10 ms·

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this fo

• ch4s3 2y ago
  What do you see as your biggest wins using Claude?
  • _acco 2y ago
    It helps me stay in flow by keeping me one layer up. In pair programming, it's ideal to have a driver (hands on keyboard) and a navigator (planning, direction). Claude can act as the driver most of the time so I can stay at the navigator level. This is so helpful, as it's easy as programmers to get sucked into implementation details or low-level minutiae that's just not important.
• candiddevmike 2y ago
  How did it "change your job description"?
  • _acco 2y ago
    As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I now "pair program" all day. Instead of being the driver and navigator all day, I can mostly sit "one layer up" in the navigator seat.
    • seanthemon 2y ago
      Do you feel yourself becoming disconnected from your skills? I used gpt extensively at one stage and I felt very rusty getting my hands dirty in code again.
      • _acco 2y ago
        I don't. But that's probably because I'm very opinionated about the implementation details, so I'm scrutinizing and tweaking its output a lot.
    • sangnoir 2y ago
      How is this a change in job description? It may be a failure of imagination on my part, but it sounds like you're still doing what you have always done - you've changed the how.
      • JamesSwift 2y ago
        Right. And in a similar vein, its very easy to replace a lot of low-effort outsourcing / junior-dev assignable tasks. I still need to describe the problem and clean up the answer, but I get the answer immediately and I can re-prompt for it to fix it immediately.
• pembrook 2y ago
  I see so many people hyping Claude Sonnet + Cursor on Twitter/X, yet in real world usage, I find it no better than GitHub Copilot (presumably GPT 4o) + VScode. Cursor offers some super marginal UX improvements over the latter (being that it’s a fork of VScode), since it allows you to switch models. But Claude and GPT have been interchangeable at least for my workflows, so I’m not sure the hype is really deserved. I can only imagine the excitement comes from the fact that cursor has a full-fat free trial, and maybe most people have never bothered paying for copilot?
  • _acco 2y ago
    Hmm, I've definitely always used paid copilot models. Perhaps it's my language of choice (Elixir)? Claude absolutely nails it, rarely gives me code with compilation errors, seems to know and leverage the standard library very well, idiomatic. Not the same with GPTs.
    • nojs 2y ago
      In my experience ChatGPT seems particularly bad at Elixir, presumably because there is a comparative lack of published code and discussion about it.
      • yeahwhatever10 2y ago
        Likely a lack of recently published code. Claude has been trained more recently.
    • lambdaba 2y ago
      Is there a definite answer on what languages / paradigms LLMs tend to be better at?
  • synergy20 2y ago
    Copilot user here, never tried Cursor yet, competition is always good. did a quick check, it's $20/month, and it has a vim plugin: https://github.com/pasky/claude.vim https://github.com/pasky/claude.vim going to give it a spin
• DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  > yet their company is barely even leveraging it ...do you not see the obnoxious CoPilot(TM) buttons and ads everywhere? It's even infected the Azure Portal - and every time I use it to answer a genuine question I have I get factually-incorrect responses (granted, I don't ask it trivial or introductory-level questions...).
  • _acco 2y ago
    I said leveraging, not hawking!
• greenthrow 2y ago
  Software engineer for multiple decades here. None of the AI assistants have made any major change to my job. They are useful tools when it's time to write code like many useful tools before them. But the hard work of being a senior+ software engineer comes before you start typing.
  • nerdjon 2y ago
    I will admit, if I need to do some one off task and write a quick python script to do something I will likely go to Claude or something and write it. I am talking 20-40 lines. I think it's fine for that, it doesn't need a ton of context, it's easy to test, easy to look at and understand, etc. But outside of that, beyond needing to remember a certain syntax, I have found that any time I tried to use it for anything more complex I am finding myself spending more time going back and forth trying to get code that works than I would have if I had just done it myself in the first place. If the code works, it just isn't maintainable code if you ask it to do too much. It will just remove entire functionality. I have seen a situation of someone submitting a PR, very clearly copying a method and sticking it in AI and saying "improve this". It made changes for no good reason and when you ask the person that submitted the PR why they made the change we of course got no answer. (these were not just Linter changes) Thats concerning, pushing code up that you can't even explain why you did something? Like you said with the hard work, sure it can churn out code. But you need to have a complete clear picture of what that code needs to look like before you start generating or you will not like the end result.
  • JeremyNT 2y ago
    They help me most when using a framework, API, or language I'm not super familiar with. Beats stack overflow for that stuff. But it's weird to me seeing people talk about these changing their jobs so much. Maybe I'm holding it wrong but I'm almost always bottlenecked by "big picture" challenges and less on the act of actually typing the code.
    • bamboozled 2y ago
      My GH copilot kept recommending incorrect things when I use it along side common libraries and frameworks, I don't know, I just don't really find it very useful.
