12 ms·

Claude Code is a slot machine

266 points by rgoldfinger 1y ago

itsthecourier 1y ago
my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding. I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, taking notes, make Opus check my notes. it improved a lot my studying sessions too. I respect the different experiences each of us get from this. for fairness I share mine
- elcapitan 1y ago
  > I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. > pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. I have very similar experiences, but very often I wonder if I couldn't just have gone to an open source project on the same topic (e.g. building a toy parser) and read the source code there, instead of letting a code generator AI reproduce it for me. Because that happy feeling is very similar to early moments in my developer career, when I read through open source standard libraries and learned a lot from it.
- TheCleric 1y ago
  > I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. We probably have different personalities but the former is the only part I care about. It’s the operation that bores me.
- Disposal8433 1y ago
  It's nice that you have all those wonderful experiences with LLMs. But for once in your life, could you show us the code? Because you look like yet another cheerleader that have nothing to show, and it's annoying.
  - blibble 1y ago
    they almost exclusively have under 250 karma too...
  - RobinL 1y ago
    I have had similar experiences to OP. All of these apps (mostly maths learning, but also the bus one) were coded using a mix of copilot and Gemini CLI: https://rupertlinacre.com/ https://rupertlinacre.com/ I'm probably capable of building all of them by hand, but with a 6yo I'd have never had the time. He loves the games, his mental arithmetic has come on amazingly now he does it 'for fun'. All code is here: https://github.com/rupertlinacre https://github.com/rupertlinacre Much of this built out of a frustration that most maths resources online are trying to sell you something, full of ads, or poor quality. Just a simple zoomable numberline is hard to find
  - ChadNauseam 1y ago
    Sure. I'll show something. I'm working on an app to help teach myself french. I work at a busy startup so I only have a few hours to spare here and there, but I've managed to make an app that works very well for me, mainly because of the help I receive from Claude Code. I can't make the github repo public because it contains some copyright material [^1]. but maybe I'll make a censored version public if there's interest. It's at https://yap.town https://yap.town . [^1]: to be clear, nothing in the frontend is copyrighted. I use some copyrighted works to figure out how common various words are, which I need because I wanted the app to teach the most common words first. Edit: the site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
    - tcoff91 1y ago
      Site isn’t working for me on iOS safari.
      - ChadNauseam 1y ago
        I should have mentioned. The site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
gatkinso 1y ago
and a damn good one
- quantumHazer 1y ago
  in the sense that is totally unpredictable and suck your time into the void without learning anything?
  - gatkinso 1y ago
    in the sense that if I have to change the shape of a complex static object or do anything tedious, it can just do it. What exactly would you say I have to learn from tasks like that?
mccoyb 1y ago
> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer, but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually. The answer to this is nuanced. You can summon ~30k LoC codebases using CC without much fanfare. Will it work? Maybe, in some of the ways you were thinking -- it will be a simulacrum of the thing you had in your mind. If something is not working, you need to know the precise language to direct CC (and _if you know this language_, you can use CC like a chisel). If you don't know this language, you're stuck -- but you'd also be stuck if you were writing the thing _by hand_. In contrast to _writing the thing by hand_, you can ask CC to explain what's going on. What systems are involved here, is there a single source of truth, explain the pipeline to me ... It's not black and white in the way I experienced this paragraph. The "details" you need to know vary across a broad spectrum, and excellent wizards can navigate throughout the spectrum, and know the meta-strategies to use CC (or whatever agentic system) to unstick themselves in the parts of the spectrum they don't know. (lots of that latter skill set correlate with being a good programmer in the first place) Many of my colleagues who haven't used CC as much seem to get stuck in a "one track" frame of mind about what it can and cannot do -- without realizing that they don't know the meta-strategies ... or that they're describing just one particular workflow. It's a programmable programming tool, don't put it into a box.
- cobbal 1y ago
  I read this entire post before realizing you weren't referring to `cc`, the C compiler. It actually kinda works with this interpretation, particularly the "if you know this language" part.
whartung 1y ago
Actually the model I like to use is a Pacinko machine. Where you can visualize all of the options that are available, while internal cursor just randomly bounces from pin to pin.
tptacek 1y ago
I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plumbing, boilerplates, error handlers, formatting, reports, templates, and cancellations. Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable. You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.
- whateveracct 1y ago
  My job pays well and I create real stuff but most of the work is honestly just slop. So maybe I should use AI to save myself the effort..I could salvage more free time for myself that way..
- rustc 1y ago
  And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?
  - tptacek 1y ago
    I spend a fraction of the time verifying LLM production of rote code --- which I do in fact do, I'm not a vibe coder --- than I would writing it. I don't understand why people always expect this to be a mic drop rebuttal.
    - boredtofears 1y ago
      Do you feel like you end up with as clear of a mental model reviewing it as you do if you wrote it? I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question for myself. Maybe the answer is, "Probably not, and it probably doesn't matter" but I'm still trying to figure out what kind of downstream effects that may have later on my judgment.
b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
I think much like how we're still figuring out how to use and manage social media to minimize the downsides and maximize its utility, we're gonna have to do the same with AI. I find it incredibly powerful for certain things and incredibly frustrating for others. Begging the AI to one shot some project feels like the wrong way to use it, it's better as a scalpel. Or as a learning device, or a more advanced rubber ducky.
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  I never allow ai to write code, certainly not unsupervised. I like to write some code and then have claude check my work. Not just for bugs, but for architecture and style as well.
  - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
    I let it write boilerplate, or other low impact stuff like html/css. It worked nicely converting Svelte components from Svelte 4 to 5 for example. And AI autocomplete has been a genuine productivity win although not without the occasional subtle bug. But I can't imagine trusting it for an entire codebase. If you're letting the AI write your code you're not thinking about it deeply enough to critique it imo. Which is fine for CSS or whatever but not most code. It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.
    - shortrounddev2 1y ago
      I stopped using copilot because it kept writing really bad c++. It's great at python and Javascript. This was a year or so ago so maybe its better now
      - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
        I used it to learn C++ but that was for basic stuff. Even I could tell when it started to go off the rails. I wonder if some of the disconnect between the AI coding fans and skeptics is just the language they're writing.
christiangenco 1y ago
The world is a slot machine. There’s a reason intermittent rewards are so intoxicating to naturally evolved brains: exploiting systems that give intermittent rewards is a great resource acquisition strategy.
ggandhi 1y ago
Lovable, I feel, works at a higher abstraction layer. The unpredictability of whether my prompt will generate something delightful in that initial design creates an addictive slot machine dynamic. But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic?
- esafak 1y ago
  Nah, it would become actually useful. Companies are not going to keep paying for slot machines. There is a strong incentive to make them reliable.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Companies will rationally stop paying for slot machines that pay out $0.90 for every $1 wagered, but they’ll happily pay for slot machines that pay out $5 for every $1 wagered. Which will be the case is the interesting question.
    - Ekaros 1y ago
      At this point I am doubtful about calling companies rational actors in many many cases. So probably they play both machines. And it is somewhat luck which they hit and some maybe have rational leaders.
- troupo 1y ago
  > But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic? No. They would become extremely useful and more magical. Because instead of weird incantations and shamanic rituals of "just one more .rules file, bro, I swear" you could create useful reproducible working tools.
  - leptons 1y ago
    Except an LLM is not and never will be deterministic, by its very design that is not how it operates. It would need to be a fundamentally different tech from the ground up.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gronglo 1y ago
> but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually. I don't think that's true. I'm wondering if the author has tried Claude 4 Opus.
- nicce 1y ago
  I have just fought 4 days with Claude 4 Sonnet because it generates too much garbage for my usage, and I am considering stopping the AI usage altogether. No matter what system prompt, rules et. all you give, they don't want to do as I said, but instead do something which compiles (Rust) but is not performant or is extremely verbose and includes all kinds of unnecessary things. They have too much assumptions that some function is used/not used in async context, or it is okay to clone, or whatever. Is the Opus really that big leap?
squidbeak 1y ago
I'd love to read the article, but the gray text is too well camouflaged against the gray background.
- rgoldfinger 1y ago
  Good catch. I tweaked it some, let me know if that helps.
Wowfunhappy 1y ago
> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying. It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones). And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part. It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!
- hakunin 1y ago
  I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing) 3) people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev: 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day) 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    Just for background, I will say I'm not a programmer—I used to work at a web design agency where I did coding as part of my job, and now I'm an elementary school teacher of all things. I never wanted to be a software engineer explicitly because I don't like writing code! But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!
    - 1y ago
ChuckMcM 1y ago
That headline really resonates as I spent many years in Las Vegas. LLMs in general have very slot machine like qualities. WHen they “pay off” they are great.
- astrobe_ 1y ago
  .. But the house always wins ?
  - ChuckMcM 1y ago
    Right? I hope that at some point the weights system will become clear enough that one could bias against wrong answers. Just “telling” it that is wrong biases for the current token cache and doesn’t back propagate to the model. Of course back propagating user input would be very exploitable so I don’t see that happening.
    - prmph 1y ago
      What about if further individualized training could occur at the user site?
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    Quite possibly. They are subsidized right now, but those things are really expensive.
- svantana 1y ago
  Oh great, together we are two datapoints that reinforce the OP's hypothesis. I have a strong distaste for gambling in all forms and I don't enjoy using opaque, unreliable text generators either.
- leptons 1y ago
  There are many ways to describe LLMs and coding assistants. The slot machine is a pretty good one. I also compare "AI" to using a Ouija Board. It's not meant for getting real answers or truth. The game is to select the next letter in a word to create a sequence of words. It's an entertainment prop, and LLMs should be treated similarly. I have also compared "Artificial Intelligence" to artificial flavors. Beaver anus is used as artificial vanilla flavoring (that is a real thing that happens), and "AI"/LLMs are the digital equivalent. Real vanilla tastes so much better, even if it is more expensive. I have no doubt that code written by real humans works much better than AI slop code. Having tried the various "AI" coding assistants, and I am not at all impressed with what it creates. Half the time if I ask for "vanilla", it will tell me "banana".
blurbleblurble 1y ago
It's definitely addictive. But also, it works really well with some steady guidance.
misja111 1y ago
> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer I guess you could use them like that, but you'll do much better if you try to get an understanding of the problem beforehand. This way you can divide the problem into subtasks with reasonably clear description, that Claude will be able to handle without getting lost and without needing too many corrections. Also, you'll still need to understand pretty much every task that Claude has implemented. It frequently makes mistakes or does things in a suboptimal way. When you use AI properly it's a great tool, it's like an IDE on steroids. But it won't take away the need to use your brains.
gonzalohm 1y ago
My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people. As an example, the other day asks chatgpt to write a configuration file for SQL fluff that formatted the code as an example that I provided. It proceeded to invent all the SQL fluff rules. And the ones that were actual rules were useless for the actual format that I wanted. I get it, SQLFluff rules are really confusing, but that's why I asked for help. I know how to code python I don't need AI to write code that then I will need to review
- troupo 1y ago
  > My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people. It's not different from most people. Everyone runs into AI bullshit. However, hype and new tech optimism overrides everything.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools. Slapping something into ChatGPT is one way, though maybe not the most efficient way of getting value out of these tools.
    - gonzalohm 1y ago
      So what should I have done differently? If I have to spend 1 hour to setup the AI tools then I'm not saving any time
      - danielbln 1y ago
