5 ms·

Claude Code feels like magic because it is iterative

105 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

sylware 1y ago
Is claude able to write rv64 assembly code? For instance can you asked for a vector-based quicksort? Well, with a "vector size unit" of a "standard" cache line, namely 512bits/64bytes (rv22+ profile).
- Veen 1y ago
  You could just ask it: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5f4cb680-9a99-4781-8803-9697f7c551a1 https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5f4cb680-9a99-4781-8803-9... (No idea how good that is. I just gave it your comment)
  - tomashubelbauer 1y ago
    And if you use Claude Code you can also tell it to compile it and test it and it will keep fixing problems until it gets it right or gives up or spirals to a dead end.
    - sylware 1y ago
      You can give a set of test cases?
      - tomashubelbauer 1y ago
        With Claude Code you can, it is aware of your code base. Or you can have it generate them and then manually check them. If there are existing tests you can tell it to use those. I usually have it work on the thing I want it to do, keep a journal MarkDown file capturing what it did and why in case I want to review something later and tell it to build and test its changes after each edit.
      - rahoulb 1y ago
        My favourite way to use it is to write tests first, then say "make these pass". It will generate some code, run the tests, say "oh, there's an error here ... let's fix that ... oh, there's an error there, let's fix that ..." and (most of the time) it will reach a solution where the tests pass. I already do TDD a lot of the time, and this way I can be sure that the actual requirements are covered by the tests. Whereas asking it to add tests to existing code often gets over-elaborate in areas that aren't important and misses cases for the vital stuff. Sometimes, when asking Claude to pass existing tests, it comes up with better implementations than I would have done. Other times the implementation is awful, but I know I can use it, because the tests prove it works. And then I (or Claude) can refactor with confidence later.
  - sylware 1y ago
    I use noscript/basic (x)html browsers: I get only a 'enable javascript' thingy. Is there a clean web portal for this? Or could you pastebin that stuff on a decently implemented online service like https://paste.c-net.org https://paste.c-net.org ? Thx!
    - mavhc 1y ago
      https://github.com/simonw/llm https://github.com/simonw/llm
      - sylware 1y ago
        AMAZING! YT-DLP FOR AIS! Well, I am going to test that very soon. The thing which may be a blocker: if it requires the credentials of an already created account, creation gated behind one of the web engines from the whatng cartel... back to square one.
marliechiller 1y ago
I find the use of the word intelligence to be a bit of a misnomer. Is something intelligent if all its doing is pattern matching? Is the evolution that led to owl butterflies appearing like an owl intelligent? Im not sure. As an aside, its amusing we simulatenously have this article on the front page as well as [Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294633) also on the front page. LLMs are really dividing the community at the moment and its exhausting to keep up with what I (as a dev) should be doing to stay sharp
- talles 1y ago
  When talking about AI, intelligence is meaningless if you don't defined it beforehand. The common sense meaning of intelligence fails on this kind of discussion.
- 0x416c6578 1y ago
  | its exhausting to keep up with what I (as a dev) should be doing to stay sharp That for me is the biggest thing I am feeling about LLMs at the moment, things are moving so quickly but to what end? I know this industry is constantly evolving and in some ways that is very exciting but I also feel like it is this exponential runaway that requires very deliberate attention focused on the bleeding edge to stay relevant, when a lot of my time in my day job doesn't facilitate this (which I have identified and have made the effort and will be changing company in a month). My own two cents on LLMs (as a junior / low mid level early career software engineer) is that they work best as a better version of Google for any well explored issue, and being able to talk through problems in a conversational manner has been a game changer. But I do fear sometimes that I am not gaining the same amount of knowledge as I would before LLMs became mainstream, it's a shortcut that in the long run I fear is going to reduce the average problem solving ability and original / novel thinking ability of software engineers (whether that is even a requirement in most SWE jobs is up for debate).
  - ozim 1y ago