• sakopov 2y ago
  I think my general perception is that AI is a great assistant for some occupations like software engineering, but due to its large room for error it's very impractical for majority of business applications that require accuracy. I'm seeing this trend at my company, which operates in the medical field and recently mandated that all engineers use CoPilot. At the same time it's a struggle to see where we can improve our business processes with AI - outside of basic things like transcriptions and spell checking - without getting ourselves into a massive lawsuit.
  • Loughla 2y ago
    It's useful for analyzing data, but only if it can be verified. We use it (higher education) to glance at data trends that may need further exploration. So it's a fancy pivot table, I guess. Most software vendors are selling their version of AI as hallucination free though. So that's terrifying.
    • slidehero 2y ago
      >Most software vendors are selling their version of AI as hallucination free though. It definitely has that Tesla Autopolit feel to it, where the marketing is ... enthusiastic, while the onus to "use the tool responsibly" is left up to the end user. I'm building a persentation/teaching tool for teachers and trying to not sweep the halicination angle under the rug. My marketing angle is that the AI is a huge time saver, but the classroom teacher is the subject expert and they need to review the output. At the end of the day, it's still much more time efficient for an expert to review the content than it is to produce it from scratch which is a huge win.
      • Loughla 2y ago
        Sadly, I think your sales pitch will fall flat. College and University admin aren't technology experts, but are VERY susceptible to flattery from tech sales people. They want to hear about the time and cost savings, regardless of reality. Also, to be super presumptuous, if you need help with anything with your tool, hit me up. I love working with developers on building realistic use case and workflows.
• layer8 2y ago
  Does your work not depend on existing code bases, product architectures and nontrivial domain contexts the LLM knows nothing about? Every thread like this over the past year or so has had comments similar to yours, and it always remains quite vague, or when examples are given, it’s about self-contained tasks that require little contextual knowledge and are confined to widely publicly-documented technologies. What exactly floored your colleague at Microsoft?
  • fuzztester 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • fuzztester 2y ago
      Even more negativity towards this comment of mine, than to some of my other ones, as shown by the greater downvotes. Jeepers creepers! :)
      • AdieuToLogic 2y ago
        Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. source: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html HTH
      • andrewflnr 2y ago
        Not-so-subtly mocking the top-level for not replying "yet", when they replied almost immediately after with a video of the relevant workflow, was not a move that made you look smart or nice.
        • fuzztester 2y ago
          Hey. These are the four simple lines that I wrote above: >Solid questions and comments, layer8. >I notice that the person you replied to has not replied to you yet. >It may be that they will, of course. >But your points are good. (Italics mine, and they were not in my original comment.) You, above: >when they replied almost immediately after with a video of the relevant workflow, I did check the time intervals between the top level comment and layer8's comment, before my first reply. It is over an hour now, so I cannot see the exact times in minutes any more, but IIRC, there was a fairly long gap (in minutes). And I also think I noticed that the top level person did reply to someone else, but not to layer8, by the time I wrote my comment. So I don't see anything wrong in what I said. I even said that they may reply later. You consider that to be: >"Not-so-subtly mocking"? Jeez. I think you are wrong. Then I have nothing further to say to you, except this: >was not a move that made you look smart or nice. Trying to look smart or nice is not the goal in online discussions. At least, I don't think so. You appear to think that. The goal (to me) is to say what you think, otherwise, why write at all? I could just get an LLM to write all my comments, and not care about its hallucinations. I don't try to be smart or nice, nor the reverse. I just put my considered thoughts out there, just like anyone else. Obviously I can be right or wrong, just like anyone else can be. And some points can be subjective, so cannot be said to be definitely either right or wrong.
• throwaway984393 2y ago
  [dead]
• adastra22 2y ago
  What is different vs. GPT-4o & Copilot?
• m3kw9 2y ago
  Coding assistance ain’t useful till it has around 50mb of context or whatever the size of 80% of code bases uses
• Calavar 2y ago
  I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a triangle using Vulkan (a 3D graphics API). There are about 1000 tutorials on this that are almost certainly in GPT-4's training data. I gave GPT two small twists so it's not a simple case of copy/paste: I asked it 1) to apply a texture to the triangle and 2) to keep all the code in a single function. (Most tutorials break the code up into about a dozen functions, but each of these functions are called only once, so it should be trivial to inline them.) Within the first ten lines, the code is already completely nonfunctional: GPT-4o declares a pointer (VkPhysicalDevice) that is uninitialized. It queries the number of graphics devices on the host machine. A human being would allocate a buffer with that number of elements and store the reference in the pointer. GPT-4o just ignores the result. Completely ignores it. So the function call was just for fun, I guess? It then tries to copy an entire array of VkPhysicalDevice_T objects into this uninitialized pointer. So that's a guaranteed memory access violation right off the bat.