        Using an agentic coding assistant would be the first step (there are many, Cline, Claude Code, Gemini CLI and various others) as those can traverse the code base, execute tests, run queries or web search and feed the outputs back into itself to validate correctness of whatever the agent has created/done. You won't need to set up this stuff for an hour every time, you set it up once and then you just give it commands. The skill ceiling is deceptive, it feels very low at first (after all, it's just natural language, right?) but getting an intuition for where these tools work best and where they break down, how to task them, what to include in the instructions, it takes a bit of using them first. That said, if you're a code maximalist, if you get most enjoyment out of hand crafting code or of you don't feel comfortable communicating effectively or delegating work, then maybe these tools aren't for you. At this point in time I'm also pretty much over proselytizing anyone, I get a TON of value out of this stuff, but everbody has to find their own workflows.
varispeed 1y ago
> I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. That's why developers are poorly paid and viewed as disposable cogs. It feels "easy" to many people and so they internally think it is immoral to get paid and corporations ruthlessly prey on that feeling. Reality is that development is hard and requires immense mental work, constant upskilling and is not something you can switch off after 5pm and think of something else. Your brain is constantly at work. That work also is creating millions and billions that gets extracted from developers and flow to the greedy hands of the rich, who now control all the means of production (think of cloud services, regulation - try starting your own forum today, anything with user generated content etc.). Developer did themselves dirty.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  TIL that “developers are poorly paid”.
  - varispeed 1y ago
    TIL someone thinks a £60k dev job in London means you’re not being exploited - because you can afford a Tesco meal deal and a flatshare in Zone 4. Never mind your code prints money for people you’ll never meet, or that your “reward” is a Jira ticket and a perf review. Developers went from garage-tinkerers to the backbone of the modern economy - and somehow ended up as overworked, disposable employees in open-plan office farms. The owners changed, the IDEs got fancier, but the deal stayed the same: build the machine, never own it. You upskill constantly just to not fall behind. You work nights “for the launch.” You get gaslit into thinking stock options in a private company are equity. Then you’re laid off via email - while the founders post yacht selfies. And the worst part? Most of you still believe you’re lucky. That’s the grift: teach engineers to think they’re “not like other workers” - then extract surplus value just like any other industry has done since the 19th century. Developers are poorly paid - not because the salary is low, but because the upside is stolen. You created the wealth, they captured it.
scoreandmore 1y ago
That’s a good way to put it. I hadn’t realized how gamified it has become. I originally felt like Claude and I were a team, but it goes off the rails so much that I find myself pulling the lever with increasing febrility. Fortunately I’m old enough to know when to quit but I’ve seen a friend just disappear into coaxing Claude for hours instead of writing code himself. I wonder if he’s got Claude gambling addiction
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
stillpointlab 1y ago
The irony is I alt-tabbed to HN to read this article after starting Claude Code on an implementation pass. My usage of Claude Code sounds different to a lot of ways I hear people using it. I write medium detail task breakdowns with strict requirements and then get Claude to refine them. I review every single line of code methodically, attempting to catch every instance Claude missed a custom rule. I frequently need to fix up broken implementations, or propose complete refactors. It is a totally different experience to any other dev experience I have had previously. Despite the effort that I have to put in, it gets the job done. A lot of the code written is better than equivalent code from junior engineers I have worked with in the past (or at worst, no worse).
jonator 1y ago
For me the fun part of coding is having visions of products or systems I'd like to exist, and writing code only as a means to an end. Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algorithm of some unimportant subset of the system. At a high level, it's the mental labor of making thousands of small (but necessary) decisions. Now, I work alongside Claude to fast track the manifestation of my vision. It completely automates away the small exhaustive decision making (what should I name this variable, where should I put this function, I can refactor this function in a better way, etc). Further, sometimes it comes up with ideas that are even better than what I had in my head initially, resulting in a higher quality output than I could have achieved on my own. It has an amazing breadth of knowledge about programming, it is always available, and it never gives up. With AI in general, I have questions around the social implications of such a system. But, without a doubt, it's delivering extreme value to the world of software, and will only continue the acceleration of demand for new software. The cost of software will also go down, even though net more opportunities will be uncovered. I'm excited to see software revolutionize the under represented fields, such as schools, trades, government, finance, etc. We don't need another delivery app, despite how lucrative they can be.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  > and it never gives up. Not to impede your overall point, but have you not encountered a situation where Claude gives up? I definitely have, it'll say something like "Given X, Y and Z, your options are [a bunch of things that do not literally but might as well amount to 'go outside and touch grass']."
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jonator 1y ago
    I agree and do experience that. Perhaps to clarify, I mean that it (unlike humans), is always down to code alongside you. It will never complain, get sick, have a life event. etc.
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
The tool is insanely powerful, but Anthropic needs to build a more interactive structure into the tool. Just "accept this diff or not" is not ideal. If you prompt it correctly and rigidly, and review everything it does large or small, it's a 10x tool for grinding through some very hard problems very quickly. But it can very easily lead you into overconfidence and bloat. And it can "cheat" without you even realizing it. Claude Code is best used as an augmentation, not automation tool. And it's best that the tool makers and investors realize that and stop pretending they're going to replace programmers with things like this. They only work well when combined with a skilled programmer who can properly direct and sift through the results. What they do allow is the ability to focus on higher level thinking and problems and let the tool help you get there.
hugodan 1y ago
In both scenarios (slot machines and vibecoding) anticipation is the name of the game. Much like doomscrolling.
sergiotapia 1y ago
Anyone else kind of lose the high of solving a difficult problem since LLMs became the workflow? You still have to really guide the AI, none of this is automatic. Yet I no longer feel the mega joys I once felt hand building something and watching it work correctly. The thrill is gone! Don't know if this is good or bad yet. I don't miss the plumbing bullshit. I do miss the joy.
- minimaxir 1y ago
  This is a common argument against AI generation and I dislike it because people derive their joy from different things. Some engineers get their joy from the process of creation, others get their joy from the final result. Neither way is inherently better or more morally correct than the other.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
antirez 1y ago
There are other ways to use AI for coding. Watch this, if you want to see my (different than the vibe coding approach) way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z7T0DgHrWM&ab_channel=SalvatoreSanfilippo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z7T0DgHrWM&ab_channel=Salva...