    I think this staying sharp is FOMO instilled by influencers and people selling guides/courses. Most of the stuff will be implemented by Anthropic, OpenAI etc. You can run local models but it is like playing matchbox cars in your backyard and imagining you will be F1 driver some day. Big guys have APIs you pay for to do serious work that’s all you need to know.
kypro 1y ago
Kinda reminds me of something my old AI professor used to say, "every problem is a search problem". Intelligence is really just a measure of ones's ability to accurately filter and iterate over the search space. Evolution is one extreme where the heuristic is poor so it must do a huge amount of iteration over many bad solution to find reasonably good solutions. Then on the other hand you have expert systems which are great at refining the search space to always deliver quality answers, but filter too much and are therefore too narrow so lack the creativity and nuance of real intelligence. LLMs provide good heuristics and agents with verifiable goals allow for iteration. This combination results in a system which demonstrates significantly more intelligent than either of its parts.
- conartist6 1y ago
  Search is eventually an existential and philosophical problem. How do you know if you have found what you are searching for? How do you know how long you can afford to keep searching if you don't find it? An LLM lacks even the intelligence of a cat or a mouse if you stop treating the intelligence of the human using it as its intelligence. To that I add this: Every single LLM user is a hyperintelligent ultraproductive centaur if I understand correctly, so how is it possible that I, as a made-of-meat individual, am kicking the ass of several whole world-class teams of these LLM-using centaur-y juggernauts? It shouldn't be possible, right? But I'm human, so it is
ed_mercer 1y ago
> What if Claude Code operated autonomously with massive parallel compute? Afaik this is not possible as LLMs have linear conversations.
- weiliddat 1y ago
  I guess if we interpreted it charitably, maybe every time there's a decision to be made, it just forked itself and ran with possible inputs it expects? I would say that's how some devs operate too. Instead of waiting for the product/customer to come back, let's predict how they might think and make a couple of possible solutions and iterate over them. Some might be dead ends, we can effectively prune them, some might lead to more forks, some might lead down linear paths. But we can essentially get more coverage before really needing some input. We might argue that it already does that in its chain-of-thought, or agent mode, but having a dedicated "forked" checkpoint lets us humans then check and rewind time in that sense.
- dbbk 1y ago
  Of course it's possible, you can do this today... just create 100 GitHub PRs and assign Copilot Coding Agent
lokimedes 1y ago
Well, Intelligence is arguably represented in a “prior” that skews the result to an optimum faster, with fewer iterations. What the article is describing as intelligence is exactly the opposite, it’s just brute force.
talles 1y ago
Technology feels like magic when you don't understand it.
- amelius 1y ago
  Even more so when even the creators of the technology don't understand it.
  - revskill 1y ago
    Where did u master humor from ?
  - mmh0000 1y ago
    The creators understand it well. The math is pretty a lot, but, you can literally do it with pen and paper. There are plenty of blog[1] posts showing the process. Anyone claiming AI is a black box no one understands is a marketing-level drone trying to sell something that THEY don't understand. [1] https://explainextended.com/2023/12/31/happy-new-year-15/ https://explainextended.com/2023/12/31/happy-new-year-15/
    - amelius 1y ago
      No, they only understand it on a superficial level. The behavior of these systems emerges from simpler stuff, yes, but the end result is difficult to reason about. Just have a look at Claude's prompt [1] that leaked some time ago, and which is an almost desperate attempt of the creators to nudge the system into a certain direction and make it not say the wrong things. We probably need a New Kind of Soft Science™ to fill this gap. [1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...
revskill 1y ago
LLM reflects YOUR intelligence, it's the secret truth.
- goodpoint 1y ago
  If anything it reflects the intelligence of the people whose work is being stolen.
  - rvnx 1y ago
    Ycombinator is an accomplice of this, and you know, all they will get is billions of tainted money as punishment. But I guess they can live with that.
- cainxinth 1y ago
  Just like all the people who think their LLM is sentient or an alien or a god are really just talking to themselves.
- rvnx 1y ago
