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An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

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Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#81

Post by 0x20cowboy »

joshstrange wrote: post #30
pbiggar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take the metaphor of writing. Would we say this guy is just a writer who started from another trade? No. Writing is something that used to require experts (scribes) and that now anyone can do and is just a normal part of doing any work. Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going…

> Developers are scribes - we have sacred knowledge that is now being democratized because everyone can do it due to good enough tools. As a result, we won't be needed much going forward. The ability to solve problems is what’s important. Not your ability to remember things or to hold sacred knowledge.

If that were true, industry interview processes would be very different.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#82

Post by steve_adams_86 »

gzread wrote: post #17
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #3

I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it. My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solv…

What were you doing before, if not making resilient software? I find that scalability is usually overblown because computers are fast now, which is not to say you shouldn't make it run fast on one computer.

I had to strike more of a balance between moving quickly and focusing strictly on resilience. The difference moving forward would be that the features already exist, and my job will increasingly be focused on ensuring they work properly, and the underlying systems supporting features are consistent, cohesive, and not duct taped together like an LLM built it.

It reminds me a lot of my early career spent remediating offshored PHP applications.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#83

Post by gopher_space »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #33
coldtea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM. New lower barrier means commodification.

Lol no it doesn't you literally have it backwards - think about the trades, specifically construction, as low barrier to entry jobs and consider that houses/buildings are all different (not commodities).

It's difficult to appreciate just how quickly and obviously low-barrier jobs sort people by ability and aptitude.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#84

Post by sroerick »

mrweasel wrote: post #8

I absolutely love this, because to me, this is what software development should be about, solving actual problems and providing faster calculations, improving the workflow for people. It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT i…

In my experience, I've worked with a number of people in non-tech industries who tried to pivot their company into software, and a huge obstacle was that ultimately the code became unmaintainable.

Maybe they didn't have the expertise to pick a software stack that would serve them in the long run, or they just didn't have the budget to hire a SWE or team full time, or their contractor team just wasn't super invested in the project.

So tech people look at "vibeslop" as unmaintainable technical debt, but they ignore that in a lot of situations their own salary is what makes the tech debt unmaintainable. Maybe that's uncharitable, but I do think many techs are very far removed from the "solve a problem and then dogfood it" cycle

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#85

Post by sroerick »

pron wrote: post #71

Here's what I find difficult to reconcile with my own experience. I've been using Codex in anger for the past 2 months or so (with gpt5.3-codex and then gpt5.4) on projects of different complexity. It is quite good at debugging, but the (non-trivial) code it produces is really bad. And I don't mean bad stylistically, but bad in the sense that Codex clearly won't be able to maintain it for long (which is how Anthropic…

It is weird. I've had maintainable solutions on non-trivial code, but it does kind of require babysitting. Planning documents and detailed specs help. You get a feel for where the agent will want to take a shortcut and can devise ways to navigate around that.

I also find Go works really well, and generally stays, if not exceptional, than at least maintainable.

I've also enjoyed using OCaml, but I will say that I found the single worst function I've ever seen in a codebase in vibecoded OCAML.

You might just try asking - "hey I'm having trouble keeping maintainable codebases - how can I structure this project in a way where the code will be stable long term".

Sometimes getting the "software architect" role into the agent context is all it takes.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#87

Post by tintor »

pron wrote: post #71

Here's what I find difficult to reconcile with my own experience. I've been using Codex in anger for the past 2 months or so (with gpt5.3-codex and then gpt5.4) on projects of different complexity. It is quite good at debugging, but the (non-trivial) code it produces is really bad. And I don't mean bad stylistically, but bad in the sense that Codex clearly won't be able to maintain it for long (which is how Anthropic…

He used Claude Code, you are using Codex.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#88

Post by mikkupikku »

coldtea wrote: post #32
mromanuk wrote: post #21

The guy from the story, it’s just another developer starting from a different trade, pretty normal across our history, musicians, lawyers that discovered that they were good at computers. The conclusion is flawed, not anyone can endure what this person did, sit at a terminal, going back and forward until something is finished. That’s what a SW dev does. My conclusion, many more people will discover that they are good…

> thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM. New lower barrier means commodification.

It means specialization. When people with no software development experience but lots of experience in some other domain have the ability to create software that fits their individual needs, that's a recipe for an explosion in highly specialized tooling.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#89

Post by Andrei_dev »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #3

I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it. My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solv…

[dead]

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#90

Post by sumedh »

i_cannot_hack wrote: post #13

It's a really interesting case study, but the summary seems to lean into the AI hype to an extent that borders on lying. > His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything. I don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradic…

He might be a bit nervous to speak to the camera and might have messed up the timeline.
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