minimaxir 1y ago
See also Anthropic's blog post directly comparing Claude Code to a slot machine, and the top comment pointing out said comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678535 I compared vibe coding to gambling in one of my recent blog posts and thought that metaphor was slightly uncharitable, but I didn't expect "slot machine" to actually now be the term of art.
kregasaurusrex 1y ago
On Friday I was converting a constrained solver from python to another language, and ran into some difficulty with subsituting an optimzer that's a few lines of easily written Scipy; but barely being supported in another language. One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. But another AI tool was really struggling with getting the right syntax to be compatible with the common existing optimization libaries, and I felt like I was repeatedly putting queries (read: $) into the software equivalent of a slot machine that was constantly apologizing for not giving a testable answer while eating tens of dollars in direct costs waiting for the "jackpot" of working code. The feedback loop of "maybe the next time it'll be right" turned into a few hundred queries resulting in finding the LLM's attempts were a ~20 node cycle of things it tried and didn't work, and now you're out a couple dollars and hours of engineering time.
- brookst 1y ago
  A very relatable experience. But not all that different from how humans work when in unfamiliar domains.
  - leptons 1y ago
    I'd rather work with a human. Even with our flaws, it's still better than constantly being lied to by a tin can. If a junior kept delivering broken results as much as the "AI" does, they wouldn't be on my team that long.
  - th0ma5 1y ago
    Except... Completely different
- moregrist 1y ago
  > One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. So slow, untested, and likely buggy, especially as the inputs become less well-conditioned? If this was a jr dev writing code I’d ask why they didn’t use <insert language-relevant LAPACK equivalent>. Neither llm outcome seems very ideal to me, tbh.
api 1y ago
One of the reasons a lot of things look like gambling is that a lot of things look like gambling. Hunting, gathering, and other baseline pre-civilization survival activities look like gambling. Dating looks like gambling. Reproduction even looks like gambling with each offspring, as a product of genetic recombination, being a dice roll. Investing, of course, looks like gambling. It's why we get so addicted to gambling. We're built for it because a lot of legitimate real things look like gambling.
ankit219 1y ago
One unpopular opinion I hold is that in recent times programming became a lot more about integrating libraries and frameworks vs writing your own thing. This was fine because if someone open sourced it, why repeat the same work. That ended up in cases where a lot of work was modifying the libraries to your use case. With vibe coding, I suspect this is a group that has adapted to it really well (alongside hobby coders and non coders). The thrill comes from problem solving, and when you can try out the solution quickly and validate, it is just addictive. The other side is how open source frameworks have increased, and there are a lot of oss libraries for just about everything. (A personal experience is implementing Cmd bar (like linear) in react when i was just learning. It took me a week or so, and then i just inserted an oss thing for comparison. It was super smooth, but i did not know the assumptions. In production, i will prefer that, and dont always have time to learn and implement from scratch). We see this with langchain etc in LLMs too, and other agentic frameworks as well. The shift is not towards less code but getting the thing to work faster. Claude code accelerates that exponentially as well.
- ivanjermakov 1y ago
  Unpopular opinion would be that if the project is not much more than a bunch of libraries/tools/techs integrated together than the need for its existence is questionable. Diversity there breaks "one way of doing things" and makes it harder to learn actual tech that makes it work.
  - ankit219 1y ago
    i meant in a way that programming is always synthesis. (to my brain) combining stuff from multiple places is good, but not great synthesis you can do on your own. Many developer feel there is not much of a difference between the two. No comment on whether there is a need for the existence.
quatonion 1y ago
I have been programming since 1978 and thoroughly enjoy it. Nothing more satisfying to me than thinking about nifty algorithms, how to wring out every last drop of performance from a system, or more recently train AI models or build agentic systems. From object models to back end, graphics to communications protocols, I love it all. But that said, I am getting on a bit now and don't particularly enjoy all the typing. When AI rolled around back in 2022 I threw myself into seeing how far I could push it. Copy pasting code back and forth between the chat window and the editor. It was a very interesting experience that felt fresh, even if the results were not amazing. Now I am a hundred percent using Claude Code with a mixture of other models in the mix. It's amazing. Yesterday I worked with CC on a CLAP plugin for Bitwig written in C and C++. It did really well - with buffer management, worker threads and proper lock-free data structures and synchronization. It even hand rolled its own WebSocket client! I was totally blown away. Sure, it needs some encouragement and help here and there, and having a lot of experience for this kind of stuff is important right now for success, but I can definitely see it won't be that way for much longer. I'm just so happy I can finally get round to all these projects I have had on the back burner all these years. The productivity is incredible, and things mostly just work. It really brings me a lot of joy and makes me happy.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
abhinavsns 1y ago
So is our brain. We pay with time.
righthand 1y ago
I've been reading Hooked by Nir Eyal and this was my conclusion too about all LLMs after just the introduction.
- firemelt 1y ago
  elaborate more as I dont read the book yet
  - righthand 1y ago
    Without explaining the book: Feedback loops + random chance llm is right When it’s wrong, what do you do? Pull the lever.
globular-toast 1y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't find CC makes me faster? I mean, it could, if I let it, but that means not reading or understanding what it's writing. Basically I just don't really believe anyone is writing software of the same quality in less time. But I can totally see how you can write software of lower quality in a fraction of the time. The interesting thing is going to be how this all holds up in a year or five. I suspect it's going to be a lot of rewriting the same old shit with LLMs again and again because the software they've already made is unmaintainable. I didn't get into software to labour like a factory worker day in, day out. I like to solve problems and see them deliver value over years and even decades, like an engineer.
bgwalter 1y ago
Yes, the gamification is why some people like it. It is another addiction. Most proponents and bloggers are tied to "AI" money though, directly or indirectly. I've seen little organic praise from high profile programmers. There aren't many, and once you search they all at least work on a commercial "AI" application.
- RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
  Simon Willison[1] of Django Framework founder[2] fame is a pretty big AI programming proponent at his blog. He's pretty high profile, as far as real-world programmers (as in, not executives and not promoters) go. You could argue, he makes money off of AI with his newsletter and whatnot, so he does stand to gain something, but it's a lot less than the executives and investors who've filled the news. [1] https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)