  Many of the complainers don't know how to use them and how to write prompts, and then blame the LLMs. Or simply use LLMs that struggle at writing good code (GPT, Gemini Pro, etc). You need to be in the shoes of a product owner, and be able to express your requirements clearly and drive the LLM in your direction, and this requires to learn new skills (like kids learn how to use search engines).
  - timr 1y ago
    > Or simply use LLMs that struggle at writing good code (GPT, Gemini Pro, etc). I love how one side of this debate seems to have embraced "No True Scotsman" as the preferred argument strategy. Anyone who points out that these things have practical limitations gets a litany of "oh you aren't using it right" or "oh, you just aren't using the cool model" in response. It reminds me of the hipsters in SF who always felt your music was a little too last week. As someone who is currently using these every day, Gemini Pro is right up there with the very best models for writing code -- and "GPT" is not a single thing -- so I have no idea what you're talking about. These things have practical limitations.
GardenLetter27 1y ago
This feels a bit too optimistic, in practice it often gets stuck going down a rabbit hole (and burning up your requests / tokens doing it!). Like even when I tested it on a clean assessment (albeit with Cursor in this case) - https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/ https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/ - it did very well in agent mode, but the questions it got wrong were worrying because they're the sort of things that a human might not notice either. That said I do think you could get a lot more accuracy between the agent checking and running its own answers, and then also sending its diff to a very strong LLM like o3 or Gemini Pro 2.5 to review it - it's just a bit expensive to do that atm. The main issue on real projects is that just having enough context to even approach problems, and build and run tests is very difficult when you have 100k+ lines of code and it takes 15 minutes to clean build and run tests. And it feels like we're still years away from having all of the above, plus a large enough context window that this is a non-issue, for a reasonable price.
- cyanydeez 1y ago
  Like, its a nerd slot machine: shows you small wins, gets you almost big wins and seduces you into thinking "just one more perfect prompt and surely ill hit the jackpot"
stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
The recent developments are impressive. I’m now using my IDE as a diff viewer. Everything goes through the terminal. If there is an error, CC can analyse and fix it. Still needs a lot of handholding. I do not (yet) think big upfront plans will suddenly start working in the enterprise world. Let it write a failing test first.
- _dark_matter_ 1y ago
  I'm still not convinced. I spent a few hours today trying to get it to add linting to a SQL repository, _given another repository that already had what I wanted_. At one point it got a linting error and just added that error to the ignore list. I definitely I spent more time reviewing this code and prompting than it would have taken for me to do it myself. And it's still not merged!
- ed_mercer 1y ago
  Are you saying TDD works best with CC? Write a failing test first? I read an article about that recently but can't find it... EDIT: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...
bgwalter 1y ago
> What other tasks could be automated today with the current LLMs performance? CEO speeches and pro-LLM blogs come to mind. Again, there is a vague focus on "updating dependencies" where allegedly some time was saved. Take that to the extreme and we don't need any new software. Freeze Linux and Windows, do only security updates and fire everyone. Because the ultimate goal of LLM shills or self-hating programmers appears to be to eliminate all redundant work. Be careful what you wish for. They won't reward you for shilling or automating, they'll just fire you.
- msgodel 1y ago
  The primary use seems to be satisfying administrative demands that were never productive anyway.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
    This. They've been pushing these at my workplace and the only thing I can think to use it for is have the LLMs generate empty long-winded corporate-speak emails that I can send to managers when they ask for things that seem best answered by an empty long-winded corporate-speak email. Like "How are using using all these AI tools we are forcing on you without asking if you needed or wanted them?"
    - hammyhavoc 1y ago
      And so how exactly are you using them? ;- )
ajkjk 1y ago
normal English would be "Why does Claude Code feel like magic?" edit: or "Why Claude Code feels like magic" without the ?.
arpowers 1y ago
