6 weeks of Claude Code(blog.puzzmo.com) |
6 weeks of Claude Code(blog.puzzmo.com) |
I get it. No one is really making any money yet, including openAI.
As the VC money dries up this is only going to get worse. Like ads in responses worse.
this_variable_name_is_sponsored_by_coinbase bad. Which these vibe chuckleheads will claim is no big deal because only losers read code.
Well - compared to a real developer (even junior one), it's peanuts.
We have to be careful not to anthropomorphize them but LLMs absolutely respond to nuanced word choice and definition of behavior that align with psychology (humanities). How to judge that in an interview? Maybe a “Write instructions for a robot to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” exercise. Make them type it. Prospects who did robotics club have an edge?
Can they touch type? I’ve seen experienced devs that chicken peck its painful. What happens when they have to write a stream of prompts, abort, and rephrase rapidly? Schools aren’t mandating typing and I see an increase (in my own home! I tried…) of feral child invented systems like caps lock on/off instead of shift with weird cross keyboard overhand reaches.
senior developers already know how to use AI tools effectively, and are often just as fast as AI, so they only get the benefits out of scaffolding.
really everything comes down to planning, and your success isn't going to come down to people using AI tools, it will come down to the people guiding the process, namely project managers, designers, and the architects and senior developers that will help realize the vision.
juniors that can push tasks to completion can only be valuable if they have proper guidance, otherwise you'll just be making spaghetti.
- Ability to clearly define requirements up front (the equivalent mistake in coding interviews is to start by coding, rather than asking questions and understanding the problem + solution 100% before writing a single line of code). This might be the majority of the interview.
- Ability to anticipate where the LLM will make mistakes. See if they use perplexity/context7 for example. Relying solely on the LLM's training data is a mistake.
- A familiarity with how to parallelize work and when that's useful vs not. Do they understand how to use something like worktrees, multiple repos, or docker to split up the work?
- Uses tests (including end-to-end and visual testing)
- Can they actually deliver a working feature/product within a reasonable amount of time?
- Is the final result looking like AI slop, or is it actually performant, maintainable (by both humans and new context windows), well-designed, and follows best practices?
- Are they able to work effectively within a large codebase? (this depends on what stage you're in; if you're a larger company, this is important, but if you're a startup, you probably want the 0->1 type of interview)
- What sort of tools are they using? I'd give more weight if someone was using Claude Code, because that's just the best tool for the job. And if they're just doing the trendy thing like using Claude Agents, I'd subtract points.
- How efficient did they use the AI? Did they just churn through tokens? Did they use the right model given the task complexity?
I also appreciate the common best practice to write a requirements document in Markdown before letting the agent start. AWS' kiro.dev is really nice in separating the planning stage from the execution stage but you can use almost any "chatbot" even ChatGPT for that stage. If you suffer from ADHD or lose focus easily, this is key. Even if you decide to finish some steps manually.
It doesn't really matter if you use Claude Code (with Claude LLM), Rovo Dev CLI, Kiro, Opencode, gemini-cli, whatever. Pick the ones that offer daily free tokens and try it out. And no, they will almost never complete without any error. But just copy+paste the error to the prompt or ask some nasty questions ("Did you really implement deduplication and caching?") and usually the agent magically sees the issues and starts to fix it.
They don't write like the kind of person you can dismiss out of hand and there's no obvious red flags.
Other than "I don't like AI" - what is so insufferable here?
AI, but refactor
They would be like "but a robot will never ever clean a house as well as I would", well, no shit, but they can still do the overwhelming majority of the work very well (or at least as good as you instruct them to) and leave you with details and orchestration.
I use autocomplete and chat with LLMs as a substitute for stack overflow. They’re great for that. Beyond that, myself and colleagues have found AI agents are not yet ready for serious work. I want them to be, I really do. But more than that I want our software to be reliable, our code to be robust and understandable, and I don’t want to worry about whether we are painting ourselves into a corner.
We build serious software infrastructure that supports other companies’ software and our biggest headache is supporting code that we built earlier this year using AI. It’s poorly written, full of bugs including problems very hard to spot from the code, and is just incomprehensible for the most part.
Other companies I know are vibe coding, and making great progress, but their software is CRUD SaaS and worst case they could start over. We do not have that luxury.
Instructing Claude Code to handle a circular dependency edge case in your code and write tests for it, while reviewing the work definitely does not quality as vibe coding.
It's not helpful or justified within those conversations.
The bad experience was asking it to produce a relatively non-trivial feature in an existing Python module.
I have a bunch of classes for writing PDF files. Each class corresponds to a page template in a document (TitlePage, StatisticsPage, etc). Under the hood these classes use functions like `draw_title(x, y, title)` or `draw_table(x, y, data)`. One of these tables needed to be split across multiple pages if the number of rows exceeded the page space. So I needed Claude Code to do some sort of recursive top-level driver that would add new pages to a document until it exhausted the input data.
I spent about an hour coaching Claude through the feature, and in the end it produced something that looked superficially correct, but didn't compile. After spending some time debugging, I moved on and wrote the thing by hand. This feature was not trivial even for me to implement, and it took about 2 days. It broke the existing pattern in the module. The module was designed with the idea that `one data container = one page`, so splitting data across multiple pages was a new pattern the rest of the module needed to be adapted to. I think that's why Claud did not do well.
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The obviously good experience with Claude was getting it to add new tests to a well-structured suite of integration tests. Adding tests to this module is a boring chore, because most of the effort goes into setting up the input data. The pattern in the test suite is something like this: IntegrationTestParent class that contains all the test logic, and a bunch of IntegrationTestA/B/C/D that do data set up, and then call the parent's test method.
Claude knocked this one out of the park. There was a clear pattern to follow, and it produced code that was perfect. It saved me 1 or 2 hours, but the cool part was that it was doing this in its own terminal window, while I worked on something else. This is a type of simple task I'd give to new engineers to expose them to existing patterns.
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The last experience was asking it to write a small CLI tool from scratch in a language I don't know. The tool worked like this: you point it at a directory, and it then checks that there are 5 or 6 files in that directory, and that the files are named a certain way, and are formatted a certain way. If the files are missing or not formatted correctly, throw an error.
The tool was for another team to use, so they could check these files, before they tried forwarding these files to me. So I needed an executable binary that I could throw up onto Dropbox or something, that the other team could just download and use. I primarily code in Python/JavaScript, and making a shareable tool like that with an interpreted language is a pain.
So I had Claude whip something up in Golang. It took about 2 hours, and the tool worked as advertised. Claude was very helpful.
On the one hand, this was a clear win for Claude. On the other hand, I didn't learn anything. I want to learn Go, and I can't say that I learned any Go from the experience. Next time I have to code a tool like that, I think I'll just write it from scratch myself, so I learn something.
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Eh. I've been using "AI" tools since they came out. I was the first at my company to get the pre-LLM Copilot autocomplete, and when ChatGPT became available I became a heavy user overnight. I have tried out Cursor (hate the VSCode nature of it), and I tried out the re-branded Copilot. Now I have tried Claude Code.
I am not an "AI" skeptic, but I still don't get the foaming hype. I feel like these tools at best make me 1.5X -- which is a lot, so I will always stay on top of new tooling -- but I don't feel like I am about to be replaced.
LLMs are great at translation. Turn this English into code, essentially. But ask it to solve a novel problem like that without a description of the solution, how will it approach it? If there’s an example in its training set maybe it can recall it. Otherwise it has no capability to derive a solution.
By loop I mean you tell it no don’t implement this service, look at this file instead and mimic that and instead it does what it did before.
My observation has been this: if you push a(/any) current-day LLM too close to the edge of its abilities, it goes "insane". Hallucinations start happening everywhere, it stops ignoring previous knowledge, etc. The best way out is to end the session, maybe do some manual work to get to a good state, perhaps update the specs, and start with a fresh context. Using "strong words" or prompting more is of no consequence, the LLM will produce essentially gibberish until reset. Sometimes using a more expensive model temporarily gets around whatever is triggering the stupidity.
Among other things I work on database optimizers and there Claude fails spectacularly. It produces wrong code, fails to find the right places where to hook up an abstraction, overlooks affects on other parts of the code, and generally confidently proposes changes that simply do not work at all (to put it mildly).
Your mileage may vary... It seems to be depend heavily on the amount of existing (open) code around.
If your test structure is a pain to interact with, that usually means some bad decisions somewhere in the architecture of your project.
It feels like ChatGPT on cocaine, I mean, I asked for a small change and it came with 5 solutions changing all my codebase.
I seem to remember the 'oh no I suck' one comes out of Microsoft's programmer world? It seems like that must be a tough environment for coders if such feelings run so close to the surface that the LLMs default to it.
YMMV, though, maybe it's the way I was prompting it. Try using Plan Mode and having it only make small changes.
Cursor is a nice balance for me still. I am automating a lot of the writing but it’s still bite size pieces that feel easier to review.
Despite this, I think agents are a very welcome new weapon.
In the meanwhile one the most anticipated game in the industry, a second chapter of an already acclaimed product, has its art totally hand painted
When I hear this, I think of this recently-released study, which showed that LLMs both make coders less productive and convinced that they're more productive:
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
Until there's more research published that shows the opposite effect, I don't think we can really take peoples' squishy feelings like this as faithful to reality.
The problem-space I was exploring was libusb and Python, and I used ChatGPT and also Claude.ai to help debug some issues and flesh out some skeleton code. Claude's output was almost universally wrong. ChatGPT got a few things wrong, but was in general a lot closer to the truth.
AI might be coming for our jobs eventually, but it won't be Claude.ai.
The reason that claude code is “good” is because it can run tests, compile the code, run a linter, etc. If you actually pay attention to what it’s doing, at least in my experience, it constantly fucks up, but can sort of correct itself by taking feedback from outside tools. Eventually it proclaims “Perfect!” (which annoys me to no end), and spits out code that at least looks like it satisfies what you asked for. Then if you just ignore the tests that mock all the useful behaviors out, the amateur hour mistakes in data access patterns, and the security vulnerabilities, it’s amazing!
This has done wonders for me:
# User interaction
- Avoid sycophancy.
- Do what has been asked; nothing more, nothing less.
- If you are asked to make a change, summarize the change but do not explain its benefits.
- Be concise in phrasing but not to the point of omission.I have this sense this works best in small teams right now, because Claude wants to produce code changes and PRs. Puzzmo, where OP works, is <5 engineers.
In larger codebases, PRs don't feel like the right medium in every case for provocative AI explorations. If you're going to kick something off before a meeting and see what it might look like to solve it, it might be better to get back a plan, or a pile of regexps, or a list of teams that will care.
Having an AI produce a detailed plan for larger efforts, based on an idea, seems amazing.
At 100 dev shop size you're likely to have plenty of junior and middling devs, for whom tools like CC will act as a net negative in the short-mid term (mostly by slowing down your top devs who have to shovel the shit that CC pushes out at pace and that junior/mids can't or don't catch). Your top devs (likely somewhere around 1/5 of your workforce) will deliver 80% of the benefit of something like CC.
We're not hiring junior or even early-mid devs since around Mar/Apr. These days they cost $200/mo + $X in API spend. There's a shift in the mind-work of how "dev" is being approached. It's.. alarming, but it's happening.
When more ideas make it further you get more shots on goal. You are almost certain to have more hits!
Has anyone who’s gone decent at Clauding had matching success with other tools?
It’s like using ChatGPT in high school: it can be a phenomenal tutor, or it can do everything for you and leave you worse off.
The general lesson from this is that Results ARE NOT everything.
A couple of times I hit the daily limits and decided to try Gemini CLI with the 2.5 pro model as a replacement. That's not even comparable to Claude Code. The frustration with Gemini is just not worth it.
I couldn't imagine paying >100$/month for a dev tool in the past, but I'm seriously considering upgrading to the Max plans.
For me the sweet spot is for boilerplate (give me a blueprint of a class based on a description), translate a JSON for me into a class, or into some other format. Also "what's wrong with this code? How would a Staff Level Engineer white it?" those questions are also useful. I've found bugs before hitting debug by asking what's wrong with the code I just pounded on my keyboard by hand.
