A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks • Hacker News Board

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

#851

Post by seffietron » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 6:14 AM UTC

At the risk of exposing my... atypical take on contemporary occupational "morality". LLMs, and Claude Code specifically, have given me the ability to work two jobs, and retain my soft-standing as the "guy" that gets stuff done/knows my stuff/can fix anything, while still working less hours than I did when I just had a single job.

I firmly believe, at SOME point, ML is going to eat my lunch. And I'd like to be well and retired off to a countryside homestead by then. Until such a time, I am going to use and abuse this technology as much as possible to gather 4 paychecks a month, optimize my investment portfolio to scale my NW, and by any means gain financial independence before the risk of my career vaporizing materializes. Sure, I could REALLY try and be one of those engineers that pulls a $750k salary and I wouldn't need to do this; but that isn't really in the cards for me. I know where I stand and I'm simply not smart or hardworking enough to get paid that much from a single job and guarantee my financial independence in the traditional way.

To that end, these tools have been extraordinarily impactful for me in a very simple and objectively positive way. And as much as I relate to basically everything OP mentioned, at the end of the day I simply DGAF. I want to make as much money as possible before the music stops, and this is the smart way to do that right now

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

#852

Post by snozolli » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 6:52 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #422

sosomoxie wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gone years without coding and when I come back to it, it's like riding a bike! In each iteration of my coding career, I have become a better developer, even after a large gap. Now I can "code" during my gap. Were I ever to hand-code again, I'm sure my skills would be there. They don't atrophy, like your ability to ride a bike doesn't atrophy. Yes you may need to warm back up, but all the connections in your brai…

Have you ever learnt a foreign language (say Mongolian, or Danish) and then never spoken it, nor even read anything in it for over 10 years? It is not like riding a bike, it doesn’t just come back like that. You have to actually relearn the language, practice it, and you will suck at it for months. Comprehension comes first (within weeks) but you will be speaking with grammatical errors, mispronunciations, etc. for m…

I studied Spanish for years in school, then never really used it. Ten years later, I started studying Japanese. Whenever I got stuck, Spanish would come out. Spanish that I didn't even consciously remember. AFAIK, foreign languages are all stored in the same part of the brain, and once you warm up those neurons, they all get activated.

Not that it's in any way relevant to programming. I will say that after dropping programming for years, I can still explain a lot of specifics, and when I dive back in, it all floods right back. Personally, I'm convinced that any competent, experienced programmer could take a multi-year break, then come back and be right up to speed with the latest software stack in only slightly longer than the stack transition would have taken without a break.

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

#853

Post by oblio » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:13 AM UTC

taylorius wrote: post #835

pvab3 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it doesn't have any skin in the game and can't be punished, and can't be rewarded for succeeding. Its reputation, career, and dignity are nonexistent.

On the contrary - the LLM has had it's own version of "skin in the game" through the whole of it's training. Reinforcement learning is nothing but that. Why is that less real than putting a person in prison. Is it because of the LLM itself, or because you don't trust the people selling it to you?

Are you claiming that LLMs are... sentient? Bold claim, Taylor.

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

#854

Post by oblio » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:31 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #469

overfeed wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted. I wouldn't have believed it a few tears ago if you told me the industry would one day, in lockstep, decide that shipping more tech-debt is awesome. If the unstated bet doesn't pay off, that is, AI development will outpace the rate it generates cruft, then there will be hell to pay.

The industry decided that decades ago . We may like to talk about quality and forethought, but when you actually go to work, you quickly discover it doesn't matter. Small companies tell you "we gotta go fast", large companies demand clear OKRs and focusing on actually delivering impact - either way, no one cares about tech debt, because they see it as unavoidable fact of life. Even more so now, as ZIRP went away and…

> the median programmer is a junior with It's worse, look up perpetual intermediates. Most people in any given field aren't good at what they're doing. They're at best mediocre.

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

#855

Post by Draiken » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 10:48 AM UTC

infecto wrote: post #838

Draiken wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good for you. Others like myself find the tools incredibly useful. I am able to knock out code at a higher cadence and it’s meeting a standard of quality our team finds acceptable.