Has anyone actually gotten productivity improvements from Claude Code? What’s the use case? (I tried some things, and it blew up. Thus far my experience w agents in general)
- ryandvm 1y ago
  I have used it on a fairly simple Kotlin Android application and was blown away. I have previously been using paid ChatGPT, Github Copilot, and Gemini. In my opinion, it's the complete access to your repo that really makes it powerful, whereas with the other plugins you kind of have to manually feed it the files in your workspace and keep them in sync. I asked it to add Google Play subscription support to my application and it did, it required minimal tweaking. I asked it to add a screen for requesting location permissions from the user and it did it perfectly. No adjustment. I also asked it add a query parameter to my API (GoLang) which should result in a subtle change several layers deep and it had no problems with that. None of this is rocket science and I think the key is that it's all been done and documented a million times on the Internet. At this point, Claude Code is at least as effective as junior developer. Yes, I understand that this is a Faustian bargain.
  - jki275 1y ago
    FYI -- Windsurf, Cline, Cursor will all do this also, using Claude models if you set them up that way.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- anonzzzies 1y ago
  It gives us great productivity. If you write the tests yourself and insist it delivers 100% success without touching the tests themselves, just run them, it is very nice. We wrote a little bit of tooling around it so it instructs and loops until 100% succeed. Even for stuff that's complex enough for seniors to struggle (parsers/compilers), it delivers results after hours instead of days or weeks. But if you miss some tests you can all but guarantee that those things won't work even though an experienced human would automatically do that right as it is illogical for instance. But we would write tests like this for humans as well, so there is not much difference in our workflow; CC delivers faster and far far cheaper. And we tried it all, especially NOT having it integrated into an ide is brilliant. Before we used aider instead of cursor etc as we can control it: we don't want a human sitting there tapping 'yes, please do' or whatnot. We want it to finish, commit a PR and then review.
guluarte 1y ago
in my experience using agents has just wasted my time and money, they are good for small things if you are lazy and watching a movie looking at the results every 10 minutes, reverting and trying again
vital_beach 1y ago
I really enjoyed Claude Code. I was using it on some side projects for about a month with API credits, and I signed up for the Max subscription shortly after it started working with Code. Overnight, my account was banned, and I have no idea why. It sucks getting banned from such a cool and helpful tool :(
- arresin 1y ago
  Did the program need to kill child processes a lot?
  - vital_beach 1y ago
    nope, just running and stopping dev servers. It may have done a pfkill once or twice if something was hanging? Either way, using it was the API credits was fine for a little over a month, so I don't know if it was that. I got autobanned only a few hours after paying for Max and reauthing the client to use the subscription. My actual usage of it didn't change.
- tbcj 1y ago
  I had two accounts banned - one for Claude and one for the API. I tried to appeal both asking for more information. The response from Anthropic was non-specific and only that it violates usage. One account had only been minimally used. One never used. The accounts used email addresses using a domain I control - e.g., anthropic-claude@domain.xyz for example. I think that might have something to do with it. I have a new account now using a Google account and it hasn’t been banned.
datpuz 1y ago
Wait 'til you see the bill.
- volkk 1y ago
  there's no bill if you're paying the 200$/mo for unlimited use, right?
  - Tomte 1y ago
    It‘s not unlimited.
    - floydnoel 1y ago
      I was hitting throttling a lot on the $100 plan, but I haven't been throttled even once on the $200. so for me it's pretty unlimited. haven't gotten past using two agents at a time, though, so maybe that has something to do with it.
aussieguy1234 1y ago
Usually, I'll go through my coding like I would have pre-LLMs. Then, when I see something that looks like it can be reliably automated by an AI agent, I'll open up Cline and put Claude or Gemini Flash to work. This has a 90% success rate so far and has saved me hours of work.
sublinear 1y ago
There is no long view on this crap. You can think otherwise in a Western world that still imported illegal immigrants to pick your peaches. Doesn't mean jack. Produce now or fuck off.