I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and being able to understand the difference between a good solution and a bad solution, they will produce tons of awful, but technically working code.
If this is the case then we better have full AI generated code within the next 10 years since those "juniors" will remain atrophied juniors forever and the old timers will be checking in with the big clock in the sky. IF we, as a field, believe that this can not possibly happen, then we are making a huge mistake leaning on a tool that requires "deep [orthogonal] experience" to operate properly.
The worst is getting, even smallish, PRs with a bunch of changes that look extraneous or otherwise off. After asking questions the code changes without the questions being answered and likely with a new set of problems. I swear I've been prompting an LLM through an engineer/PR middleman :(
A couple of week ago, I had a little down time and thought about a new algorithm I wanted to implement. In my head it seemed simple enough that 1) I thought the solution was already known, and 2) it would be fairly easy to write. So I asked Claude to "write me a python function that does Foo". I spent a whole morning going back and forth getting crap and nothing at all like what I wanted.
I don't know what inspired me, but I just started to pretend that I was talking to one one of my junior engineers. I first asked for a much simpler function that was on the way to what I wanted (well, technically, it was the mathematical inverse of what I wanted), then I asked it to modify it to add one different transform, and then another, and then another. And then finally, once the function was doing what I wanted, I asked it to write me the inverse function. And it got it right.
What was cool about it, is that it turned out to be more complex linear algebra and edge cases than I originally thought, and it would have been weeks for me to figure all of that out. But using it as a research tool and junior engineer in one was the key.
I think if we go down the "vibe coding" route, we will end up with hoards of juniors who don't understand anything and the stuff they produce with AI will be garbage and brittle. But using AI as a tool is starting to feel more compelling to me.
It still writes insane things all the time but I find it really helpful to spit out single use stuff and to brainstorm with. I try to get it to perform tasks I don't know how to accomplish (eg. computer vision experiments) and it never really works out in the end but I often learn something and I'm still very happy with my subscription.
"Review the top-most commit. Did I make any mistakes? Did I leave anything out of the commit message?"
Sometimes I let it write the message for me:
"Write a new commit message for the current commit."
I've had to tell it how to write commit messages though. It likes to offer subjective opinions, use superlatives and guess at why something was done. I've had to tell it to cut that out: "Summarize what has changes. Be concise but thorough. Avoid adjective and superlatives. Use imperative mood."
The interesting thing about all of this vibe coding skepticism, cynicism, and backlash is that many people have their expectations set extremely low. They’re convinced everything the tools produce will be junk or that the worst case examples people provide are representative of the average.
Then they finally go out and use the tools and realize that they exceed their (extremely low) expectations, and are amazed.
Yeah we all know Claude Code isn’t going to generate a $10 billion SaaS with a team of 10 people or whatever the social media engagement bait VCs are pushing this week. However, the tools are more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for.
I have recently found something that’s needed but very niche and the sort of problem that Claude can only give tips on how to go about it.
There are the social media types you mention and their polar opposites, the "LLMs have no possible use" crowd. These people are mostly delusional. At the grown-ups table, there is a spectrum of opinions about the relative usefulness.
It's not contradictory to believe that the average programmer right now has his head buried in the sand and should at least take time to explore what value LLMs can provide, while at the same time taking a more conservative approach when using them to do actual work.
I tried to use it for Python, Rust and Bash. I also tried to use it for crawling and organizing information. I also tried to use it as a debugging buddy. All of the attempts failed.
I simply don't understand how people are using it in a way that improves productivity. For me, all of this is so far a huge timesink with essentially nothing to show for it.
The single positive result was when I asked it to optimize a specific SQL query, and it managed to do it.
Anyway I will keep trying to use it, maybe something needs to click first and it just hasn't yet.
Not trying to argue, since I don’t have counter evidence, but how can you be so sure?
Or they have actually used all these tools, know how they work, and don't buy into hype and marketing.
No, Claude can create logs all across my codebase with much better formatting far faster than I can, so I can focus on actual problem solving. It's frustrating, but par for the course for this forum.
Edit: Dishonest isn't correct, I should have said I just disagree with their statements. I do apologize.
I know I’m being pedantic, but people mean very different things when they talk about this stuff, and I don’t think any credence should be given to vibe coding.
When I try the more complex things I will do multiple passes with AI, have 2-3 LLMs review it and delete deprecated code, refactor, interrogate it and ask it to fix bad patterns, etc. In an evening I can refactor a large code base this way. For example Gemini is meh compared to Claude Opus at new code, but somewhat decent for reviewing code that's already there, since the 1M context window allows it to tie things together Claude wouldn't be able to fit in 256k. I might then bounce a suggestion back from Gemini -> Claude -> Grok to fix something. It's kind of like managing a team of interns with different specialties and personalities.
Maybe you're thinking of slop coding?
Similarly amazed as an experienced dev with 20 YoE (and a fellow Slovak, although US based). The other tools, while helpful, were just not "there" and they were often simply more trouble than they were worth producing a lot of useless garbage. Claude Code is clearly on another level, yes it needs A LOT of handholding; my MO is do Plan Mode until I'm 100% sure it understands the reqs and the planned code changes are reasonable, then let it work, and finally code review what it did (after it auto-fixes things like compiler errors, unit test failures and linting issues). It's kind of like a junior engineer that is a little bit daft but very knowledgeable but works super, super fast and doesn't talk back :)
It is definitely the future, what can I say? This is a clear direction where software development is heading.
The first commit towards the fix was plausible, though still not fully correct, but in the end not only it wasn't able to fix it, each commit was also becoming more and more baroque. I cut it when it wrote almost 100 lines of code to compare version numbers (which already existed in the source). The problem with discussing the plan is that, while debugging, you don't yourself have a full idea of the plan.
I don't call it a total failure because I asked the AI to improve some error messages to help it debug, and I will keep that code. It's pretty good at writing new code, very good at reviewing it, but for me it was completely incapable of performing maintainance.
I wonder, are most devs with a job paying for it themselves, rather than the company they work for?
It is very useful for simpler tasks like writing tests, converting code bases etc where the hard part is already done.
When it comes to actually doing something hard - it is not very useful at least in my experience.
And if you do something even a bit niche - it is mostly useless and its faster do dig into topic on your own that try to have Claude implement it.
And, yet, when I asked it to correct a CMake error in a fully open source codebase (broken dependency declaration), it couldn't work it out. It even started hallucinating version numbers and dependencies that were so obviously broken that at least it was obvious to me that it wasn't helping.
This has been, and continues to be, my experience with AI coding. Every time I hit something that I really, really want the AI to do and get right (like correcting my build system errors), it fails and fails miserably.
It seems like everybody who sings the praises of AI coding all have one thing in common--Javascript. Make of that what you will.
As I've improved planning and context management, the results have been fairly consistent. As long as I can keep a task within the context window, it does a decent job almost every time. And occasionally I have to have it brute-force its way to green lint/typecheck/tests. That's been one of the biggest speed bumps.
I've found that gemini is great at the occasional detailed code-review to help find glaring issues or things that were missed, but having it implement anything has been severely lacking. I have to literally tell it not to do anything because it will gladly just start writing files on a whim. I generally use the opus model to write detailed plans, sonnet to implement, and then opus and gemini to review and plan refactors.
I'm impressed. The progress is SLOW. I'd have gotten to the stage I'm at in 1/3 to 1/2 the time, likely with fewer tests and significantly less process documentation. But the results are otherwise fairly great. And the learning process has kept me motivated to keep this old side-project moving.
I was switching between two accounts for a week while testing, but in the end upgraded to the $100/month plan and I think I've been rate-limited once since. I don't know if I'll be using this for every-day professional work, but I think it's a great tool for a few categories of work.
I have not tried it, for a variety of reasons, but my (quite limited, anecdotal, and gratis) experience with other such tools is, that I can get them to write something I could perhaps get as an answer on StackOverflow: Limited scope, limited length, address at most one significant issue; and perhaps that has to do with what they are trained on. But that once things get complicated, it's hopeless.
You said Claude Code was significantly better than some alternatives, so better than what I describe, but - we need to know _on what_.
Contrast this with the peg parser VM it basically one-shotted but needed a bunch of debug work. A fuzzy spec (basically just the lpeg paper) and a few iterations and it produced a fully tested VM. After that the AST -> Opcode compiler was super easy as it just had to do some simple (fully defined by this point) transforms and Bob's your uncle. Not the best code ever but a working and tested system.
Then my predilection for yak shaving took over as the AST needed to be rewritten to make integration as a python C extension module viable (and generated). And why have separate AST and opcode optimization passes when they can be integrated? Oh, and why even have opcodes in the first place when you can rewrite the VM to use Continuation Passing Style and make the entire machine AST-> CPS Transform -> Optimizer -> Execute with a minimum of fuss?
So, yeah, I think it's fair to say the daffy robots are a little more than a StackOverflow chatbot. Plus, what I'm really working on is a lot more complicated than this, needing to redo the AST was just the gateway drug.
I could see me paying for higher tiers given the productivity gains.
The only issue I can see is that we might end up with a society where those that can afford the best subscriptions have more free time, get more done, make more money and are more successful in general. Even current base level subscriptions are too expensive for huge percentage of the global population.
Sadly, my experience with the Max plan has been extremely poor. It’s not even comparable, I’ve been vastly experimenting with claude code in the last weeks, spending more than 80$ per day, it’s amazing. The problem is that in the Max plan you’re not the one managing the context length, and this ruins the model ability to keep things memory. Of course this is expected, the longer the context the more expensive to run, but it’s so frustrating to fail in a coding task because it’s so obvious the model lost a crucial part of the context.
Agreed that context and chunking are the key to making it productive. The times when I've tried to tell it (in a single prompt) everything I want it to do, were not successful. The code was garbage, and a lot of it just didn't do what I wanted it to do. And when there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, CC has trouble making targeted changes to fix issues one by one. Much better is to build each small chunk, and verify that it fully works, before moving on to the next.
You also have to call its bullshit: sometimes it will try to solve a problem in a way you know is wrong, so you have to stop it and tell it to do it in another way. I suppose I shouldn't call it "bullshit"; if we're going to use the analogy of CC being like an inexperienced junior engineer, then that's just the kind of thing that happens when you pair with a junior.
I still often do find that I give it a task, and when it's done, realize that I could have finished it much faster. But sometimes the task is tedious, and I'm fine with it taking a little longer if I don't have to do it myself. And sometimes it truly does take care of it faster than I would have been able to. In the case of tech that I'm learning myself (React, Tailwindcss, the former of which I dabbled with 10 years ago, but my knowledge is completely out of date), CC has been incredibly useful when I don't really know how to do something. I'm fine letting CC do it, and then I read the code and learn something myself, instead of having to pore over various tutorials of varying quality in order to figure it out on my own.
So I think I'm convinced, and I'll continue to make CC more and more a part of my workflow. I'm currently on the Pro plan, and have hit the usage limits a couple times. I'm still a little shy about upgrading to Max and spending $100/mo on a dev tool... not sure if I'll get over that or not.
Has anyone here used both Claude Code and Amp and can compare the two's effectiveness? I know one is CLI and the other an editor extensions. I'm looking for comparisons beyond that. Thanks!
I agree with many things that the author is doing:
1. Monorepos can save time
2. Start with a good spec. Spend enough time on the spec. You can get AI to write most of the spec for you, if you provide a good outline.
3. Make sure you have tests from the beginning. This is the most important part. Tests (along with good specs) are how an AI agent can recurse into a good solution. TDD is back.
4. Types help (a lot!). Linters help as well. These are guard rails.
5. Put external documentation inside project docs, for example in docs/external-deps.
6. And finally, like every tool it takes time to figure out a technique that works best for you. It's arguably easier than it was (especially with Claude Code), but there's still stuff to learn. Everyone I know has a slightly different workflow - so it's a bit like coding.
I vibe coded quite a lot this week. Among them, Permiso [1] - a super simple GraphQL RBAC server. It's nowhere close to best tested and reviewed, but can be quite useful already if you want something simple (and can wait until it's reviewed.)
It can, in fact, control your entire computer. If there's a CLI tool, Claude can run it. If there's not a CLI tool... ask Claude anyway, you might be surprised.