jgb1984 1y ago
Any code that chatgpt or claude ever gave me was overly verbose and highly inefficient in the best case, and riddled with subtle or not so subtle bugs in the worst case. Before the average junior dev will even discover those bugs his grasp on the codebase will have fallen so far behind that he won't stand a chance to redeem the project. Software quality is taking a nosedive. Our industry is vibecoding itself off the cliff.
bubblyworld 1y ago
You definitely need to be careful of the addition mechanics of CC, but is it still a slot machine if there are loads of steps you can take to improve your odds of success? For instance, only allowing it to code within a feedback loop of some kind. I find the author's premise that the skill here is just "knowing which model to use" way too reductive. Seems like an entirely different beast to gambling, where the odds are fixed by the house.
yuvadam 1y ago
avoid any gambling addiction, run with --dangerously-skip-permissions
wyldfire 1y ago
Love it or hate it, at the very least you can grant it this: Claude Code can mitigate some of the cost of Yak Shaving [1]. You need this digression/distraction feature, even though it's not the main attraction. Testing/infrastructure etc -- whatever it is, let's just have the automaton do the tedium. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving
eric-burel 1y ago
Can we collectively stop upvoting low quality 300 words random opinions about llm based dev? As a professional in the field I find the qualify of what's posted on HN really super low in this area, compared to posts eg related to cloud infrastructure or software engineering. There are better posts and sources than that.
- dwaltrip 1y ago
  The post may not have a ton of meat, but it resonates and seems ripe for discussion. It’s quite timely as we all try to figure out how and when to use these tools. Your comment doesn’t add much. Where’s the substance to your critique?
  - eric-burel 1y ago
    For instance this one is a great, valuable read about AI and developers productivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 Post that are just opinions doesn't really fuel discussions as they don't bring enough raw material to build on. Some opinions are still worthy because they are original, but here I see nothing new.
  - Too 1y ago
    There are several topics like this on the front page every day, since many months back now, and the comments are all the same. It’s enough.
- raincole 1y ago
  People don't upvote low quality 300 words random opinions. People upvote funny and catchy headlines. If you're asking whether we can collectively stop upvoting such headlines, the answer is probably no.
zaphodq42 1y ago
Claude works best for context based pattern matching. I specifically use claude for tasks which are simply replicating the logic with minor contextual differences. I can’t even imagine Claude writing whole features by itself.
osigurdson 1y ago
>> AI disrupts the process. I completely agree when using synchronous tools like Windsurf and Cursor. This is why I much prefer the async workflow most of the time. Here you get a chance to think about how the AI should be constrained in order to have the highest probability of a "one shot" PR or at least something that would only require a few edits. I spend a lot of time on the AGENTS.md file and as well as thinking a lot about the prompt that I am going to use. I sometime converse with ChatGPT a little on the prompt as the feedback loop is very fast. Then, just send it and wait ~5 minutes for completion. I still use synchronous tools sometime for UI and other things were it is hard to specify up front and iteration is required. But realistically, I use async 50:1 over sync.
dewarrn1 1y ago
Claude Code is^W^W^WEvery LLM is a slot machine.
4gotunameagain 1y ago
It is just another tool. Novel and powerful, but a tool nonetheless. You cannot write everything using LLMs, you cannot maintain hodgepodge LLM codebases, but also you might want a break from writing scaffolding code or simple functions.
stlava 1y ago
My worry is we're going to have a generation of engineers that have not built up the necessary critical thinking/pattern matching skills needed to weigh tradeoffs and bring in context to ask the right questions and interpret the answers. Sure we can segment this into code generation models and code review models but are engineers really going to want to be questioned by a code review tool on "what are you trying to do?" or are they just going to merge and pull the slot lever again?
jaredcwhite 1y ago
The degree of after-the-fact ad hoc justifications for using these tools makes my brain hurt. "I'm in meetings all day anyway" …wtf?! So yay for the machines taking over our skillsets and hard-earned craft so we can attend more meetings*? Sure sounds like a hellscape to me! * How 'bout I deploy my "digital twin" to attend the meetings for me. That'll show 'em!
nunez 1y ago
In other words: code assistants are going to wipe out software engineering (and adjacent roles) as a lucrative career path for generations to come...but not before our generation retires and "gets ours."
halis 1y ago
I think you meant a slop machine
BadIron 1y ago
I started using Claude AI, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek for helping me to develop Windows applications using Delphi Pascal a few months ago. I absolutely love it. I learned Pascal when I was 16 (high school) and throughout college. I have never been a professional programmer in my life. I'm getting old. I want to start getting back into programming. AI has helped me tremendously. AI has helped me to develop many special procedures and functions which I could not figure out by myself anymore. I am a Vice President at a company that sells computer networking equipment. Still need to keep my day job. By the way, Claude AI is the best so far when it comes to Pascal. ChatGPT is disappointing, maybe it's better in other programming languages. DeepSeek depends, it's average.
firemelt 1y ago
anyone know how to make claude code to be less invasive?
hommes-r 1y ago
Typical dark pattern with your mystery boxes and player skins. Claude code just makes it easier to tell yourself that its ok to play.
_iobt 1y ago
If you actually can code and know to define testable constraints around what you want it's great. But it is amazing how many people really are playing it like a slot machine and hoping for the best. That's just people and as always some will better utilise new tech than others. On aggregate I think everyone still wins
dmh2000 1y ago
I'm a 72 year old dev. Ai and Claude specifically are great because I can't focus on code like I used to. Ai has extended my viability for a few years.
ryanegt 1y ago
I started writing software in 2001 - I loved problem solving, or the act of creating the perfect snowflakes of SOLID code, the most beautifully optimized database query or the most developer friendly SDK libraries - probably stemming my experience joining projects where the code base was trash. But parts of the job do feel like repetitive drudgery... which is where I think AI comes in beautifully. What I've learned so far is that AI is only as good as the average developer who writes code and is only as effective as the codebase is approachable... unless you let the AI contribute to the architecture at the ground floor it will get just as confused and write just as much spaghetti code as a human coder will. Like other professions before us... this is a moment where software engineers must adapt or perish. It was a battle to overcome the stubborn mindset of being unchanged in my ways (and adopt AI)... but the writing is on the wall. And now I'm building and refining the very same AI tools that do the jobs of data analysts and software engineers.

