

I'm aware of that particular chapter of history, my master's thesis was on conversational interfaces. I don't think the potential of the algorithms (and hardware) back then was in any way comparable to what's currently going on. There is definitely a hype cycle going on right now, but I'm nearly convinced it will actually leave many things changed even after it plays out.

Funny thing is that meanwhile (today) I've actually been on an emergency consulting project where a PO/PM kind of guy vibecoded some app that made it into production. The thing works, but a cursory audit laid open the expected flaws (like logic duplication, dead code, missing branches). So that's another point for our profession still being required in the near future.

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

#795

Post by Applejinx »

rurp wrote: post #395
Havoc wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'. Recently had an AI tell me this code (that it wrote) is a mess and suggested wiping it and starting from scratch with a more structure plan. That seems to hint at some meta cognition outlines

Perhaps. I've had LLMs tell me some code is deeply flawed garbage that should be rewritten about code that exact same LLM wrote minutes before. It could be a sign of deep meta cognition, or it might be due to some cognitive gaps where it has no idea why it did something a minute ago and suddenly has a different idea.

This is not a fair criticism. There is _nobody_ there, so you can't be saying 'code the exact same LLM wrote minutes before'. There is no 'exact same LLM' and no ideas for it to have, you're trying to make sense of sparkles off the surface of a pond. There's no 'it' to have an idea and then a different idea, much less deep meta cognition.

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

#797

Post by AIorNot »

runarberg wrote: post #777
mikemarsh wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presenting this quote without additional commentary is an interesting Rorschach test. Thankfully more and more people are seriously considering the effects of technology on true wisdom and getting of the "all technological progress clearly is great, look at all these silly unenlightened naysayers from the past" train.

Socrates was right about the effects. Writing did indeed cause us to loose the talent of memorizing. Where he was wrong though (or rather where this quote without context is wrong) is that it turned out that memorizing was by the most part not the important skill to have. When Socrates uses the same warnings about LLMs he may however be correct both on the effect and the importance of the skill being lost. If we loos…

While there are dangers to LLMs -science fiction has been talking about this issue for decades (see below) and I think its overblown and the point of the Socrates quote is valid.

e.g the Matrix Reloaded: https://youtu.be/cD4nhYR-VRA?si=bXGBI4ca-LaetLVl&t=69 Machines no one understand or can manage

Issac Asmiov's Classic - the Feeling of Power https://ia600806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/T...

(future scientists discover how to add using paper and pencil instead of computer)

I mean Big Paradigm shifts are like death, we can't really predict how humanity will evolve if we really get AGI -but these LLMs as they work today are tools and humans are experts at finding out how to use tools efficiently to counter the trade offs.

Does it really matter today that most programmers don't know how to code in assembly for example?

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

#798

Post by peaseagee »

simianwords wrote: post #190
ipaddr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clocks prices have gone up since 2020. Unless a cheaper better way to make clocks has emerged inflation causes prices to grow.

not true, clocks have gone down after accounting for inflation. verified using ChatGPT.

You cannot verify anything using a tool that cannot validate truth.

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

#799

Post by sarchertech »

apercu wrote: post #690
sarchertech wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Gen-AI were making tech workers even 10× more productive at scale, you’d expect to see it reflected in revenue per employee, margins, or operating leverage across the sector. If we’re even just talking a 2x multiplier, it should show up in some externally verifiable numbers.

I agree, and we might be seeing this but there is so much noise, so many other factors, and we're in the midst of capital re-asserting control after a temporary loss of leverage which might also be part of a productivity boost (people are scared so they are working harder). The issue is that I'm not a professional financial analyst and I can't spend all day on comps so I can't tell through the noise yet if we're seei…

Yes, I think there many issues in a big company that could hide a 2x productivity increase for a little while. But I'd expect it to be very visible in small companies and projects. Looking at things like number of games released on steam, new products launched on new product sites, or issues fixed on popular open source repos, you'd expect a 2x bump to be visible.

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

#800

Post by sarchertech »

direwolf20 wrote: post #709
sarchertech wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never because the only reason that works with Amazon is that everyone is down at the exact same time.

Everyone will suffer from slop code at the same time.

Yeah but that's very different from an AWS outage. Everyone's website being down for a day every year or 2 is something that it's very hard to take advantage of as a competitor. That's not true for software that is just terrible all the time.
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