105 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

Is claude able to write rv64 assembly code? For instance can you asked for a vector-based quicksort? Well, with a "vector size unit" of a "standard" cache line, namely 512bits/64bytes (rv22+ profile).

Veen 1y ago
You could just ask it: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5f4cb680-9a99-4781-8803-9697f7c551a1 https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5f4cb680-9a99-4781-8803-9... (No idea how good that is. I just gave it your comment)
- tomashubelbauer 1y ago
  And if you use Claude Code you can also tell it to compile it and test it and it will keep fixing problems until it gets it right or gives up or spirals to a dead end.
  - sylware 1y ago
    You can give a set of test cases?
    - tomashubelbauer 1y ago
      With Claude Code you can, it is aware of your code base. Or you can have it generate them and then manually check them. If there are existing tests you can tell it to use those. I usually have it work on the thing I want it to do, keep a journal MarkDown file capturing what it did and why in case I want to review something later and tell it to build and test its changes after each edit.
    - rahoulb 1y ago
      My favourite way to use it is to write tests first, then say "make these pass". It will generate some code, run the tests, say "oh, there's an error here ... let's fix that ... oh, there's an error there, let's fix that ..." and (most of the time) it will reach a solution where the tests pass. I already do TDD a lot of the time, and this way I can be sure that the actual requirements are covered by the tests. Whereas asking it to add tests to existing code often gets over-elaborate in areas that aren't important and misses cases for the vital stuff. Sometimes, when asking Claude to pass existing tests, it comes up with better implementations than I would have done. Other times the implementation is awful, but I know I can use it, because the tests prove it works. And then I (or Claude) can refactor with confidence later.
- sylware 1y ago
  I use noscript/basic (x)html browsers: I get only a 'enable javascript' thingy. Is there a clean web portal for this? Or could you pastebin that stuff on a decently implemented online service like https://paste.c-net.org https://paste.c-net.org ? Thx!
  - mavhc 1y ago
    https://github.com/simonw/llm https://github.com/simonw/llm
    - sylware 1y ago
      AMAZING! YT-DLP FOR AIS! Well, I am going to test that very soon. The thing which may be a blocker: if it requires the credentials of an already created account, creation gated behind one of the web engines from the whatng cartel... back to square one.

marliechiller 1y ago

I find the use of the word intelligence to be a bit of a misnomer. Is something intelligent if all its doing is pattern matching? Is the evolution that led to owl butterflies appearing like an owl intelligent? Im not sure. As an aside, its amusing we simulatenously have this article on the front page as well as [Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294633) also on the front page. LLMs are really dividing the community at the moment and its exhausting to keep up with what I (as a dev) should be doing to stay sharp

talles 1y ago
When talking about AI, intelligence is meaningless if you don't defined it beforehand. The common sense meaning of intelligence fails on this kind of discussion.
0x416c6578 1y ago
| its exhausting to keep up with what I (as a dev) should be doing to stay sharp That for me is the biggest thing I am feeling about LLMs at the moment, things are moving so quickly but to what end? I know this industry is constantly evolving and in some ways that is very exciting but I also feel like it is this exponential runaway that requires very deliberate attention focused on the bleeding edge to stay relevant, when a lot of my time in my day job doesn't facilitate this (which I have identified and have made the effort and will be changing company in a month). My own two cents on LLMs (as a junior / low mid level early career software engineer) is that they work best as a better version of Google for any well explored issue, and being able to talk through problems in a conversational manner has been a game changer. But I do fear sometimes that I am not gaining the same amount of knowledge as I would before LLMs became mainstream, it's a shortcut that in the long run I fear is going to reduce the average problem solving ability and original / novel thinking ability of software engineers (whether that is even a requirement in most SWE jobs is up for debate).
- ozim 1y ago
  I think this staying sharp is FOMO instilled by influencers and people selling guides/courses. Most of the stuff will be implemented by Anthropic, OpenAI etc. You can run local models but it is like playing matchbox cars in your backyard and imagining you will be F1 driver some day. Big guys have APIs you pay for to do serious work that’s all you need to know.