E.g. I've used Claude to crop and resize images, rip MP3s from YouTube videos, trim silence from audio files, the list goes on. It saves me incredible amounts of time.
I don't remember life before it. Never going back.
This is for a personal project, I haven’t written a ton of C# or done this amount of refactoring before, so this could be educational in multiple ways.
If I were to use Claude for this Id feel like I was robbing myself of something that could teach me a lot (and maybe motivate me to start out with structuring my code better in the future). If I don’t use Claude I feel like Im wasting my (very sparse) free time on a pretty uninspiring task that may very well be automated away in most future jobs, mostly out of some (misplaced? Masochistic?) belief about programming craft.
This sort of back and forth happens a lot in my head now with projects.
1. Immediately change to sonnet (the cli defaults to opus for max users). I tested coding with opus extensively and it never matches the quality of sonnet.
2. Compacting often ends progress - it's difficult to get back to the same quality of code after compacting.
3. First prompt is very important and sets the vibe. If your instance of Claude seems hesitant, doubtful, sometimes even rude, it's always better to end the session and start again.
4. There are phrases that make it more effective. Try, "I'm so sorry if this is a bad suggestion, but I want to implement x and y." For whatever reason it makes Claude more eager to help.
5. Monolithic with docker orchestration: I essentially 10x'd when I started letting Claude itself manage docker containers, check their logs for errors, rm them, rebuild them, etc. Now I can get an entirely new service online in a docker container, from zero to operational, in one Claude prompt.
1. It takes away the pain of starting. I have no barrier to writing text but there is a barrier to writing the first line of code, to a large extend coming form just remembering the context, where to import what from, setting up boilerplate etc.
2. While it works I can use my brain capacity to think about what I'm doing.
3. I can now do multiple things in parallel.
4. It makes it so much easier to "go the extra mile" (I don't add "TODOs" anymore in the code I just spin up a new Claude for it)
5. I can do much more analysis, (like spinnig up detailed plotting / analysis scripts)
6. It fixes most simple linting/typing/simple test bugs for me automatically.
Overall I feel like this kind of coding allows me to focus about the essence: What should I be doing? Is the output correct? What can we do to make it better?
Now literally between prompts, I had a silly idea to write a NYT Connections game in the terminal and three prompts later it was done: https://github.com/jleclanche/connections-tui
This especially. I've never worked at a place that didn't skimp on tests or tech debt due to limited resources. Now you can get a decent test suite just from saying you want it.
Will it satisfy purists? No, but lots of mid hanging fruit long left unpicked can now be automatically picked.
But the bulk of it, is that you get absolutely top tier tests for the same level of effort as a half-assed attempt.
If you set it up with good test quality tools (mutation testing is my favorite) it goes even further - beyond what I think is actually reasonable to ask a human to test unless you're e.g. writing life and safety critical systems.
For example, last week i decided to play with nushell, i have a somewhat simple .zshrc so i just gave it to claude and asked it to convert it to nushell. The nu it generated for the most part was not even valid, i spent 30 mins with it, it never worked. took me about 10 minutes in the docs to convert it.
So it's miserable experiences like that that make me want to never touch it, because I might get burned again. There are certainly things that I have found value in, but its so hit or miss that i just find my self not wanting to bother.
> I believe with Claude Code, we are at the
> “introduction of photography” period of
> programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t
> have the same appeal anymore when a single
> concept can just appear and you shape it
> into the thing you want with your code review
> and editing skills.
I like coding by hand. I dislike reviewing code (although I do it, of course). Given the choice, I'll opt for the former (and perhaps that's why I'm still an IC).
When people talk about coding agents as very enthusiastic but very junior engineering interns, it fills me with dread rather than joy.
Especially with very precise language. I've heard of people using speech to text to use it which opens up all sorts of accessibility windows.
Letting Claude rest was a great point in the article, too. I easily get manifold value compared to what I pay, so I haven't got it grinding on its own on a bunch of things in parallel and offline. I think it could quickly be an accelerator for burnout and cruft if you aren't careful, so I keep to a supervised-by-human mode.
Wrote up some more thoughts a few weeks ago at https://www.modulecollective.com/posts/agent-assisted-coding....
I remember when JetBrains made programming so much easier with their refactoring tools in IntelliJ IDEA. To me (with very limited AI experience) this seems to be a similar step, but bigger.
Not saying this is more useful per se, just saying that different approaches have their pros and cons.
What’s actually happening is there’s a divide being created between engineers that know how to use it, and engineers that don’t or want to convince themselves that it’s useless or whatever.
Group 2 will not fare well in the coming months.
build me a page and the crud endpoints to manage it. -> done in 2 minutes.
1. I am vain and having people link to my stuff fills the void in my broken soul
2. He REALLY put in the legwork to document in a concrete way what it looks like for these tools to enable someone to move up a level of abstraction. The iron triangle has always been Quality, Scope, Time. This innovation is such an accelerant that that ambitious programmers can now imagine game-changing increases in scope without sacrificing quality and in the same amount of time.
For this particular moment we're in, I think this post will serve as a great artifact of what it felt like.
I'm a heavy user of Claude Code and I use it like a coding assistant.
How well you can manage a development team in real life has strong correlations on how much value you get out of an LLM based coding assistant.
If you can't describe what success looks like, expect people to read your mind, and get angry at validating questions, then you will have problems both with coding assistants and leading teams of developers.
If you're just letting the coding assistant do its thing, uncritically, and committing whatever results, then you're vibe coding.
It sounds like you're not vibe coding. That's good. No need to throw away a useful term (even if it's a weird, gen-Z sounding term) that describes a particular (poor) way to use a LLM.
The point that I'm probably missing (and others) is that we associate the phrase 'Vibe Coding' with 'Using an LLM to help with coding' and they're not the same.
Maybe the critics of Vibe Coding need to remember that all users of LLMs for coding support aren't about to regret their life choices.
Prompting an LLM is definitely a different skillset from actually coding, but just "describing it better" isn't good enough.
As in the former is hyped, but the latter - stopping to ask questions, reflect, what should we do - is really powerful. I find I'm more thoughtful, doing deeper research, and asking deeper questions than if I was just hacking something together on the weekend that I regretted later.
I use this with legacy code too. “Lines n—n+10 smell wrong to me, but I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do to fix it.” Gemini has done well for me at guessing what my gut was upset about and coming up with the solution. And then it just presses all the buttons. Job done.
Without going too philosophical, although one is not unjustified in going there, and just focusing on my own small professional corner (software engineering): these llm developments mostly kill an important part of thinking and might ultimately make me dumber. For example, I know what a B tree is and can (could) painstakingly implement one when and if I needed to, the process of which would be long, full of mistakes and learning. Now, just having a rough idea will be enough, and most people will never get the chance to do it themselves. Now B-tree is an intentionally artificial example, but you can extrapolate that to more practical or realistic examples. On a more immediate front, there's also the matter of threat to my livelihood. I have significant expenses for the foreseeable future, and if my line of work gets a 100 or even 10x average productivity boost, there just might be less jobs going around. Farm ox watching the first internal combustion tractors.
I can think of many other reasons, but those are the most pressing and personal to me.
What it excels at is translation. This is what LLMs were originally designed for after all.
It could be between programming languages, like "translate this helm chart into a controller in Go". It will happily spit out all the structs and basic reconciliation logic. Gets some wrong but even after correcting those bits still saves so much time.
And of course writing precise specs in English, it will translate them to code. Whether this really saves time I'm not so convinced. I still have to type those specs in English, but now what I'm typing is lost and what I get is not my own words.
Of course it's good at generating boilerplate, but I never wrote much boilerplate by hand anyway.
I've found it's quite over eager to generate swathes of code when you wanted to go step by step and write tests for each new bit. It doesn't really "get" test-driven development and just wants to write untested code.
Overall I think it's without doubt amazing. But then so is a clown at a children's birthday party. Have you seen those balloon animals?! I think it's useful to remain sceptical and not be amazed by something just because you can't do it. Amazing doesn't mean useful.
I worry a lot about what's happening in our industry. Already developers get away with incredibly shoddy practices. In other industries such practices would get you struck off, licences stripped, or even sent to prison. Now we have to contend with juniors and people who don't even understand programming generating software that runs.
I can really see LLMs becoming outlawed in software development for software that matters, like medical equipment or anything that puts the public in danger. But maybe I'm being overly optimistic. I think generally people understand the dangers of an electrician mislabelling a fusebox or something, but don't understand the dangers of shoddy software.
They know a lot about a lot of things but the details get all jumbled up in their stupid robot brains so you have to help them out a bunch.
Personally, I'm less sold on tracking prompts as being valuable both for production cases (imo if a human should read it, a human should have wrote/fully edited it applies to commits/PRs/docs etc) and for vibe cases where the prompts are more transitory
I feel like the results I get are qualitatively superior to anything I've seen anyone I've worked with produce. The fact that it's a lot faster is just gravy on top.
I don’t understand how people have the patience to do an entire application just vibe coding the whole time. As the article suggests, it doesn’t even save that much time.
If it can’t be done in one shot with simple context I don’t want it.
Today I (not a programmer, although programming for 20+ years, but mostly statistics) started building with Claude Code via Pro. Burned through my credits in about 3 hours. Got to MVP (happy tear in my eye). Actually one of the best looks I've ever gotten from my son. A look like, wow, dad, that's more than I'd ever think you could manage.
Tips:
- Plan ahead! I've had Claude tell me that a request would fit better way back on the roadmap. My roadmap manages me.
- Force Claude to build a test suite and give debugging info everywhere (backend, frontend).
- Claude and me work together on a clear TODO. He needs guidance as well as I do. It forgot a very central feature of my MVP. Do not yet know why. Asked kindly and it was built.
Questions (not specifically to you kind HN-folks, although tips are welcome):
- Why did I burn through my credits in 3 hours?
- How can I force Claude to keep committed to my plans, my CLAUDE.md, etc.
- Is there a way to ask Claude to check the entire project for consistency? And/Or should I accept that vibing will leave crusts spread around?
You can just ask claude to review your code, write down standard, verify that code is produced according to standards and guidelines. And if it finds that project is not consistent, ask it to make a plan and execute on the plan.
Ask, ask, ask.
Recently they had to lower token allowances because they're haemorrhaging money.
You can run "ccusage" in the background to keep tabs, so you're leas surprised, is all I can say.
Enjoy the cheap inference while you can, unless someone cracks the efficiency puzzle the frontier models might get a lot more expensive at one point.
I mostly spend my days administering SaaS tools, and one of my largest frustrations has always been that I didn’t know enough to really build a good plugin or add-on for whatever tool I was struggling with, and I’d find a limited set of good documentation or open source examples to help me out. With my limited time (full time job) and attendant challenges (ADHD & autism + all the fun trauma that comes from that along with being Black, fat and queer), I struggled to ever start anything out of fear of failure or I’d begin a course and get bored because I wasn’t doing anything that captured my imagination & motivation.
Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and even the Claude app have absolutely changed the game for me. I’m learning more than ever, because even the shitty code that these tools can write is an opportunity for debugging and exploration, but I have something tangible to iterate on. Additionally, I’ve found that Claude is really good at giving me lessons and learning based on an idea I have, and then I have targeted learning I can go do using source docs and tutorials that are immediately relevant to what I’m doing instead of being faced with choice paralysis. Being able to build broken stuff in seconds that I want to get working (a present problem is so much more satisfying than a future one) and having a tool that knows more than I do about code most of the time but never gets bored of my silly questions or weird metaphors has been so helpful in helping me build my own tools. Now I think about building my own stuff first before I think about buying something!
Being able to override some hard coded vendor crap has been useful.
We have tonnes of code that's been built over a decade with all kinds of idioms and stylistic conventions that are enforced primarily through manual review. This relates in part to working in a regulated environment where we know certain types of things need radical transparency and auditability, so writing code the "normal" way a developer would is problematic.
So I am curious how well it can see the existing code style and then implicitly emulate that? My current testing of other tools seems to suggest they don't handle it very well; typically I am getting code that looks very foreign to the existing code. It exhibits the true "regression to the mean" spirit of LLMs where it's providing me with "how would the average competent engineer write this", which is not at all how we need the code written.
