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It’s only a feeling, but I’d swear I’ve seen variations on this post across a half a dozen software-adjacent subreddits every day for the last month. The common

It’s only a feeling, but I’d swear I’ve seen variations on this post across a half a dozen software-adjacent subreddits every day for the last month. The common denominator has always been “Paying $200 for Claude Max is a steal” with absolutely no evidence of what the author did with it. I honestly think we’re being played.

tomlockwood 1y ago
Agreed. Where's the code?
- giantrobot 1y ago
  Where's the 10x, 20x, or whatever increases in profit from all the AI "productivity"? Typing is not the challenging aspect of writing code. Writing boilerplate faster isn't the super power that a lot of non-technical people seem to think it is.
  - tomlockwood 1y ago
    Yeah the current Vibe for me seems to be: Congratulations, you trained a giant machine that makes copying code from Stackoverflow marginally faster.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    "it handles the boilerplate!" Has always been the weirdest argument about most things. Like, sure...so does a library. That's why we have libraries. (Or at the extreme end, this is what something like C++ templates were for).
    - giantrobot 1y ago
      Libraries and frameworks remove some boilerplate but there's still tons of it. It's rare a library exposes a single doTheThingINeed() function that runs a business. Everyone needs boring but domain specific code.
  - jkmcf 1y ago
    Are we returning to ideas having importance now since PoC are cheaper and easier? Any dev on HN can create a Facebook competitor, but getting the traffic shift will require some magical thinking.
    - giantrobot 1y ago
      A PoC has never really been a problem that needed solving. It's going from that to a product that's actually fit for purpose. AWS will happily drain your bank account because you're throwing tons of resources at a poor implementation. Hackers will also happily exploit trivial security vulnerabilities a vibe coder had no ability to identify let alone fix. This is not the first time the industry has been down this road. They're not in themselves bad tools but their hype engenders a lot of overconfidence in non-technical users.
dbalatero 1y ago
Watch: it's just Dario Amodei's marketing reddit account.
Bjorkbat 1y ago
Yeah, I was about to say, it sounds a lot like this guy is just riding an intense high from getting Claude to build some side-project he's been putting off, which I feel is like 90% of all cases where someone writes a post like this. But then I never really hear any update on whether the high is still there or if it's tapered off and now they're hitting reality.
- gwynforthewyn 1y ago
  For sure. Fwiw, I use Claude Pro in my own side project. When it’s great, I think it’s a miracle. But when it hits a problem it’s a moron. Recently I was fascinated to see it (a) integrate swagger into a golang project in two minutes with full docs added for my api endpoints, and then (b) spend 90 minutes unable to figure out that it couldn’t align a circle to the edge of a canvas because it was moving the circle in increments of 20px and the canvas was 150px wide. Where it’s good it’s a very good tool, where it’s bad it’s very bad indeed.
joshdavham 1y ago
> I honestly think we’re being played. Supposing this is true, who is playing us and why?
- tomlockwood 1y ago
  Sam Altman and the money.
- gwynforthewyn 1y ago
  I didn't intend anything super nefarious there; I just think it's Influencer-style marketing that's going on.
  - joshdavham 1y ago
    Ah, I see.
furyofantares 1y ago
I don't think you're getting played. I think it's legitimately possible to get something done in a week that used to take 3 months, without realizing that you haven't actually done that. You might have all the features that would have taken 3 months, but you personally have zero understanding of the code produced. And that code is horrible. The LLM won't be able to take it further, and you won't either. I think we're seeing people on a high before they've come to understand what they have.
alexk6 1y ago
4 year old reddit account but active only recently, name ending with 4 digits.
octo888 1y ago
> with absolutely no evidence of what the author did with it. I've got colleagues desperate to be seen as on board with all the AI experiments and they just write things like "tool X is MILES better than tool Y". Leadership laps it up They never provide any evidence.

tomlockwood 1y ago

Agreed. Where's the code?

giantrobot 1y ago
Where's the 10x, 20x, or whatever increases in profit from all the AI "productivity"? Typing is not the challenging aspect of writing code. Writing boilerplate faster isn't the super power that a lot of non-technical people seem to think it is.
- tomlockwood 1y ago
  Yeah the current Vibe for me seems to be: Congratulations, you trained a giant machine that makes copying code from Stackoverflow marginally faster.
- XorNot 1y ago
  "it handles the boilerplate!" Has always been the weirdest argument about most things. Like, sure...so does a library. That's why we have libraries. (Or at the extreme end, this is what something like C++ templates were for).
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    Libraries and frameworks remove some boilerplate but there's still tons of it. It's rare a library exposes a single doTheThingINeed() function that runs a business. Everyone needs boring but domain specific code.
- jkmcf 1y ago
  Are we returning to ideas having importance now since PoC are cheaper and easier? Any dev on HN can create a Facebook competitor, but getting the traffic shift will require some magical thinking.
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    A PoC has never really been a problem that needed solving. It's going from that to a product that's actually fit for purpose. AWS will happily drain your bank account because you're throwing tons of resources at a poor implementation. Hackers will also happily exploit trivial security vulnerabilities a vibe coder had no ability to identify let alone fix. This is not the first time the industry has been down this road. They're not in themselves bad tools but their hype engenders a lot of overconfidence in non-technical users.

dbalatero 1y ago

Watch: it's just Dario Amodei's marketing reddit account.

Bjorkbat 1y ago

Yeah, I was about to say, it sounds a lot like this guy is just riding an intense high from getting Claude to build some side-project he's been putting off, which I feel is like 90% of all cases where someone writes a post like this. But then I never really hear any update on whether the high is still there or if it's tapered off and now they're hitting reality.

gwynforthewyn 1y ago
For sure. Fwiw, I use Claude Pro in my own side project. When it’s great, I think it’s a miracle. But when it hits a problem it’s a moron. Recently I was fascinated to see it (a) integrate swagger into a golang project in two minutes with full docs added for my api endpoints, and then (b) spend 90 minutes unable to figure out that it couldn’t align a circle to the edge of a canvas because it was moving the circle in increments of 20px and the canvas was 150px wide. Where it’s good it’s a very good tool, where it’s bad it’s very bad indeed.

joshdavham 1y ago

> I honestly think we’re being played. Supposing this is true, who is playing us and why?

tomlockwood 1y ago
Sam Altman and the money.
gwynforthewyn 1y ago
I didn't intend anything super nefarious there; I just think it's Influencer-style marketing that's going on.
- joshdavham 1y ago
  Ah, I see.

furyofantares 1y ago

I don't think you're getting played. I think it's legitimately possible to get something done in a week that used to take 3 months, without realizing that you haven't actually done that. You might have all the features that would have taken 3 months, but you personally have zero understanding of the code produced. And that code is horrible. The LLM won't be able to take it further, and you won't either. I think we're seeing people on a high before they've come to understand what they have.

alexk6 1y ago

4 year old reddit account but active only recently, name ending with 4 digits.

octo888 1y ago

> with absolutely no evidence of what the author did with it. I've got colleagues desperate to be seen as on board with all the AI experiments and they just write things like "tool X is MILES better than tool Y". Leadership laps it up They never provide any evidence.