kypro 1y ago

Kinda reminds me of something my old AI professor used to say, "every problem is a search problem". Intelligence is really just a measure of ones's ability to accurately filter and iterate over the search space. Evolution is one extreme where the heuristic is poor so it must do a huge amount of iteration over many bad solution to find reasonably good solutions. Then on the other hand you have expert systems which are great at refining the search space to always deliver quality answers, but filter too much and are therefore too narrow so lack the creativity and nuance of real intelligence. LLMs provide good heuristics and agents with verifiable goals allow for iteration. This combination results in a system which demonstrates significantly more intelligent than either of its parts.

conartist6 1y ago
Search is eventually an existential and philosophical problem. How do you know if you have found what you are searching for? How do you know how long you can afford to keep searching if you don't find it? An LLM lacks even the intelligence of a cat or a mouse if you stop treating the intelligence of the human using it as its intelligence. To that I add this: Every single LLM user is a hyperintelligent ultraproductive centaur if I understand correctly, so how is it possible that I, as a made-of-meat individual, am kicking the ass of several whole world-class teams of these LLM-using centaur-y juggernauts? It shouldn't be possible, right? But I'm human, so it is

ed_mercer 1y ago

> What if Claude Code operated autonomously with massive parallel compute? Afaik this is not possible as LLMs have linear conversations.

weiliddat 1y ago
I guess if we interpreted it charitably, maybe every time there's a decision to be made, it just forked itself and ran with possible inputs it expects? I would say that's how some devs operate too. Instead of waiting for the product/customer to come back, let's predict how they might think and make a couple of possible solutions and iterate over them. Some might be dead ends, we can effectively prune them, some might lead to more forks, some might lead down linear paths. But we can essentially get more coverage before really needing some input. We might argue that it already does that in its chain-of-thought, or agent mode, but having a dedicated "forked" checkpoint lets us humans then check and rewind time in that sense.
dbbk 1y ago
Of course it's possible, you can do this today... just create 100 GitHub PRs and assign Copilot Coding Agent

lokimedes 1y ago

Well, Intelligence is arguably represented in a “prior” that skews the result to an optimum faster, with fewer iterations. What the article is describing as intelligence is exactly the opposite, it’s just brute force.

talles 1y ago

Technology feels like magic when you don't understand it.

amelius 1y ago
Even more so when even the creators of the technology don't understand it.
- revskill 1y ago
  Where did u master humor from ?
- mmh0000 1y ago
  The creators understand it well. The math is pretty a lot, but, you can literally do it with pen and paper. There are plenty of blog[1] posts showing the process. Anyone claiming AI is a black box no one understands is a marketing-level drone trying to sell something that THEY don't understand. [1] https://explainextended.com/2023/12/31/happy-new-year-15/ https://explainextended.com/2023/12/31/happy-new-year-15/
  - amelius 1y ago
    No, they only understand it on a superficial level. The behavior of these systems emerges from simpler stuff, yes, but the end result is difficult to reason about. Just have a look at Claude's prompt [1] that leaked some time ago, and which is an almost desperate attempt of the creators to nudge the system into a certain direction and make it not say the wrong things. We probably need a New Kind of Soft Science™ to fill this gap. [1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...

revskill 1y ago

LLM reflects YOUR intelligence, it's the secret truth.