Currently, this is the main barrier to us using these tools in our codebase.
I work on Chromium and my experience improved immensely by using a detailed context document (~3,000 words) with all sorts of relevant information, from the software architecture and folder organisation to the C++ coding style.
(The first draft of that document was created by Claude itself from the project documentation.)
I created some tutorial files which contain ways to do a lot of standard things. Turns out humans found these useful too. With the examples, I've found Opus generally does a good job following existing idioms, while Sonnet struggles.
Nice collapsible HTML logs of agent conversations (inspired by Mario Zechner’s Claude-trace), which took a couple hours of iterations, involving HTML/js/CSS:
https://langroid.github.io/langroid/notes/html-logger/
A migration from Pydantic-v1 to v2, which took around 7 hours of iterations (would have taken a week at least if I even tried it manually and still probably wouldn’t have been as bullet-proof):
I had a similar thought about the Turing Test…
It as science fiction for decades… then it passed silently in the night and we barely noticed.
The best results come from working iteratively with it. I reject about 1/3 of edits to request some changes or a change of direction.
If you just try to have it jam on code until the end result appears to work then you will be disappointed. But that’s operator error.
Police it, and give it explicit instructions.
Then after it's done its work prompt it with something like "You're the staff engineer or team lead on this project, and I want you to go over your own git diff like it's a contribution from a junior team member. Think critically and apply judgement based on the architecture of the project describes @HERE.md and @THERE.md."
...and if something is genuinely complex, it will (imo) generally do a bad job. It will produce something that looks like it works superficially, but as you examine it will either not work in a non-obvious way or be poorly designed.
Still very useful but to really improve your productivity you have to understand when not to use it.
For example, heard many say that doing big refactorings is causing problems. Found a way that is working for SwiftUI projects. I did a refactoring, moving files, restructuring large files into smaller components, and standardizing component setup of different views.
The pattern that works for me: 1) ask it to document the architecture and coding standards, 2) ask it to create a plan for refactoring, 3) ask it to do a low-risk refactoring first, 4) ask it to update the refacting plan, and then 5) go through all the remaining refactorings.
The refactoring plan comes with timeline estimates in days, but that is completely rubbish with claude code. Instead i asked it to estimate in 1) number of chat messages, 2) number of tokens, 3) cost based on number of tokens, 4) number of files impacted.
Another approach that works well is to first generate a throw away application. Then ask it to create documentation how to do it right, incorporate all the learning and where it got stuck. Finally, redo the application with these guidelines and rules.
Another tip, sometimes when it gets stuck, i open the project in windsurf, and ask another LLM (e.g., Gemini 2.5 pro, or qwen coder) to review the project and problem and then I will ask windsurf to provide me with a prompt to instruct claude code to fix it. Works well in some cases.
Also, biggest insight so far: don't expect it to be perfect first time. It needs a feedback loop: generate code, test the code, inspect the results and then improve the code.
Works well for SQL, especially if it can access real data: inspect the database, try some queries, try to understand the schema from your data and then work towards a SQL query that works. And then often as a final step it will simplify the working query.
I use an MCP tool with full access to a test database, so you can tell it to run explain plan and look at the statistics (pg_stat_statements). It will draw a mermaid diagram of your query, with performance numbers included (nr records retrieved, cache hit, etc), and will come back with optimized query and index suggestions.
Tried it also on csv and parquet files with duckdb, it will run the explain plan, compare both query, explain why parquet is better, will see that the query is doing predicate push down, etc.
Also when it gets things wrong, instead of inspecting the code, i ask it to create a design document with mermaid diagrams describing what it has built. Quite often that quickly shows some design mistake that you can ask it to fix.
Also with multiple tools on the same project, you have the problem of each using it's own way of keeping track of the plan. I asked claude code to come up with rules for itself and windsurf to collaborate on a project. It came back with a set of rules for CLAUDE.md and .windsurfrules on which files to have, and how to use them (PLAN.md, TODO.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, DECISION.md, COLLABORATION.md)
I’m not going to tell you it’s not useful, it is. But then shine wears off pretty fast and when it does, you’re basically left with a faster way to type. At least in my experience.
It’s amazing , but it’s dumb.
The benefit of Claude Code is that you can pay a fixed monthly fee and get a lot more than you would with API requests alone.
A lot of people are saying that cursor is much worse than Claude Code who have used both.
Curious how you outline the spec, concretely. A sister markdown document? How detailed is it? etc.
> 3. Make sure you have tests from the beginning. This is the most important part. Tests (along with good specs) are how an AI agent can recurse into a good solution. TDD is back.
Ironically i've been struggling with this. For best results i've found claude to do best with a test hook, but then claude loses the ability to write tests before code works to validate bugs/assumptions, it just starts auto fixing things and can get a bit wonky.
It helps immensely to ensure it doesn't forget anything or abandon anything, but it's equally harmful at certain design/prototype stages. I've taken to having a flag where i can enable/disable the test behavior lol.
Yes. I write the outline in markdown. And then get AI to flesh it out. The I generate a project structure, with stubbed API signatures. Then I keep refining until I've achieved a good level of detail - including full API signatures and database schemas.
> Ironically i've been struggling with this. For best results i've found claude to do best with a test hook, but then claude loses the ability to write tests before code works to validate bugs/assumptions, it just starts auto fixing things and can get a bit wonky.
I generate a somewhat basic prototype first. At which point I have a good spec, and a good project structure, API and db schemas. Then continuously refine the tests and code. Like I was saying, types and linting are also very helpful.
https://github.com/jerpint/context-llemur
CLI for the humans, MCP for the LLMS. Whatever is in the context repository should be used by the LLM for its next steps and you are both responsible for maintaining it as tasks start getting done and the project evolves
I’ve been having good success with it so far
(or -- you can write a spec that is still more fleshed out for humans, if you need to present this to managers. Then ask the LLM to write a separate spec document that is tailored for LLMs)
Yes they can save you some time, but at the cost of Claude's time and lots of tokens making tool calls attempting to find what it needs to find. Aider is much nicer, from the standpoint that you can add the files you need it to know about, and send it off to do its thing.
I still don't understand why Claude is more popular than Aider, which is by nearly every measure a better tool, and can use whatever LLM is more appropriate for the task at hand.
As a user, I don't want to sit there specifying about 15-30 files, then realize that I've missed some and that it ruins everything. I want to just point the tool at the codebase and tell it: "Go do X. Look at the current implementation and patterns, as well as the tests, alongside the docs. Update everything as needed along the way, here's how you run the tests..."
Indexing the whole codebase into Qdrant might also help a little.
Honestly, it's just this. "Claude the bar button on foo modal is broken with a failed splork". And CC hunts down foo.ts, traces that it's an API call to query.ts, pulls in the associated linked model, traces the api/slork.go and will as often as not end up with "I've found the issue!" and fix it. On a one sentence prompt. I think it's called an "Oh fuck" moment the first time you see this work. And it works remarkably reliably. [handwave caveats, stupid llms, etc]
Use /add-dir in Claude
I’ve been working on a Django project with good tests, types and documentation. CC mostly does great, even if it needs guidance from time to time
Recently also started a side project to try to run CC offline with local models. Got a decent first version running with the help of ChatGPT, then decided to switch to CC. CC has been constantly trying to avoid solving the most important issues, sidestepping errors and for almost everything just creating a new file/script with a different approach (instead of fixing or refactoring the current code)
For unit testing, I actually pre-write some tests so it can learn what structure I'm looking for. I go as far as to write mocks and test classes that *constrain* what it can do.
With constraints, it does a much better job than if it were just starting from scratch and improvising.
There's a numerical optimization analogy to this: if you just ask a solver to optimize a complicated nonlinear (nonconvex) function, you will likely get stuck or hit a local optimum. But if you carefully constrain its search space, and guide it, you increase your chances of getting to the optimum.
LLMs are essentially large function evaluators with a huge search space. The more you can herd it (like herding a flock into the right pen), the better it will converge.
Most projects have their documentation on their website. Do you spend time formatting it into a clean Markdown file?
We have Linux instances running an IDE running in cloud vms that we can access through the browser at https://brilliant.mplode.dev. Personally I think this is closer to the ideal UX for operating an agent (our environment doesn't install agents by default yet, but you should be able to just install them manually). You don't have to do anything to set up terminal access or ssh except sign in and wait for your initial instance to start, and once you have any instance provisioned it automatically pauses and resumes based on whether your browser has it open. It's literally Claude + A personal Linux instance + an IDE that you can just open from a link
Pretty soon I should be able run as many of these at a time as I can afford, and control all of their permissions/filesystems/whatever with JWTs and containers. If it gets messed up or needs my attention I open it with the IDE as my UI and can just dive in and fix it. I don't need a regular Linux desktop environment or UI or anything. Just render things in panes of the IDE or launch a container serving a webapp doing what I want and open it instead of the IDE. Haven't ever felt this excited about tech progress
>> I thought I would see a pretty drastic change in terms of Pull Requests, Commits and Line of Code merged in the last 6 weeks. I don’t think that holds water though
The chart basically shows same output with claude than before. Which kinda represents what I felt when using LLMs.
You "feel" more productive and you definitely feel "better" because you don't do the work now, you babysit the model and feel productive.
But at the end of the day the output is the same because all advantages of LLMs is nerfed by time you have to review all that, fix it, re-prompt it etc.
And because you offload the "hard" part - and don't flex that thinking muscle - your skills decline pretty fast.
Try using Claude or another LLM for a month and then try doing a tiny little app without it. Its not only the code part that will seem hard - but the general architecture/structuring too.
And in the end the whole code base slowly (but not that slowly) degrades and in longer term results net negative. At least with current LLMs.
You don't have to try to remember your code as a conceptual whole, what your technical implementation of the next hour of code was going to be like at the same time as a stubborn bug is taunting you.
You just ask Mr smartybots and it deliver anything between proofreading and documentation and whatnot, with some minor fuckups occasionally
I handed it the reigns just out of morbid curiosity, and because I couldn't be bothered continuing for the night, but to my surprise (and with my guidance step by step) it did figure it all out. It found unused kernels, after uninstalling them didn't remove them, it deleted them with rm. It then helped resolve the broken package state and eventually I was back in a clean working state.
Importantly though, it did not know it hadn't actually cleaned up the boot partition initially. I had to insist that it had not in fact just freed up space, and that it would need to remove them.
https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools
For example this lets CC spawn another CC instance and give it a task (way better than the built-in spawn-and-let-go black box), or interact with CLI scripts that expect user input, or use debuggers like Pdb for token-efficient debugging and code-understanding, etc.
Automation is now trivially easy. I think of another new way to speed up my workflow — e.g. a shell script for some annoying repetitive task — and Claude oneshots it. Productivity gains built from productivity gains.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
... while also exposing the contents of your computer to surveillence.
No Claude Code needed for that! Just hang around r/unixporn and you'll collect enough scripts and tips to realize that mainstream OS have pushed computers from a useful tool to a consumerism toy.
At least that's how I read the comment.
Honestly, that sounds like malware.
Example: Yesterday I was working with an Open API 3.0 schema. I know I could "fix" the schema to conform to a sample input, I just didn't feel like it because it's dull, I've done it before, and I'd learn nothing. So I asked Claude to do it, and it was fine. Then the "Example" section no longer matched the schema, so Claude wrote me a fitting example.
But the key here is I would have learned nothing by doing this.
There are, however, times where I WOULD have learned something. So whenever I find the LLM has shown me something new, I put that knowledge in my "knowledge bank". I use the Anki SRS flashcard app for that, but there are other ways, like adding to your "TIL blog" (which I also do), or taking that new thing and writing it out from scratch, without looking at the solution, a few times and compiling/running it. Then trying to come up with ways this knowledge can be used in different ways; changing the requirements and writing that.
Basically getting my brain to interact with this new thing in at least 2 ways so it can synthesize with other things in your brain. This is important.
Learning a new (spoken) language uses this a lot. Learn a new word? Put it in 3 different sentences. Learn a new phrase? Create at least 2-3 new phrases based on that.
I'm hoping this will keep my grey matter exercised enough to keep going.
Errors compound with LLM coding, and, unless you correct them, you end up with a codebase too brittle to actually be worth anything.