Looking forward for those 10x improvements to finally show up somewhere. Any day now!

Jokes aside, I never said it's not useful, but most definitely it's not even close to all this hype.

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

#856

Post by yetihehe » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

danans wrote: post #731

ryandrake wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most companies (in the global, not SV sense) would be well served by an app that runs in a Docker container in a VPS somewhere and has PostgreSQL and maybe Garage, RabbitMQ and Redis if you wanna get fancy, behind Apache2/Nginx/Caddy. That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC. How did we get to the point where applications by defaul…

> That’s still too much complication. Most companies would be well served by a native .EXE file they could just run on their PC I doubt that. As software has grown to solving simple personal computing problems (write a document, create a spreadsheet) to solving organizational problems (sharing and communication within and without the organization), it has necessarily spread beyond the .exe file and local storage. Tha…

It can be like that, but then IT and users complain about having to update this .exe on each computer when you add new functionality or fix some errors. When you solve all major pain points with a simple app, "updating the app" becomes top pain point, almost by definition.

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

#857

Post by mlrtime » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 12:10 PM UTC

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #646

mlrtime wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I barely made it through Engineering school, but would stay up all night figuring out everything a computer could do (before the internet). I did it because I enjoyed it, and still do. I just do it with LLMs now. There is more to figure out than ever before and things get created faster than I have time to understand them. LLM should be enabling this, not making it more depressing.

Me three. I was not as smart as many of my peers in uni but I freakin LOVE the subject matter and I also love studying and feeling that progress of learning, which led me to put in the huge number of hours necessary to be successful and have a positive attitude the whole time.

There are dozens of us!

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

#858

Post by mlrtime » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 12:12 PM UTC

chrisjj wrote: post #577

mlrtime wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Why would you want to? See this is a perfect example of OPs statement! I don't care about the lines, I care about the output! It was never about the lines of code. Your comment makes it very clear there are different viewpoints here. We care about problem->solution. You care about the actual code more than the solution.

> I don't care about the lines, I care about the output! It was never about the lines of code. > Your comment makes it very clear there are different viewpoints here. Agreed. I care that code output not include leaked secrets, malware installation, stealth cryptomining etc. Some others don't.

>not include leaked secrets, malware installation, stealth cryptomining etc.

Not sure what your point is exactly, but those things don't bother me because I have no control over what happens on others computers. Maybe you insinuate that LLMs will create this, If so, I think you misunderstand the tooling. Or mistake the tooling with the operator.

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

#859

Post by mlrtime » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 12:15 PM UTC

rustyhancock wrote: post #733

mlrtime wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that challenging, the answer is, it depends. It's like a junior dev writing features for a product everyday vs a principle engineer. The junior might be adding a feature with O(n^2) performance while principle has seen this before and writes it O(log n). If the feature never reaches significance, the "better" solution doesn't matter, but it might! The principle may write once and it is solid and never touche…

There's that, but I actually think LLMs are becoming very good at not making the bad simple choice. What they're worse at is the bits I can't easily see. An example is that I recently was working on a project building a library with Claude. The code in pieces all looked excellent. When I wrote some code making use of it several similar functions which were conceptually similar had signatures that were subtly mismatch…

Yes, but now you know about that classification of problem. So you learned something! As an Engineer have a choice now on what to do with that classification or problem.

Better yet, go up one level and and think about how to avoid the other classifications of problems you don't know about, how can the LLM catch these before it writes the code... etc.

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

#860

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jan 30, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #854

TeMPOraL wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry decided that decades ago . We may like to talk about quality and forethought, but when you actually go to work, you quickly discover it doesn't matter. Small companies tell you "we gotta go fast", large companies demand clear OKRs and focusing on actually delivering impact - either way, no one cares about tech debt, because they see it as unavoidable fact of life. Even more so now, as ZIRP went away and…

> the median programmer is a junior with It's worse, look up perpetual intermediates. Most people in any given field aren't good at what they're doing. They're at best mediocre.

Sure, but we have high growth on top of that - meaning all those "perpetual intermediaries" are always the minority and gravitate upwards in the org chain, while ~all the coding work is done by people who just started working in the field, and didn't even learn enough yet to become mediocre.