goodpoint 1y ago
If anything it reflects the intelligence of the people whose work is being stolen.
- rvnx 1y ago
  Ycombinator is an accomplice of this, and you know, all they will get is billions of tainted money as punishment. But I guess they can live with that.
cainxinth 1y ago
Just like all the people who think their LLM is sentient or an alien or a god are really just talking to themselves.
rvnx 1y ago
Many of the complainers don't know how to use them and how to write prompts, and then blame the LLMs. Or simply use LLMs that struggle at writing good code (GPT, Gemini Pro, etc). You need to be in the shoes of a product owner, and be able to express your requirements clearly and drive the LLM in your direction, and this requires to learn new skills (like kids learn how to use search engines).
- timr 1y ago
  > Or simply use LLMs that struggle at writing good code (GPT, Gemini Pro, etc). I love how one side of this debate seems to have embraced "No True Scotsman" as the preferred argument strategy. Anyone who points out that these things have practical limitations gets a litany of "oh you aren't using it right" or "oh, you just aren't using the cool model" in response. It reminds me of the hipsters in SF who always felt your music was a little too last week. As someone who is currently using these every day, Gemini Pro is right up there with the very best models for writing code -- and "GPT" is not a single thing -- so I have no idea what you're talking about. These things have practical limitations.

GardenLetter27 1y ago

This feels a bit too optimistic, in practice it often gets stuck going down a rabbit hole (and burning up your requests / tokens doing it!). Like even when I tested it on a clean assessment (albeit with Cursor in this case) - https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/ https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/ - it did very well in agent mode, but the questions it got wrong were worrying because they're the sort of things that a human might not notice either. That said I do think you could get a lot more accuracy between the agent checking and running its own answers, and then also sending its diff to a very strong LLM like o3 or Gemini Pro 2.5 to review it - it's just a bit expensive to do that atm. The main issue on real projects is that just having enough context to even approach problems, and build and run tests is very difficult when you have 100k+ lines of code and it takes 15 minutes to clean build and run tests. And it feels like we're still years away from having all of the above, plus a large enough context window that this is a non-issue, for a reasonable price.

cyanydeez 1y ago
Like, its a nerd slot machine: shows you small wins, gets you almost big wins and seduces you into thinking "just one more perfect prompt and surely ill hit the jackpot"

stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago

The recent developments are impressive. I’m now using my IDE as a diff viewer. Everything goes through the terminal. If there is an error, CC can analyse and fix it. Still needs a lot of handholding. I do not (yet) think big upfront plans will suddenly start working in the enterprise world. Let it write a failing test first.

_dark_matter_ 1y ago
I'm still not convinced. I spent a few hours today trying to get it to add linting to a SQL repository, _given another repository that already had what I wanted_. At one point it got a linting error and just added that error to the ignore list. I definitely I spent more time reviewing this code and prompting than it would have taken for me to do it myself. And it's still not merged!
ed_mercer 1y ago
Are you saying TDD works best with CC? Write a failing test first? I read an article about that recently but can't find it... EDIT: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

bgwalter 1y ago

> What other tasks could be automated today with the current LLMs performance? CEO speeches and pro-LLM blogs come to mind. Again, there is a vague focus on "updating dependencies" where allegedly some time was saved. Take that to the extreme and we don't need any new software. Freeze Linux and Windows, do only security updates and fire everyone. Because the ultimate goal of LLM shills or self-hating programmers appears to be to eliminate all redundant work. Be careful what you wish for. They won't reward you for shilling or automating, they'll just fire you.

msgodel 1y ago
The primary use seems to be satisfying administrative demands that were never productive anyway.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  This. They've been pushing these at my workplace and the only thing I can think to use it for is have the LLMs generate empty long-winded corporate-speak emails that I can send to managers when they ask for things that seem best answered by an empty long-winded corporate-speak email. Like "How are using using all these AI tools we are forcing on you without asking if you needed or wanted them?"
  - hammyhavoc 1y ago
    And so how exactly are you using them? ;- )

ajkjk 1y ago

normal English would be "Why does Claude Code feel like magic?" edit: or "Why Claude Code feels like magic" without the ?.