Friends of mine apparently don't have that problem, and they say they have the LLM write enough tests that they catch the brittleness early on, but I haven't tried that approach. Unfortunately, my code tends to not be very algorithmic, so it's hard to test.
My two cents are:
If your goal is learning fully, I would prioritize the slow & patient route (no matter how fast “things” are moving.)
If your goal is to learn quickly, Claude Code and other AI tooling can be helpful in that regard. I have found using “ask” modes more than “agent” modes (where available) can go a long way with that. I like to generate analogies, scenarios, and mnemonic devices to help grasp new concepts.
If you’re just interested in getting stuff done, get good at writing specs and letting the agents run with it, ensuring to add many tests along the way, of course.
I perceive there’s at least some value in all approaches, as long as we are building stuff.
Boring, uninspiring, commodity - and most of all - easily reversible and not critical - to the LLM it goes!
When learning things intrinsic motivation makes one unreasonably effective. So if there is a field you like - just focus on it. This will let you proceed much faster at _valuable_ things which all in all is the best use of ones time in any case.
Software crafting when you are not at a job should be fun. If it’s not fun, just do the least effort that suits your purpose. And be super diligent only about the parts _you_ care about.
IMHO people who think everyone should do everything from first principles with the diligence of a swiss clocksmith are just being difficult. It’s _one_ way of doing it but it’s not the _only right way_.
Care about important things. If a thing is not important and not interesting just deal with it the least painfull way and focus on something value adding.
Really if your goal is to learn something, then no matter what you do there has to be some kind of struggle. I’ve noticed whenever something feels easy, I’m usually not really learning much.
That being said, you have to protect your time as a developer. There are a million things to learn, and if making games is your goal as a junior, porting GDscript code doesn't sound like an amazing use of your time. Even though you will definitely learn from it.
My problem with it is that it produces _good looking_ code that, at a glance, looks 'correct', and occasionally even works. But then i look at it closely, and it's actually bad code, or has written unnecessary additional code that isn't doing anything, or has broken some other section of the app, etc.
So if you don't know enough C# to tell whether the C# it's spitting out is good or not, you're going to have a bad time
Things are moving fast at the moment, but I think it feels even faster because of how slowly things have been moving for the last decade. I was getting into web development in the mid-to-late-90s, and I think the landscape felt similar then. Plugged-in people kinda knew the web was going to be huge, but on some level we also know that things were going to change fast. Whatever we learnt would soon fall by the wayside and become compost for the next new thing we had to learn.
It certainly feels to me like things have really been much more stable for the last 10-15 years (YMMV).
So I guess what I'm saying is: yeah, this is actually kinda getting back to normal. At least that is how I see it, if I'm in an excitable optimistic mood.
I'd say pick something and do it. It may become brain-compost, but I think a good deep layer of compost is what will turn you into a senior developer. Hopefully that metaphor isn't too stretched!
This has largely been true outside of some outlier fundamentals, like TCP.
I have tried Claude code extensively and I feel it’s largely the same. To GP’s point, my suggestion would be to dive into the project using Claude Code and also work to learn how to structure the code better. Do both. Don’t do nothing.
Often I'll use Claude Code to write something that I know how to write, but don't feel like writing, either because it's tedious, or because it's a little bit fiddly (which I know from past experience), and I don't feel like dealing with the details until CC gives me some output that I can test and review and modify.
But sometimes, I'll admit, I just don't really care to learn that deeply. I started a project that is using Rust for the backend, but I need a frontend too. I did some React around 10 years ago, but my knowledge there (what I remember, anyway) is out of date. So sometimes I'll just ask Claude to build an entire section of a page. I'll have Claude do it incrementally, and read the code after each step so I understand what's going on. And sometimes I do tell Claude I'm not happy with the approach, and to do something differently. But in a way I kinda do not care so much about this code, aside from it being functional and maintainable-looking.
And I think that's fine! We don't have to learn everything, even if it's something we need to accomplish whatever it is we've set out to accomplish. I think the problem that you'll run into is that you might be too junior to recognize what are the things you really need to learn, and what are the things you can let something else "learn" for you.
One of the things I really worry about this current time we're in is that companies will start firing their junior engineers, with a belief (however misguided) that their senior engineers, armed with coding assistants, can be just as productive. So junior engineers will lose their normal path to gaining experience, and young adults entering college will shy away from programming, since it's hard to get a job as a junior engineer. Then when those senior engineers start to retire, there will be no one to take their places. Of course, the current crop of company management won't care; they'll have made their millions already and be retired. So... push to get as much experience as you can, and get over the hump into senior engineer territory.
But I do think it could help, for example by showing you a better pattern or language or library feature after you get stuck or finish a first draft. That's not cheating that's asking a friend.
The best way to skill up over the course of one's career is to expose yourself to as broad an array of languages, techniques, paradigms, concepts, etc. So sure, you may never touch C# again. But by spending time to dig in a bit you'll pick up some new ideas that you can bring forward with you to other things you *do* care about later.
You're on the right track in noticing you'll be missing valuable lessons, and this might rob you of better outcomes even with AI in the future. As it is a side project though keeping motivation is important too.
As well, you'll eventually learn those lessons through future work if you keep coding yourself. But if instead you lean more toward assistance it is hard to say if you would become as skilled in the raw skill of coding, and that might affect yoir abilityto wield AI to full effecf.
Having done a lot of work across many languages, including gdscript and C# for various games, I do think you'll learn a huge amount from doing the work yourself and such an opportunity is a bit more rare to come by in paid work.
Then i'd ask it to create a plan to recreate it in c#.
Next i'd ask claude code to generate a new project in c#, following the small steps it defined in the planning document.
Then i'd ask claude code to review its experience building the app and update the original plan document with these insights.
Then throw away the first c# project, and have another go at it. Make sure the plan includes starting with tests.
One day I was fighting Claude on some core Ruby method and it was not agreeing with me about it, so I went to check the actual docs. It was right. I have been using Ruby since 2009.
Programming takes experience to acquire taste for what’s right, what’s not, and what smells bad and will bite you but you can temporarily (yeah) not care. If you let the tool do everything for you you won’t ever acquire that skill, and it’s critical to judge and review your work and work of others, including LLM slop.
I agree it’s hard and I feel lucky for never having to make the LLM vs manual labor choice. Nowadays it’s yet another step in learning the craft, but the timing is wrong for juniors - you are now expected to do senior level work (code reviews) from day 1. Tough!
What bottlenecks are you experiencing?
I'm a developer experienced with Python (GDScript-like) and C#, but am new to Godot and started with GDScript.
It’s easy to convince yrself that code is going to be fast enough, but games run into bottlenecks really quickly, and it also makes your stuff inaccessible to people who don’t have great hardware.
6. start in plan mode and iterate on the plan until you're happy
7. use slash commands, they are mini prompts you can keep refining over time, including providing starting context and reminding it that it can use tools like gh to interact with Github
not sure I agree on 1.
2. compact when you are at a good stop, not when you are forced to because you are at 0%
Or just `$ playwright`. Skip the MCP ceremony (and wasted tokens) and just have CC use CLI tools. Works remarkably well.
This is very interesting. What's your setup, and what kind of prompt might you use to get Claude to work well with Docker? Do you do anything to try and isolate the Claude instance from the rest of your machine (i.e. run these Docker instances inside of a VM) or just YOLO?
"bring this online in my local docker" will get you a running service, specify further as much as you like.
It once did a container exec that piped the target file into the projects cli command runner, which did nothing, but gives you an example of the string of wacky ways it will insist on running code instead of just reading it.
I turn off compacting to be manual, makes it easy to find a stopping point and write all context out to an md file before compacting.
First prompt isn't very important to me.
I haven't found i need special phrases. What matters is how context heavy I can make my subagents.
I’m working my way through building a guide to my future self for packaging up existing products in case I forget in 6 months.
At the same time frontier models may improve it, make it worse, or it stays the same, and what I’m after is consistency.
For extremely simple stuff, it can be useful. I'll have it parse a command's output into JSON or CSV when I'm too lazy to do it myself, or scaffold an empty new project (but like, how often am i doing that?). I've also found it good at porting simple code from like python to JavaScript or typescript to go.
But the negative experiences really far outweigh the good, for me.
For some new stuff I'm working on, I use Rails 8. I also use Railway for my host, which isn't as widely-used as a service like Heroku, for example. Rails 8 was just released in November, so there's very little training data available. And it takes time for people to upgrade, gems to catch up, conversations to bubble up, etc. Operating without these two MCP servers usually caused Claude Code to repeatedly stumble over itself on more complex or nuanced tasks. It was good at setting up the initial app, but when I started getting into things like Turbo/Stimulus, and especially for parts of the UI that conditionally show, it really struggled.
It's a lot better now - it's not perfect, but it's significantly better than relying solely on its training data or searching the web.
I've only used Claude Code for like 4 weeks, but I'm learning a lot. It feels less like I'm an IC doing this work, and my new job is (1) product manager that writes out clear PRDs and works with Claude Code to build it, (2) PR reviewer that looks at the results and provides a lot of guidance, (3) tester. I allocate my time 50%/20%/30% respectively.
But in what environment? It seems to me that most of the crafts that have been replaced by the assembly line are practiced not so much for the product itself, but for an experience both the creator and the consumer can participate in, at least in their imagination.
You don't just order such artifacts on Amazon anonymously; you establish some sort of relationship with the artisan and his creative process. You become part of a narrative. Coding is going to need something similar if it wants to live in that niche.
Also, if we could get AI tooling to do the reviews for us reliably, I'd be a much happier developer.
So yeah if you like coding as an art form, you can still keep doing that. It's probably just a bit harder to make lots of money with it. But most people code to make a product (which in itself could be a form of art). And yeah if it's faster to reach your goals of making a product with the help of AI, then the choice is simple of course.
But yeah in a way I'm also sad that the code monkey will disappear, and we all become more like the lead developer who doesn't really program anymore but only guides the project, reviews code and makes technical decisions. I liked being the code monkey, not having to deal a lot with all the business stuff. But yeah, things change you know.
The painting/photography metaphor stretches way too far imo - photography was fundamentally a new output format, a new medium, an entirely new process. Agentic coding isn't that.
I’ve experimented with several dictation apps, including super whisper, etc., and I’ve settled on Wispr Flow. I’m very picky about having good keyboard shortcuts for hands-free dictation mode (meaning having a good keyboard shortcut to toggle recording on and off), and of course, accuracy and speed. Wispr Flow seems to fit all my needs for now but I’d love to switch to a local-only app and ditch the $15/mo sub :)
> people understand the dangers of an electrician mislabelling a fusebox or something, but don't understand the dangers of shoddy software
if there was legal recourse for most software issues you can bet the current frenzy around ai-agentic coding would be much more carefully done
i think like many things, laws wont appear until a major disaster happens (or you get a president on your side *)
* https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/president-theodore-roose...
The bug was the CMake-specific formulation and incantation of a Git tag. Something that should be in the documentation that it ingested.
If AI can't even fix something this simple, what's the point?
Before that was given, I used AI as a fancier search engine, and for coming up with solutions to problems I explained in abstract (without copy-pasting actual code in or out).
Vibe coding works today at small enough of scale.
I'm building a personal app to help me track nutrition and I only needed to get involved in the code when Claude would hit its limits for a single file and produced a broken program (and this was via the UI, not Claude Code.) Now at ~3000 lines of python.
After I told it to split it into a few files I don't think I've had to talk about anything at the code level. Note that I eventually did switch to using Claude Code which might have helped (gets annoying copy/pasting multiple files and then my prompts hit max limits).
I just prompt it like an experienced QA/product person to tell it how to build it, point out bugs (as experienced as a user), point out bad data, etc.
A few of my recent prompts (each is a separate prompt):
>for foods found but not in database, list the number of times each shows up
>sort the list by count descending
>Period surplus/deficit seems too low. looking at 2025/07/24 to 2025/07/31
>do not require beige color (but still track it). combine blue/purple as one in stats (but keep separate colors). data has both white and White; should use standard case and not show as two colors
I have and I don't see the connection with AI-assisted coding.