266 points by rgoldfinger 1y ago

my time coding with Claude has been the most joyful experience in my 25 years of coding. I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. no moment in my coding life has been this productive and enlightening. pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. studying a paper, discussing it with Opus, back and forth, taking notes, make Opus check my notes. it improved a lot my studying sessions too. I respect the different experiences each of us get from this. for fairness I share mine

elcapitan 1y ago
> I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. > pretty often I sit down to read how the ai solved the issue and learn new techniques and tools. I have very similar experiences, but very often I wonder if I couldn't just have gone to an open source project on the same topic (e.g. building a toy parser) and read the source code there, instead of letting a code generator AI reproduce it for me. Because that happy feeling is very similar to early moments in my developer career, when I read through open source standard libraries and learned a lot from it.
TheCleric 1y ago
> I have delivered many pet projects I always wanted to build and now focus in the operation of them. We probably have different personalities but the former is the only part I care about. It’s the operation that bores me.
Disposal8433 1y ago
It's nice that you have all those wonderful experiences with LLMs. But for once in your life, could you show us the code? Because you look like yet another cheerleader that have nothing to show, and it's annoying.
- blibble 1y ago
  they almost exclusively have under 250 karma too...
- RobinL 1y ago
  I have had similar experiences to OP. All of these apps (mostly maths learning, but also the bus one) were coded using a mix of copilot and Gemini CLI: https://rupertlinacre.com/ https://rupertlinacre.com/ I'm probably capable of building all of them by hand, but with a 6yo I'd have never had the time. He loves the games, his mental arithmetic has come on amazingly now he does it 'for fun'. All code is here: https://github.com/rupertlinacre https://github.com/rupertlinacre Much of this built out of a frustration that most maths resources online are trying to sell you something, full of ads, or poor quality. Just a simple zoomable numberline is hard to find
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  Sure. I'll show something. I'm working on an app to help teach myself french. I work at a busy startup so I only have a few hours to spare here and there, but I've managed to make an app that works very well for me, mainly because of the help I receive from Claude Code. I can't make the github repo public because it contains some copyright material [^1]. but maybe I'll make a censored version public if there's interest. It's at https://yap.town https://yap.town . [^1]: to be clear, nothing in the frontend is copyrighted. I use some copyrighted works to figure out how common various words are, which I need because I wanted the app to teach the most common words first. Edit: the site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.
  - tcoff91 1y ago
    Site isn’t working for me on iOS safari.
    - ChadNauseam 1y ago
      I should have mentioned. The site uses the FileSystemWritableFileStream API, so Safari/iOS users will need Safari 26.

gatkinso 1y ago

and a damn good one

quantumHazer 1y ago
in the sense that is totally unpredictable and suck your time into the void without learning anything?
- gatkinso 1y ago
  in the sense that if I have to change the shape of a complex static object or do anything tedious, it can just do it. What exactly would you say I have to learn from tasks like that?

