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Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

hollandtech.net

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Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#2

Post by retrac »

For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output.

When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was like that too, to be fair.

However, when I described the desired passes and their types:

    collectDefines :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], Map Text Text)
    
    runLitPool :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], [(Text, LitKey)])
    
    evalExpr :: Text -> Map Text Text -> Either AsmError Int
etc. It was almost one-shot. About 20 minutes until I was happy. Assembles all the test programs correctly. Code is mediocre in many places. But it would have taken me weeks to implement.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#4

Post by joe_mamba »

retrac wrote: post #2

For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output. When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was li…

>Code is mediocre in many places.

As if code written by devs at major corporations is't mediocre at best.

Nokia's Symbian OS took days to build. Days. With a D. Not minutes, not hours but days.

One of our devs shipped code to prod with a memory leak thanks to including a library that had "do not use this library in production because it causes a memory leak" written everywhere as warning.

So I don't wanna hear about how poor AI code is when human code is shit too. Human laziness and stupidity can beat AI hallucinations.

Sure, maybe your DeepMind, OpenAI devs and your John Carmacks of the world can beat AI code 100% of the time, but most workers most companies get don't have John Carmack as candidates.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#6

Post by mlinhares »

retrac wrote: post #2

For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output. When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well Claude picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was li…

I keep telling people that they have to design and think about it first and then go to the tool, but they keep saying “Claude can plan too” and obviously it produces some shit that requires a lot of changes while when I get it to go I can almost always one shot the stuff I want because I am actually putting in the time to give it a detailed plan of what to do.

Even just saving me the time to deal with CI is worth it.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#8

Post by Waterluvian »

laszlojamf wrote: post #5

I keep hearing that claude is supposedly so agreeable. This doesn't agree with my experience. Claude will often tell me that I'm wrong, and insist on its own solution being right even when I tell it it's wrong.

I’ve been doing amateur game dev as a way to explore Claude and I’ve found it to be quite reasonable about when it agrees and disagrees.

It will tell me a suggested abstraction is probably overkill and just to make a component own the new thing I’m discussing.

What I’m missing from the loop is it later saying without directly prompting, “hey it’s time to revisit that abstraction idea.”

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#9

Post by bad_username »

I think the article has the correct message, but I disagree with this:

> It’s just incapable of the thing that makes a real architect valuable: saying “no.”

From my experience Claude is excellent at saying "no". It won't say "no" if the prompt doesn't call for it (it won't say "no" to your direct request to do something, usually). But it offers good critique and happily pushes back if you make it clear that that's a first class option.

Re: Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend

#10

Post by CPLX »

I agree with the article, but I feel like this is something that anyone who uses AI aggressively for a while picks up on pretty quickly.

The thing that I find Claude incredibly good at when I'm designing architecture is working more like a research assistant on briefing decisions. It has the ability to read the entire code base and draw some conclusions. It can pull from lots of best practices and the millions of blog posts about this or that pretty effortlessly, which would take me a lot more time.

And then if asked, it can do a really good job of laying out the landscape around decisions and walking through the trade-offs. Like the author of this post, I found that if you let it, it will certainly be happy to just come up with some architecture and run with it, often in ways that will paint you quite rapidly into a corner.

But if you ask it to present you with all the trade-offs and let you make the judgment calls, it's great for that too.

That's certainly how I use it. And I think, just like anything else, working with AI is a skill, and similar to working with libraries, SaaS providers, service providers, frameworks, or anything else that's a "helper." You learn how something that could work but will fail silently is a problem, or you learn how depending on a fly-by-night SaaS company for a key framework is different than depending on a well-populated open source project, etc.

In the same way, you learn that relying on Claude's judgment is a bad idea, while relying on Claude's ability to summarize, brief, and research can be incredibly efficient.

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