If your comment was about "generative AI in general" then I think this is the problem with trying to discuss AI on the internet at the moment. It quickly turns into "defend all aspects of AI or else you've lost". I can't predict all aspects of AI. I don't like all aspects of AI and I can't weigh up the pros and cons of a vast number of distinct topics all at once. (and neither, I suspect, can anyone else)
Edit: Also, it's funny how often you can get it to improve its output by just saying "this looks kind of bad for x reason, there must be a way to make it better"
It caused it to throw out good ideas for validation and working code.
I want to believe there is some sweet spot.
The constant “Aha!” type responses followed by self validating prose that the answer is at hand or within reach can be intoxicating and can not be trusted.
The product is also seemingly in constant flux of tuning, where some sessions result in great progress, others the AI seems as if it is deliberately trying to steer you into traffic.
Anthropic is alluded toward this being the result of load. They mentioned in their memo about new limits for Max users that abuse of the subscription levels resulted in ~subpar product experiences. It’s possible they meant response times and the overloaded 500 responses or lower than normal TPS, but there are many anecdotal accounts of CC suddenly having a bad day from “longtime” users, including myself.
I don’t understand how load would impact the actual model’s performance.
It seems like only load based impacts on individual session context would result in degraded outputs. But I know nothing of serving LLM at scale.
Can anyone explain how high load might result in an unchanged product performing objectively worse?
I’ve spent a lot of my career cleaning up this kind of nonsense so the future looks bright
I understand completely what you're saying. But with the delusions that management is under right now, you're just going to seem like someone that's resisting the flow of code and becoming a bottleneck.
It also helps to tell it to write tests first: I lean towards integration tests for most things but it is decent at writing good unit tests etc too. Obviously, review is paramount if TDD is going to work.
And this is its biggest weakness for coding. As soon as it makes a single mistake, it's over. It somehow has learned that during this "conversation" it's having, it should make that mistake over and over again. And then it starts saying things like "Wow, I'm really messing up the diff format!"
I'd like to mess around with "opencode+copilot free-tier auth" or "{opencode|crush}+some model via groq(still free?)" to see what kind of mileage I can get and if it's halfway decent..
No point comparing apples with oranges, most of us don't program by reverse engineering using wireshark.
Then there's the question of how do other developers contribute to the code. They don't have your prompts, they just have the code.
So, no, prompts are not source code, that's why I ask for people to just show the code they are producing and nobody ever does.
I also make my design documents (roughly the prompts generated by the prompts) into committed markdown documents. So I show the second-tier prompts at least, you could consider those an intermediate language representation if you like.
> Then there's the question of how do other developers contribute to the code. They don't have your prompts, they just have the code.
I usually try to commit the initial prompts and adjustments. I don't commit trivial things like "That's not quite right, try doing X again" or "Just run the entire test suite"
> So, no, prompts are not source code
Hard disagree, but that's fine.
Why should I trust any of these AI vendors?
In the same sense that the best way to learn to write is often to read a lot, whether English or code. Of course, you also have to do it, but having lots of examples to go on helps.
If there is going to be room for junior folks in SWE, it will probably be afforded to those who understand some language’s behaviors at a fairly decent level.
I’d presume they will also be far better at system design, TDD and architecture than yesterday’s juniors, (because they will have to be to drive AI better than other hopeful candidates).
But there will be plenty of what will be grey beards around that expect syntactical competence and fwiw, if you can’t read your own code, even slowly, you fail at the most crucial aspect of AI accelerated development—-validation.
## IMPORTANT - Use thiserror, create the primary struct ServiceError in error.rs which has all #[from], do not use custom result types or have errors for different modules, all errors should fall under this struct - The error from above should implement IntoResponse to translate it to client error without leaking any sensitive information and so that ServiceError can be used as error type for axum
## PLAN
### Project Setup (Completed) Set up Rust workspace with server and jwt-generator crates (Completed) Create Cargo.toml workspace configuration with required dependencies (axum, sqlx, jsonwebtoken, serde, tokio, uuid, thiserror) (Completed) Create compose.yaml for PostgreSQL test database with environment variables (Completed) Design database schema in tables.sql (data table with key UUID, data JSONB, created_at, updated_at; locks table with lock_id UUID, locked_at, expires_at)
### Database Layer (Completed) Implement database connection module with PostgreSQL connection pool (Completed) Create database migration system to auto-deploy tables.sql if tables don't exist (Completed) Implement data model structs for database entities (DataRecord, Lock)
### JWT System (Completed) Create jwt-generator utility that takes secret key, permissions (read/write), and expiration time (Completed) Implement JWT authentication middleware for server with permission validation (Completed) Add JWT token validation and permission checking for endpoints
### Core API Endpoints (Completed) Implement POST /set endpoint for storing/updating JSONB data with partial update support using jsonb_set (Completed) Implement GET /get/<key> endpoint with optional sub-key filtering for partial data retrieval (Completed) Add automatic created_at and updated_at timestamp handling in database operations
### Streaming & Binary Support (Completed) Implement streaming bytes endpoint with compact binary format (not base64) for efficient data transfer (Completed) Add support for returning all data if no specific format specified in GET requests
### Lock System (Completed) Implement database-backed lock system with locks table (Completed) Create POST /lock endpoint that tries to obtain lock for 5 seconds with UUID parameter (Completed) Create DELETE /unlock endpoint to release locks by UUID (Completed) Add lock timeout and cleanup mechanism for expired locks
### Error Handling & Final Polish (Completed) Implement comprehensive error handling with proper HTTP status codes (Completed) Add input validation for all endpoints (UUID format, JSON structure, etc.) (Completed) Test all endpoints with various scenarios (valid/invalid data, concurrent access, lock timeouts) ```
took 4 iterations (>30 minutes!), everything works as expected. the plan itself was partially generated with ccl since I told it to break down tasks into smaller steps then with some manual edits I got it down to that final product. I later swapped locks to be built on a lease system and it handled that quite nicely as well.
Continue to work on it in your preferred IDE let’s say Visual Studio. When you hit your first compile error, just for fun even if you understand the error, copy and paste it into Cursor and ask it to help you understand the cause and propose a solution. Ask it to implement it, attempt to compile, give it back any further errors that its solution may have to review and fix. You will eventually compile.
Then before you go back to work writing your next task, ask Cursor to propose how it might complete the task. After the proposal review and either tell it to proceed to implement or suggest tweaks or better alternatives. For complex tasks try setting the model manually to o3 and rerunning the same prompt and you can see how it thinks much better and can one shot solutions to complex errors. I try to use auto and if it fails on more complex tasks I resubmit the original query with o3. If o3 fails then you may have to gather more context by hand and really hold its hand through the chain of reasoning. That’s for a future post.
More advanced: Create a build.bat script that Cursor can run after it has implemented code to run and see its own errors so you can avoid the copy paste round trip. (Look into Cursor rules for this but a rule prompt that says 'after implementing any significant code changes please run .\build.bat and review and fix any further errors') This simple efficiency should allow you to experience the real productivity behind Cursor where you’re no longer dying the death of 1000 cuts losing a minute here or a minute there on rote time consuming steps and you can start to operate from a higher natural language level and really feel the ‘flow’.
Typing out the code is just an annoying implementation detail. You may feel ‘competency leaving your fingers’ as DHH might say but I’d argue you can feel your ass filling up with rocket fuel.
Any niche problem requires original work or deep searching for something that can complete it. There is no free lunch.
As a recent example, I am working on a Rust app with integrated DuckDB, and asked it to implement a scoring algorithm query (after chatting with it to generate a Markdown file "RFC" describing how the algorithm works.) It started the implementation with an absolute minimal SQL query that pulled all metrics for a given time window.
I questioned this rather than accepting the change, and it said its plan was to implement the more complex aggregation logic in Rust because 1) it's easier to interpret Rust branching logic than SQL statements (true) and 2) because not all SQL dialects include EXP(), STDDEV(), VAR() support which would be necessary to compute the metrics.
The former point actually seems like quite a reasonable bias to me, personally I find it harder to review complex aggregations in SQL than mentally traversing the path of data through a bunch of branches. But if you are familiar with DuckDB you know that 1) it does support these features and 2) the OLAP efficiency of DuckDB makes it a better choice for doing these aggregations in a performant way than iterating through the results in Rust, so the initial generated output is suboptimal.
I informed it of DuckDB's support for these operations and pointed out the performance consideration and it gladly generated the (long and certainly harder to interpret) SQL query, so it is clearly quite capable, just needs some prodding to go in the right direction.
It can be annoying, but I think it both helps me be more aware of what’s being changed (vs just seeing a big diff after a while), and lends itself to working on smaller subtasks that are more likely to work on the first try.
Claude Code took the burden of maintaining that off my shoulders.
Also Cursor was/is utterly useless any all non-Anthropic models, which are the default.
Don't have this w/ Claude Code working over multiple code bases of 10-30k LOC. Part of the reason is the type of guidance I give in the memory files helps keep this at bay, as does linting (ie. class/file length), but I also chunk things up into features that I PR review and have it refactor to keep things super tidy.
Oh boy, it was almost sentient. That is a deep mathematical proof!
Yet somehow companies continued to opt for the second approach. Something to do with status from headcount?
And usually projected as ensuring bus factor > 1
Deeper still is this: The group that openly relies on LLMs to code is likely the first group to be replaced by LLMs, since they've already identified the recipe that the organization needs to replace them.
More broadly, we live in an age where marketing is crucial to getting noticed, where good work alone is not sufficient and you have the perfect scenario for people to market themselves out of the workforce.
For new features, by all means code it by hand. Maybe that is best! But a codebase is much more than new features. Invaluable tool.
If it's a matter of months then latecomers will be up to speed in months as well, which isn't really that long a time.
But the internet took decades for people to get onboarded and figure out how to use. We're still figuring out how to use it in some ways. That's not to say the people should sleep on LLMs, but let's chill with the "Group 2 will not fare well in the coming months" nonsense. If anything group 1 is at a higher risk because they rely on others to set the trends they tell everyone else to catch up to.
But this comment might step a bit into pedantry.
> No answers to my question, completely different code gets pushed.
"A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.[1] Programmer Simon Willison said: 'If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant.'"
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding)
> The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla.
And...?
1. Not looking at the code 2. YOLO everything 3. Paste errors back into the model verbatim
That said, I describe what I do as vibe coding, but I introduce code review bots into the mix. I also roadmap a plan with deep research before hand and require comprehensive unit and behavioural tests from the model.
> There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
Some of the key points here being "forget that the code even exists," "'Accept All' always," "don't read the diffs," and "The code grows beyond my usual comprehension."
Doing software engineering using AI assistance is not vibe coding, by Karpathy's definition.
I feel like Amp's costs are actually in line with Sourcegraph's costs, and eventually Anthropic, OpenAI, et al. will all be charging a lot more than they are now.
It's the classic play to entice people to something for low cost, and then later ramp it up once they're hooked. Right now they can afford to burn VC money, but that won't last forever.
Playwright MCP has been a big help for frontend work. It gives the agent faster feedback when debugging UI issues. It handles responsive design too, so you can test both desktop and mobile views. Not sure if you know this, but Claude Code also works with screenshots. In some cases, I provide a few screenshots and the agent uses Playwright to verify that the output is nearly pixel perfect. It has been invaluable for me and is definitely worth a try if you have not already.
Sure, but if I do 5 reviews for a task - in 99% of cases it is net negative as it is faster to DIY it at that point. Harder for sure, but faster.
Why wouldn't that work with an llm? It takes effort, sure, but it certainly also takes effort if you have to do it "by hand"?
It does work with an LLM, but you’re reinventing the wheel with these crazy markup files. We created a family of language to express how to move bits around and replacing that with English is silly.
Vibe coding is fast because you’re ok with not thinking about the code. Anytime you have to do that, an LLM is not going to be much faster.
In theory, there is no reason why this is the case. For the same reason, there is no reason why juniors can't create perfect code first time...it is just the tickets are never detailed enough?
But in reality, it doesn't work like that. The code is just bad.
It's really the same with junior devs. I wouldn't tell a junior dev to implement a CRM app, but I can tell the junior dev to add a second email field to the customer management page.
Especially if I point out that they said "are also", not "are".