mccoyb 1y ago

> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer, but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually. The answer to this is nuanced. You can summon ~30k LoC codebases using CC without much fanfare. Will it work? Maybe, in some of the ways you were thinking -- it will be a simulacrum of the thing you had in your mind. If something is not working, you need to know the precise language to direct CC (and _if you know this language_, you can use CC like a chisel). If you don't know this language, you're stuck -- but you'd also be stuck if you were writing the thing _by hand_. In contrast to _writing the thing by hand_, you can ask CC to explain what's going on. What systems are involved here, is there a single source of truth, explain the pipeline to me ... It's not black and white in the way I experienced this paragraph. The "details" you need to know vary across a broad spectrum, and excellent wizards can navigate throughout the spectrum, and know the meta-strategies to use CC (or whatever agentic system) to unstick themselves in the parts of the spectrum they don't know. (lots of that latter skill set correlate with being a good programmer in the first place) Many of my colleagues who haven't used CC as much seem to get stuck in a "one track" frame of mind about what it can and cannot do -- without realizing that they don't know the meta-strategies ... or that they're describing just one particular workflow. It's a programmable programming tool, don't put it into a box.

cobbal 1y ago
I read this entire post before realizing you weren't referring to `cc`, the C compiler. It actually kinda works with this interpretation, particularly the "if you know this language" part.

whartung 1y ago

Actually the model I like to use is a Pacinko machine. Where you can visualize all of the options that are available, while internal cursor just randomly bounces from pin to pin.

tptacek 1y ago

I didn't become a software developer so I could write the same SQL queries, the same plumbing code, the same boilerplate beginnings of programs, the same repetitive error handling, the same string formatting, the same report generation, the same HTML templating, and the same thread cancellation logic. I also didn't become a programmer so I could gratify myself by yak-shaving elegant helpers for those SQL queries, plumbing, boilerplates, error handlers, formatting, reports, templates, and cancellations. Bloggers have been kidding themselves for decades about how invigorating programming is, how intellectually demanding it is, how high the IQ demands are, like they're Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach every time they write another fucking unit test. Guess what: a lot of the work programmers do, maybe even most of it, is rote. It should be automated. Doing it all by hand is part of why software is so unreliable. You have a limited amount of electrical charge in your brain for doing interesting work every day. If you spend it on the rote stuff, you're not going to have it to do actually interesting algorithmic work.

whateveracct 1y ago
My job pays well and I create real stuff but most of the work is honestly just slop. So maybe I should use AI to save myself the effort..I could salvage more free time for myself that way..
rustc 1y ago
And now you spend the same time verifying/reviewing AI output?
- tptacek 1y ago
  I spend a fraction of the time verifying LLM production of rote code --- which I do in fact do, I'm not a vibe coder --- than I would writing it. I don't understand why people always expect this to be a mic drop rebuttal.
  - boredtofears 1y ago
    Do you feel like you end up with as clear of a mental model reviewing it as you do if you wrote it? I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question for myself. Maybe the answer is, "Probably not, and it probably doesn't matter" but I'm still trying to figure out what kind of downstream effects that may have later on my judgment.

b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago

I think much like how we're still figuring out how to use and manage social media to minimize the downsides and maximize its utility, we're gonna have to do the same with AI. I find it incredibly powerful for certain things and incredibly frustrating for others. Begging the AI to one shot some project feels like the wrong way to use it, it's better as a scalpel. Or as a learning device, or a more advanced rubber ducky.

shortrounddev2 1y ago
I never allow ai to write code, certainly not unsupervised. I like to write some code and then have claude check my work. Not just for bugs, but for architecture and style as well.
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
  I let it write boilerplate, or other low impact stuff like html/css. It worked nicely converting Svelte components from Svelte 4 to 5 for example. And AI autocomplete has been a genuine productivity win although not without the occasional subtle bug. But I can't imagine trusting it for an entire codebase. If you're letting the AI write your code you're not thinking about it deeply enough to critique it imo. Which is fine for CSS or whatever but not most code. It's such a great tool for learning, double checking your work, figuring out syntax or console commands, writing one-off bash scripts etc.
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    I stopped using copilot because it kept writing really bad c++. It's great at python and Javascript. This was a year or so ago so maybe its better now
    - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
      I used it to learn C++ but that was for basic stuff. Even I could tell when it started to go off the rails. I wonder if some of the disconnect between the AI coding fans and skeptics is just the language they're writing.

christiangenco 1y ago

The world is a slot machine. There’s a reason intermittent rewards are so intoxicating to naturally evolved brains: exploiting systems that give intermittent rewards is a great resource acquisition strategy.

ggandhi 1y ago

Lovable, I feel, works at a higher abstraction layer. The unpredictability of whether my prompt will generate something delightful in that initial design creates an addictive slot machine dynamic. But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic?

esafak 1y ago
Nah, it would become actually useful. Companies are not going to keep paying for slot machines. There is a strong incentive to make them reliable.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Companies will rationally stop paying for slot machines that pay out $0.90 for every $1 wagered, but they’ll happily pay for slot machines that pay out $5 for every $1 wagered. Which will be the case is the interesting question.
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    At this point I am doubtful about calling companies rational actors in many many cases. So probably they play both machines. And it is somewhat luck which they hit and some maybe have rational leaders.
troupo 1y ago
> But would these tools lose their magic if the results became completely deterministic? No. They would become extremely useful and more magical. Because instead of weird incantations and shamanic rituals of "just one more .rules file, bro, I swear" you could create useful reproducible working tools.
- leptons 1y ago
  Except an LLM is not and never will be deterministic, by its very design that is not how it operates. It would need to be a fundamentally different tech from the ground up.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

gronglo 1y ago

> but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually. I don't think that's true. I'm wondering if the author has tried Claude 4 Opus.

nicce 1y ago
I have just fought 4 days with Claude 4 Sonnet because it generates too much garbage for my usage, and I am considering stopping the AI usage altogether. No matter what system prompt, rules et. all you give, they don't want to do as I said, but instead do something which compiles (Rust) but is not performant or is extremely verbose and includes all kinds of unnecessary things. They have too much assumptions that some function is used/not used in async context, or it is okay to clone, or whatever. Is the Opus really that big leap?