arpowers 1y ago

Has anyone actually gotten productivity improvements from Claude Code? What’s the use case? (I tried some things, and it blew up. Thus far my experience w agents in general)

ryandvm 1y ago
I have used it on a fairly simple Kotlin Android application and was blown away. I have previously been using paid ChatGPT, Github Copilot, and Gemini. In my opinion, it's the complete access to your repo that really makes it powerful, whereas with the other plugins you kind of have to manually feed it the files in your workspace and keep them in sync. I asked it to add Google Play subscription support to my application and it did, it required minimal tweaking. I asked it to add a screen for requesting location permissions from the user and it did it perfectly. No adjustment. I also asked it add a query parameter to my API (GoLang) which should result in a subtle change several layers deep and it had no problems with that. None of this is rocket science and I think the key is that it's all been done and documented a million times on the Internet. At this point, Claude Code is at least as effective as junior developer. Yes, I understand that this is a Faustian bargain.
- jki275 1y ago
  FYI -- Windsurf, Cline, Cursor will all do this also, using Claude models if you set them up that way.
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anonzzzies 1y ago
It gives us great productivity. If you write the tests yourself and insist it delivers 100% success without touching the tests themselves, just run them, it is very nice. We wrote a little bit of tooling around it so it instructs and loops until 100% succeed. Even for stuff that's complex enough for seniors to struggle (parsers/compilers), it delivers results after hours instead of days or weeks. But if you miss some tests you can all but guarantee that those things won't work even though an experienced human would automatically do that right as it is illogical for instance. But we would write tests like this for humans as well, so there is not much difference in our workflow; CC delivers faster and far far cheaper. And we tried it all, especially NOT having it integrated into an ide is brilliant. Before we used aider instead of cursor etc as we can control it: we don't want a human sitting there tapping 'yes, please do' or whatnot. We want it to finish, commit a PR and then review.

guluarte 1y ago

in my experience using agents has just wasted my time and money, they are good for small things if you are lazy and watching a movie looking at the results every 10 minutes, reverting and trying again

vital_beach 1y ago

I really enjoyed Claude Code. I was using it on some side projects for about a month with API credits, and I signed up for the Max subscription shortly after it started working with Code. Overnight, my account was banned, and I have no idea why. It sucks getting banned from such a cool and helpful tool :(

arresin 1y ago
Did the program need to kill child processes a lot?
- vital_beach 1y ago
  nope, just running and stopping dev servers. It may have done a pfkill once or twice if something was hanging? Either way, using it was the API credits was fine for a little over a month, so I don't know if it was that. I got autobanned only a few hours after paying for Max and reauthing the client to use the subscription. My actual usage of it didn't change.
tbcj 1y ago
I had two accounts banned - one for Claude and one for the API. I tried to appeal both asking for more information. The response from Anthropic was non-specific and only that it violates usage. One account had only been minimally used. One never used. The accounts used email addresses using a domain I control - e.g., anthropic-claude@domain.xyz for example. I think that might have something to do with it. I have a new account now using a Google account and it hasn’t been banned.

datpuz 1y ago

Wait 'til you see the bill.

volkk 1y ago
there's no bill if you're paying the 200$/mo for unlimited use, right?
- Tomte 1y ago
  It‘s not unlimited.
  - floydnoel 1y ago
    I was hitting throttling a lot on the $100 plan, but I haven't been throttled even once on the $200. so for me it's pretty unlimited. haven't gotten past using two agents at a time, though, so maybe that has something to do with it.

aussieguy1234 1y ago

Usually, I'll go through my coding like I would have pre-LLMs. Then, when I see something that looks like it can be reliably automated by an AI agent, I'll open up Cline and put Claude or Gemini Flash to work. This has a 90% success rate so far and has saved me hours of work.

sublinear 1y ago

There is no long view on this crap. You can think otherwise in a Western world that still imported illegal immigrants to pick your peaches. Doesn't mean jack. Produce now or fuck off.