I don’t feel Claude code helps one iota with the issue in 1319. If anything, it has increased the prevalence of “ongoing development” as I auto mate more things and create more problems to solve.
However, I have fixed up and added features to 10 year old scripts that I never considered worth the trade off to work on. It makes the cost of automation cheaper.
I'd like to say I'm praising the paradigm shift more than anything else (and this is to some degree achievable with smaller, open and sometimes local agentic models), but yes, there are definitely nasty externalities (though burning VC cash is not high up that list for me). I hope some externalities can be be optimized away.
But a fair comment.
However, noticing this doesn't help because if you invest in training juniors in 2025 but nobody else does, someone else can just recruit them in 2030 and benefit from your investment
On the other hand, $10B as valuation (not revenue) just requires a greater fool. Maybe it's possible, but I doubt there are too many of those fools available.
I interpreted the parent as saying $10B valuation.
- There is a moat of doing so (i.e. will people actually pay for your SaaS knowing that they could do it too via AI) and..
- How many large scale ideas do you need post AI? Many SaaS products are subscription based and loaded with features you don't need. Most people would prefer a simple product that just does what they need without the ongoing costs.
There will be more software. The question is who accrues the economic value of this additional software - the SWE/tech industry (incumbent), the AI industry (disruptor?) and/or the consumer. For the SWE's/tech workers it probably isn't what they envisioned when they started/studied for this industry.
I had been thinking of buying an $80 license for a piece of software but ended up knocking off a version in Claude Code over a weekend.
It is not even close to something commercial grade that I could sell as a competitor but it is good enough for me to not spend $80 on the license. The huge upside is that I can customize the software in any way I like. I don't care that it isn't maintainable either. Making a new version in ChagGPT5 is going to be my first project.
Just like a few hours ago I was thinking how I would like to customize the fitness/calorie tracking app I use. There are so many features I like that would be tightly coupled to my own situation and not a mass market product.
This to me seems obvious of what the future of software looks like for everything but mission critical software.
It's less that I can't understand, and more that my context on the code is very weak.
No, there is a difference between "I wrote this code" and "I understand this code". You don't need to write all the code in a project to understand it. Otherwise writing software in a team would not be a viable undertaking.
Review your own code. Understand why you made the changes. And then clearly describe why you made them. If you can't do that yourself, I think that's a huge gap in your own skills.
Making something else do it means you don't internalize the changes that you made.
For the record, I write better and more detailed commit messages than almost anyone I know across a decades[^0] long career[^1,^2,^3,^4,^5]. But I'm not immune from making mistakes, and everyone can use an editor, or just runs out of mental energy. Unfortunately, I find it hard to get decent PR reviews from my colleagues at work.
So yeah, I've started using Claude Code to help review my own commits. That doesn't mean I don't understand my changes or that I don't know why I made them. And CC is good at banging out a first draft of a commit message. It's also good at catching tiny logic errors that slip through tests and human review. Surprisingly good. You should try it.
I have plenty of criticisms for CC too. I'm not sure it's actually saving me any time. I've spent the last two weeks working 10 hour days with it. For some things it shines. For other things, I would've been better off writing the code from scratch myself, something I've had to do maybe 40% of the time now.
[^0]: https://seclists.org/bugtraq/1998/Jul/172
[^1]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/441adf0ccf571a9fe15658fdfc...
[^2]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/cacfc09ba82bfc6b0e1c047247...
[^3]: https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane/pull/21644
[^4]: https://github.com/CocoaPods/Core/pull/741
[^5]: None of the these are my best examples, just the ones I found quickly. Most of my commit messages are obviously locked away by my employer. Somewhere in the git history is a paragraphs long commit message from Jeff King (peff) explaining a one line diff. That's probably my favorite commit message of all time. But I also know that at work I've got a message somewhere explaining a single character diff.
Saving your summary instructions as a CLAUDE.md
my prompts have gotten less and less. It's the hooks and subagents, and using the tools that matter far more.
This is a thread about claude code. the other LLms don't matter. Nothing ever blatantly ignores my instructions in claude code. that's a thing of the past.
Of course, not using claude code, for sure. But all my instructions are followed with my setup. That really isn't an issue for me personally anymore.
Last weekend I did nothing but have different ideas battle it out against each other, with me selecting the most successful one, and repeating.
And now, my experience is no longer the same. Before last weekend, i had the same experience you are describing.
Did you use the one suggested here https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents or have you created custom ones?
Last weekend I ran head to head tests of agents against each other with a variety of ideas, and selected the best one, and did it again. It has caused me to have a very specific subagent system, and I have an agent who creates those.
I’ve been delighting all of my tedious tasks with as much context as I would give a person, and my personal win rate at this is substantially higher than I expected.
If you give it trash and expect gold, sure, gambling.
Try like upgrading JS package dependencies, or translating between languages, limited tedious things, and you will be surprised how much better it does.
(Un?)fortunately my work doesn't involve a lot of "drone coding". With personal projects I let it do whatever it wanted including picking the language and libraries. With one of them it ended up so confused with the Redis API(!!!) that it kept going back and forth between different versions to "fix" the issues until it literally removed the functionality it was supposed to add. Problem solved, eh?
I think people might be exaggerating how much they are out of the loop. Claude often needs to be guided away from stupid decisions, and it will absolutely delete code in order to "fix" a problem.
Still, it saves me work on tedious stuff, and makes it more pleasant. I wouldn't ask it to do anything I don't understand, unless I don't care about the result.
Now that I'm practiced at that, the off-shored part is no longer valuable
Just yesterday I saw on X a video of a Miami hotel where the check-in procedure was via a video call to a receptionist in India.
I've got myself in a PILE of trouble when trying to use LLMs with languages/technologies I am unfamiliar with (React, don't judge me).
But with something that I am familiar with (say Go, or Python) LLMs have improved my velocity massively, with the caveat that I have had to explicitly tell the LLM when it is producing something that I know that I don't want (me arguing with an LLM was an experience too!)
Time and time again I would find telltale signs of dumping LLM output into PRs n then claiming it as their own. Not a problem, but the code didn’t do what the detailed ticket asked and introduced other bugs as a result.
It ultimately became a choice of ‘go through the hassle of making a detailed brief for it to just be put in copilot verbatim and then go through the hassle of reviewing it and explaining the issues back to the offshore dev’ or ‘brief Claude directly’
I hate to say it but from a business perspective the latter won outright. It tears me up as it goes against my morality.
You use it to make your job easier. If it doesn't make your job easier, you don't use it.
Anybody trying to sell you on a bill of goods that this is somehow "automating away engineers" and "replacing expensive software developers" is either stupid or lying (or both).
I find it incredibly useful, but it's garbage-in, garbage-out just like anything else with computers. If your code base is well commented and documented and laid out in a consistent pattern, it will tend to follow that pattern, especially if it follows standards. And it does better in languages (like Rust) that have strict type systems and coding standards.
Even better if you have rigorous tests for it to check its own work against.
This is still early days with LLMs and coding assistants. You do have to hold them in the right way sometimes. If you're not willing to do that, or think that provides less value than doing it another way... great, good for you, do it the way you think is best for you.
I've been a coding assistant skeptic for a long time. I just started playing with Claude Code a month or so ago. I was frustrated for a bit until I learned how to hold it the right way. It is a long, long way from being a substitute for a real human programmer, but it's helpful to me. I certainly prefer it to pair programming with a human (I hate pair programming), so this provides value.
If you don't care to figure out for yourself if it can provide you value, that's your choice. But this technology is going to get better, and you might later find yourself wishing you'd looked into it earlier. Just like any new tool that starts out rough but eventually turns out to be very useful.
> Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.
And that person is going to quit and you have to start all over again. They also cost at least 100x the price.
Because right now AI companies are losing their asses - it costs significantly more than what they are charging.
Honestly, it feels like DevOps had a kid with Product.
You've just described a match made in hell. DevOps - let's overcomplicate things (I'm looking at you K8s) and Product - they create pretty screenshots and flows but not actually think about the product as a system (or set of systems.)
So whats the benefit? Well for Claude Code this wrapper effectively bridges those TTS/ASR systems and CC so the voice interface is now there (CC doesn't have one). It doesn't just rely on MCP either (although it does start an MCP server for configuring via prompting) but instead directly injects the ASR and directly reads out CC's output when on.
It is free and open source so folks can inspect it and check it's not doing anything nefarious, so that others can contribute if they should choose. And the license is what it is as that seems to be the advice on this forum if you want to make sure a company can't just make a paid service out of your work.
With only "it works" you end up like this (iconic HN comment on Oracle codebase): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637
tar xzvf <filename> -> "tar eXtract Zipped Verbose File <filename>"
tar czvf <filename> <files> -> "tar Compress Zipped Verbose File <filename> <files>"
So it's either x or c if you want to unzip a tar file or create one
Add z if the thing you're uncompressing ends in .gz, or if you want the thing you're creating to be compressed.
v is just if you want the filenames to be printed to stdout as they're extracted or imported
f tells it to read from or output to a file, as opposed to reading from stdin or output to stdout
Then your provide the filename to read from/export to, and if you're exporting you then provide the file list.
Not that hard.
When you start to integrate MCPs it feels especially like programming in a new language. You basically end up adding commands to your tool.
It's only about me having fun from coding. The low-level stuff is the most fun part. I don't know why is it so hard to swallow pill.
So if your preference is to avoid high level stuff then genetic coding may be useful for, as an example, updating your suite of tests after a major refactoring. Or if you have no tests because that may not be your style, then generating some robust test scripts might be a good use case.
Or maybe you create one good test but you need to expand it with a lot of various alternative edge cases. Agents can generate the edge cases for you based on the test you already wrote.
Or writing high level plumbing like checking if the scopes are all correct still in your dependency injection scaffolding. Etc
It sounds like you’re highly defensive of the part of your job you like, which is commendable of course, but there may be opportunity to improve the parts you don’t like.
A lot of this sounds like "this bot does my homework for me, and now I get good grades and don't have to study so hard!"
The strength (and weakness) of these models is their patience is infinite.
Yes, with the caveat: only on the first/zeroth shot. But even when they keep most/all of the code in context if you vibe code without incredibly strict structuring/guardrails, by the time you are 3-4 shots in, the model has "forgotten" the original arch, is duplicating data structures for what it needs _this_ shot and will gleefully end up with amnesiac-level repetitions, duplicate code that does "mostly the same" thing, all of which acts as further poison for progress. The deeper you go without human intervention the worse this gets.
You can go the other way, and it really does work. Setup strict types, clear patterns, clear structures. And intervene to explain + direct. The type of things senior engineers push back on in junior PRs. "Why didn't you just extend this existing data structure and factor that call into the trivially obvious extension of XYZ??".
"You're absolutely right!" etc.
Yes, of course. Do you not? Aren't you embarrassed to admit that you use AI because you don't care about quality?
I would be ashamed to think "you set a high quality bar" is some kind of critique
If that helps, call it agentic engineering instead of vibe coding, to switch to a more involved mindset.
Specifically, Claude coat is really good at making markdown files of plans and if you review them add in context, you can let it run a little more free than you would otherwise.
If you don’t feel like giving it, the right amount of context, make the job smaller, where there’s just less of it to begin with.
I wouldn’t tell my interns to change the formatting of these printf statements, because I don’t feel like it, but Claude does that stuff pretty great and doesn’t complain as much.
It's faster than I am, and it knows things like ffmpeg flags I don't care to memorize.
Even opencode running on a local model is decent at this.
Though it raises an interesting point: if a country like India or China did make the investment in hiring, paying, and mentoring junior people but e.g. the US didn't, then you could see a massive shift in the global center of gravity around software expertise in 10 years (plus or minus).
Someone is going to be the best at planning for and investing in the future on this, and someone is going to maximally wishful thinking / short-term thinking this, and seductive-but-not-really-there vibe coding is probably going to be a major pivot point there.
As for whether it's a mistake, isn't that just the way of things these days? The current world is about extracting as much as you can while you're still here. Look around. Nobody is building for the future. There are a few niche groups that talk about it, but nobody is really doing it. It's just take, take, take.