  • aschobel 2y ago
    Give it another shot but with Claude Sonnet 3.5. It’s my daily driver for coding tasks. It seems especially strong with Python but a bit medium with Swift.
    • Calavar 2y ago
      I just signed up for the free version. Claude Sonnet does properly use malloc/free to manage the buffer where GPT-4o screws up (Yay!) It manages to gets through the whole process of initializing a graphics device and grabbing a queue from the device. It took some questionable shortcuts to get there (and didn't leave any comments explaining those shortcuts and the problems they could cause down the road), but fine, the code works. After that it goes completely off the rails by trying to issue draw commands before binding a graphics pipeline, which is both illogical and illegal. After a lot of prodding, I did manage to get it to bind a graphics pipeline, but it forgot about the texture. So Claude Sonnet is definitely better than GPT-4o, but it still feels raw, like a game of whack-a-mole where I can get it to fix a mistake, but it reintroduces an old one. I also have to be the one offering the expertise. I can prompt it to fix the issues because I know exactly what the issues are. If I was using this to try to fill in for a gap in my knowledge, I would be stuck when I ran the code and it crashed - I would have no idea where to go next. Update: Took about 50 min of experimenting, but I did get Claude to generate code that doesn't have any obvious defects on first inspection, although it cut off about halfway through because of the generation limit. That's the best result that I've seen from an LLM yet. But that's after about a dozen very broken broken programs, and again, I think the domain expertise here is key in order to be able to reprompt and correct.
• mlloyd 2y ago
  The most valuable thing AI has done for me with coding is commenting my code and creating documentation from it. It saves so much time doing a task that hardly any of us actually want to do - and it does it well.
• deadbabe 2y ago
  This is just Dunning-Kruger effect.
• MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
  I think tools like Copilot are best for people learning a popular programming language from scratch. You get better answers and easier problems to solve. The more experience you have the more you can outpace it in terms of correctness and appropriateness.
  • bpiroman 2y ago
    Not a fan of Copilot - having a chat bot separate from your coding environment feels much cleaner.
• meeb 2y ago
  I also find AI coding assistants useful, particularly when working on a framework heavy codebase (Django, Spring etc.). While I don’t use it to generate massive blocks of code from descriptions just the mostly accurate tab completion of boilerplate code probably saves me 10-20% of my coding time. It’s not a groundbreaking advancement but certainly a decent optimisation.
• paraschopra 2y ago
  How much do you end up paying for Claude + Cursor? I’m assuming cursor uses Claude api
• celestialcheese 2y ago
  100% this - Cursor's new inline multi-file editing with claude is staggeringly good. And it's _so_ new still.
• febed 2y ago
  It’s just a souped up version of Aider with an easier interface, isn’t it?
• anonzzzies 2y ago
  I have the same experience; I hope some open source/weights model gets to the same standard as I find a company like Anthropic having too much power to just shut out parts of the world (it did in the beginning when not available in the EU so I had to use proxies etc). It is of vital importance (imho) to get open models at the same level before another jump comes (if it comes of course, maybe another winter, but at least we'll have something I use every day/all day; so not all hype I think).
• tippytippytango 2y ago
  BigCos won't let their employees use these tools to write code because you can't let code leak off prem. To keep from falling behind I use it on my weekend projects. I sense no urgency to remedy this inside, but I'm not sure how these tools would help with millions of lines of legacy code. They are awesome for creating new things or editing small things where you can build up context easily.
  • Havoc 2y ago
    > BigCos won't let their employees use these tools to write code because you can't let code leak off prem. Ridiculous blanket statement. A bunch of places use external LLMs.
• maxglute 2y ago
  I'm a dummy with very rudimentary script kiddie tier skills, and Claude has helped me do a bunch of personal projects that would normally take months of research and stackoverflow begging in a few days. For me the hype is real, but maybe not trillions $$$ worth of value real.
• mdavid626 2y ago
  How did it change your workflow? I'm also a developer with 10+ years of experience. Generating code is not what I miss in my daily life. Understanding what you're doing and creating a mental model of it is the difficult part. Typing in the code is easy. I'm not sure how would a coding assistant help with that.
• machiaweliczny 2y ago
  I feel like currently the group feeling the most impact from Claude is frontend devs as tools like v0.dev, Claude etc. can almost create frontend from API schema (I've tested only page per page) which is great. It's probably because there's examples on the internet and that's why it works well.
• elephantears 2y ago
  Here's the test for experienced engineers to see if the LLM hype is bullshit or not -- use cursor with Claude Sonnet. Build an app in a programming language you don't know at all. Don't stop prompting until you build it.
• elephantears 2y ago
  Here's a test for experienced engineers to see if the LLM hype is bs or not -- 1. Use cursor with Claude Sonnet 2. Pick a programming language you don't know at all 3. Build an app in that language prompting only, don't stop prompting until you've run it successfully