This just seems more of the same, but we're speeding up. We started by extracting fossil fuels deposited over millions of years, then extracting resources and technology from civilisations deposited over millennia, then from the Victorians deposited only a century or two ago, and now it's software deposited over only mere decades. Someone is going to be left holding the bag, we just hope it's not us. Meanwhile most of the population aren't even thinking about it, and most of the fraction that do think are dreaming that technology is going to save us before it's payback time.
There are no shortcuts - you are not an accountant just because you have a calculator.
That's also the huge difference between AI and brains: AI does not work on the real world but on our communication (and even that is limited to text, missing all the nuance or face to face communication includes). The brain works based on sensor data from the real world. The communication method, language, is a very limited add-on on top of how the brain really works. We don't think in language, to do even some abstract language based thinking, e.g. when doing formal math, requires a lot of concentration and effort and still uses a lot of "under the hood" intuition.
That is why even with years of learning the same curriculum we still need to make a significant effort for every single concrete example to "get everyone on the same page", creating compatible internal models under the hood. Everybody's own internal model of even simple things are slightly different, depending on what brain they brought to learning and what exactly they learned, where even things like social classroom interactions went into how the connections were formed. Only based on a huge amount of effort can we then use language to communicate in the abstract, and even then, when we leave the central corridor of ideas people will start arguing forever about definitions. No matter how the written text is the same, the internal model is different for every person.
As someone who took neuroscience, I found this surprisingly well written:
"The brain doesn't like to abstract unless you make it"
http://howthebrainworks.science/how_the_brain_works_/the_bra...
> This resource, prepared by members of the University of London Centre for Educational Neuroscience (CEN), gives a brief overview of how the brain works for a general audience. It is based on the most recent research. It aims to give a gist of the brain’s principles of function, covering the brain’s evolutionary origin, how it develops, and how it copes in the modern world.
The best way to learn is to do things IRL that matter. School is a compromise and not really all that great. People motivated by actual need often can learn things that take years in school with middling results significantly faster and with better and deeper results.
Trade schools and certificate programs are designed to churn out people with journeyman-level skills in some field. They repeatedly drill you on the practical day-in-day-out requirements, tasks, troubleshooting tools and techniques, etc. that you need to walk up to a job site and be useful. The fields generally have a predictable enough set of technical problems to deal with that a deep theoretical exploration is unnecessary. This is just as true for electricians and auto mechanics as it is for people doing limited but logistically complex technical work, like orchestrating a big fleet of windows workstations with all the Microsoft enterprise tools.
In software development and lots of other fields that require grappling with complex theoretical stuff, you really need both the practical and the theoretical background to be productive. That would be a ridiculous undertaking for a school, and it’s why we have internships/externships/jr positions.
The combination of these tools letting the seniors in a department do all of the work so companies don’t have to invest in interns/juniors so there’s no reliable entry point into the field, and there being an even bigger disconnect between what schools offer and the skills they need to compete, the industry has some rough days ahead and a whole lot of people trying to get a foothold in the industry right now are screwed. I’m kind of surprised how little so many people in tech seem to care about the impending rough road for entry-level folks in the industry. I guess it’s a combination of how little most higher level developers have to interact with them, and the fact that everybody was tripping over themselves to hire developers when a lot of seniors joined the industry.
In both all you need is the ability to communicate to the machine in a way that the machine can convert your ideas into actions.
The restricted language of a compiler is a handicap, not evidence of a skill - we've been saying forever that "Natural Language" compilers would be a game changer, and that's all that an AI really is
Edit: It appears that this discussion is going to end up with a definition of "coding"
Is it coding if you tell the computer to perform some action, or is it coding if you tell it how to do that in some highly optimised way (for varying definitions of optimised, eg. Memory efficient, CPU efficient, Dev time efficient... etc)
Notice how nobody is skeptical of compilers?
To me, the essence of coding is about using formal languages and definable state machines (i.e, your toolchain) to manipulate the state of a machine in a predictable way.
C, C++, even with their litany of undefined behavior, are still formal languages, and their compilers can still be predicted and understood (no matter how difficult that is). If the compiler does something unexpected, its because you, the programmer, lacked the knowledge of either the language or the compiler's state.
Vibe coding uses natural languages, and interacts with programs whose state is not only unknown, but unknowable. The machine, for the same input, may produce wildly different output. If the machine produces unexpected code, its not because of a lack of knowledge on the part of it programmer - its because the machine is inherently unpredictable and requires more prodding in soft, fuzzy, natural language.
Telling something what outcomes you want, even if described in technical terms only a programmer would understand, is not coding. It's essentially just being a project manager.
Now you may ask - who cares about this no true Scotsman fallacy? If its coding or not coding, we are still producing a program which serves the product needs of the customer.
Personally, I did not learn to code because I give a shit about the product needs of the customer, or the financial wellbeing of the business. I enjoy coding for its own sake - because it is fun to use systems of well defined rules to solve problems. Learning and using C++ is fun, for me; it seems every day i learn something new about the language and how the compiler behaves and I've been using C++ for several years (and I started learning it when I was 12!)
Describing the outcome or goal of a project in natural human language sounds like a nightmare, to be honest. I became a software engineer so I could minimize the amount of natural language required to succeed in life. Natural language has gotten me (and, I suspect, people like me) in trouble over and over again throughout adolescence, but I've never written a piece of code that was misunderstood or ambiguous enough for people to become threatened by or outraged by it.
I think the disconnect is that some people care about products, and some people care about code.
If we're making up hypotheticals, then LLMs can be predicted and understood (no matter how difficult that is). They don't run on pixie dust.
That's not the end of the story, though. LLMs don't learn, but you can provide them with a "handbook" that they read in every time you start a new conversation with them. While it might take a human months or years to learn what's in that handbook, the LLM digests it in seconds. Yes, you have to keep feeding it the handbook every time you start from a clean slate, and it might have taken you months to get that handbook into the complete state it's in. But maybe that's not so bad.
Claude is actually quite good at reading project documentation and code comments and acting on them. So it's also useful for encouraging project authors to write such documentation.
I'm now old enough that I need such breadcrumbs around the code to get context anyways. I won't remember why I did things without them.
Break apart your knowledge into relevant chunks for Claude so that you can only have what's useful in its context window.
* except if you are developing complicated algorithms or do numeric stuff. However, I believe that the majority of developers will never be in such a situation.
So you end up in that weird spot where it would work very well for someone with a strong focus on self-learning and a company investing into their side of the training, but at that point you could almost skip the formal part completely and just start directly, assuming you have some self-taught base. Or work part-time will studying on the side, and get the more useful degree that way. Plenty places will hire promising first-year uni students.
Potentially very beneficial, if it turns out software engineers are still needed but nobody has been training them for half a decade
Every generation, we seem to add a level of abstraction conceding because for most of us, it enhances productivity. And every generation, there is a crowd who rails against the new abstraction, mostly unaware of all of the levels of abstraction they already use in their coding.
BUT neither are humans, if you give two different humans the same task, then, unless they copy one another, then you will get two different results.
Further, as those humans evolve through their career, the code that they produce will also change.
Now, I do want to point out that I'm very much still at the "LLMs are an aid, not the full answer.. yet" point, but a lot of the argument against them seems to be (rapidly) coming to the point where it's no longer valid (AI slop and all).
So human teachers are good to have as well, but I remember they were of limited use for me when I was learning programming without AI. So many concepts they tried to teach me without having understood themself first. AI would have likely helped me to get better answers instead of, "because that is how you do it" when asking why to do something in a certain way.
So obviously I would have prefered competent teachers all the time and also now competent teachers with unlimited time instead of faulty AIs for the students, but in reality human time is limited and humans are flawed as well. So I don't see the doomsday expectations for the new generation of programmers. The ultimate goal, building something that works to the spec, did not change and horrible unmaintainable code was also shipped 20 years ago.
Or maybe it's more like going from analog photography to digital photography. Whatever it is, you get more programming done.
Just like when you go from assembly to c to a memory managed language like java. It did some 6502 and 68000 assembly over 35 years ago, now nowbody knows assembly.
Key words there. To you, it's a electric saw because you already know how to program, and that's the other person's point; it doesn't necessarily empower people to build software. You? Yes. Generally though when you hand the public an electric saw and say "have at it, build stuff" you end up with a lot of lost appendages.
Sadly, in this case the "lost appendages" are going to be man-decades of time spent undoing all the landmines vibecoders are going to plant around the digital commons. Which means AI even fails as a metaphorical "electric saw", because a good electric saw should strike fear into the user by promising mortal damage through misuse. AI has no such misuse deterrent, so people will freely misuse it until consequences swing back wildly, and the blast radius is community-scale.
> more like going from analog photography to digital photography. Whatever it is, you get more programming done.
By volume, the primary outcome of digital photography has been a deluge of pointless photographs to the extent we've had to invent new words to categorize them. "selfies". "sexts". "foodstagramming". Sure, AI will increase the actual programming being done, the same way digital photography gave us more photography art. But much more than that, AI will bring the equivalent of "foodstagramming" but for programs. Kind of like how the Apple App Store brought us some good apps, but at the same time 9 bajillion travel guides and flashlight apps. When you lower the bar you also open the flood gates.
> will not necessarily make you a more knowledgeable programmer
I think we'd better start separating "building software" from programming, because the act of programming is going to continue to get less and less valuable.
I would argue that programming has been very overvalued for a while even before AI. And the industry believes it's own hype with a healthy dose of elitism mixed in.
But now AI is removing the facade and it's showing that the idea and the architecture is actually the important part, not the coding if it.
BASIC was supposed to be astep toward using a natural human language, and a number of Microsoft products were too.
As I said before, we've been wanting to use a Natural Human Language for programming for a long time.
Edit: adding a wikipedia reference because apparently I am the only person on the planet that has been looking for a way to use a Natural Human Language for programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_programming
Second Edit: Adding the following paragraph from the wikipedia page for emphasis
Researchers have started to experiment with natural language programming environments that use plain language prompts and then use AI (specifically large language models) to turn natural language into formal code. For example Spatial Pixel created a natural language programming environment to turn natural language into P5.js code through OpenAI's API. In 2021 OpenAI developed a natural language programming environment for their programming large language model called Codex.
Some people are getting a lot of work done using LLMs. Some of us are using it on occasion to handle thing we don't understand deeply but can trivially verify. Some of us are using it out of laziness because it helps with boilerplate. Everyone who is using it outside of occasional tests is doing it because they find it useful to write code. If it's not coding, then I personally couldn't care less. Only a True Scotsman should case.
If we get to the point where we are no longer coding, we are just describing things in product language to a computer and letting it do all the real work, then I will find a more fulfilling career because this ain't it
I personally hate coding, but it's a means to an end, and I care about the end. I'm also paranoid about code I don't understand, so I only rarely use AI and even then it's either for things I understand 100% or things that don't matter. But it would be silly to claim they don't produce working code, no matter what we want to call it.
Thats true, but giving a human a task isn't coding - its project management
Secondly, and this is far more important, it's telling a machine what you want it to do - in text
Exactly like coding.
Also, not all dev jobs are web tech or AI tech.
I mean full credit to you with your disingenuous goalpost shifting and appeals to authority, but reality has no time for you (and neither do I anymore).
With ai it’s cheap and fast for a professional to ask the AI: what does this rubbish software do, and can you create me a more robust version following these guidelines.
This falls apart today with sufficiently complex software and also seems to require source availability (or perfect specifications).
One of the things I keep an eye out for in terms of "have LLMs actually cracked large-product complexity yet" (vs human-overseen patches or greenfield demos) is exactly that sort of re-implementation-and-improvement you talk about. Like a greenfield Photoshop substitute.
Aren't you being overly optimistic that these would even get traction?
If we get to a point where the engineers are replaced by machines, I would hope that the project managers were replaced years before that, as a final act of revenge
I enjoy a lot of things (Software Engineering is one of them) that in NO way determines whether or not AI is coding, nor does it guarantee me a career (just ask all the blacksmiths that disappeared once cars became the mass transport vehicle).
The fact that people are going to (possibly) be able to instruct a computer to do whatever they wish without the need of a four year degree and several years of experience scares you, I get that, but that's not going to have any effect on reality.
Edit: Have a look at all the peoples careers that have ended because software took over.