squidbeak 1y ago

I'd love to read the article, but the gray text is too well camouflaged against the gray background.

rgoldfinger 1y ago
Good catch. I tweaked it some, let me know if that helps.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago

> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying. It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones). And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part. It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!

hakunin 1y ago
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc) 2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing) 3) people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev: 1) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day) 2) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started) I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  Just for background, I will say I'm not a programmer—I used to work at a web design agency where I did coding as part of my job, and now I'm an elementary school teacher of all things. I never wanted to be a software engineer explicitly because I don't like writing code! But I've been using Claude non-stop this summer on personal projects and I just love the experience!
  - 1y ago

ChuckMcM 1y ago

That headline really resonates as I spent many years in Las Vegas. LLMs in general have very slot machine like qualities. WHen they “pay off” they are great.

astrobe_ 1y ago
.. But the house always wins ?
- ChuckMcM 1y ago
  Right? I hope that at some point the weights system will become clear enough that one could bias against wrong answers. Just “telling” it that is wrong biases for the current token cache and doesn’t back propagate to the model. Of course back propagating user input would be very exploitable so I don’t see that happening.
  - prmph 1y ago
    What about if further individualized training could occur at the user site?
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  Quite possibly. They are subsidized right now, but those things are really expensive.
svantana 1y ago
Oh great, together we are two datapoints that reinforce the OP's hypothesis. I have a strong distaste for gambling in all forms and I don't enjoy using opaque, unreliable text generators either.
leptons 1y ago
There are many ways to describe LLMs and coding assistants. The slot machine is a pretty good one. I also compare "AI" to using a Ouija Board. It's not meant for getting real answers or truth. The game is to select the next letter in a word to create a sequence of words. It's an entertainment prop, and LLMs should be treated similarly. I have also compared "Artificial Intelligence" to artificial flavors. Beaver anus is used as artificial vanilla flavoring (that is a real thing that happens), and "AI"/LLMs are the digital equivalent. Real vanilla tastes so much better, even if it is more expensive. I have no doubt that code written by real humans works much better than AI slop code. Having tried the various "AI" coding assistants, and I am not at all impressed with what it creates. Half the time if I ask for "vanilla", it will tell me "banana".

blurbleblurble 1y ago

It's definitely addictive. But also, it works really well with some steady guidance.

misja111 1y ago

> AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer I guess you could use them like that, but you'll do much better if you try to get an understanding of the problem beforehand. This way you can divide the problem into subtasks with reasonably clear description, that Claude will be able to handle without getting lost and without needing too many corrections. Also, you'll still need to understand pretty much every task that Claude has implemented. It frequently makes mistakes or does things in a suboptimal way. When you use AI properly it's a great tool, it's like an IDE on steroids. But it won't take away the need to use your brains.

gonzalohm 1y ago

My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people. As an example, the other day asks chatgpt to write a configuration file for SQL fluff that formatted the code as an example that I provided. It proceeded to invent all the SQL fluff rules. And the ones that were actual rules were useless for the actual format that I wanted. I get it, SQLFluff rules are really confusing, but that's why I asked for help. I know how to code python I don't need AI to write code that then I will need to review

troupo 1y ago
> My experience with AI seems to be totally different than for most people. It's not different from most people. Everyone runs into AI bullshit. However, hype and new tech optimism overrides everything.
- danielbln 1y ago
  Or, you know, there are different ways of using these tools. Slapping something into ChatGPT is one way, though maybe not the most efficient way of getting value out of these tools.
  - gonzalohm 1y ago
    So what should I have done differently? If I have to spend 1 hour to setup the AI tools then I'm not saving any time
    - danielbln 1y ago
      Using an agentic coding assistant would be the first step (there are many, Cline, Claude Code, Gemini CLI and various others) as those can traverse the code base, execute tests, run queries or web search and feed the outputs back into itself to validate correctness of whatever the agent has created/done. You won't need to set up this stuff for an hour every time, you set it up once and then you just give it commands. The skill ceiling is deceptive, it feels very low at first (after all, it's just natural language, right?) but getting an intuition for where these tools work best and where they break down, how to task them, what to include in the instructions, it takes a bit of using them first. That said, if you're a code maximalist, if you get most enjoyment out of hand crafting code or of you don't feel comfortable communicating effectively or delegating work, then maybe these tools aren't for you. At this point in time I'm also pretty much over proselytizing anyone, I get a TON of value out of this stuff, but everbody has to find their own workflows.

varispeed 1y ago

> I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. That's why developers are poorly paid and viewed as disposable cogs. It feels "easy" to many people and so they internally think it is immoral to get paid and corporations ruthlessly prey on that feeling. Reality is that development is hard and requires immense mental work, constant upskilling and is not something you can switch off after 5pm and think of something else. Your brain is constantly at work. That work also is creating millions and billions that gets extracted from developers and flow to the greedy hands of the rich, who now control all the means of production (think of cloud services, regulation - try starting your own forum today, anything with user generated content etc.). Developer did themselves dirty.

sokoloff 1y ago
TIL that “developers are poorly paid”.
- varispeed 1y ago
  TIL someone thinks a £60k dev job in London means you’re not being exploited - because you can afford a Tesco meal deal and a flatshare in Zone 4. Never mind your code prints money for people you’ll never meet, or that your “reward” is a Jira ticket and a perf review. Developers went from garage-tinkerers to the backbone of the modern economy - and somehow ended up as overworked, disposable employees in open-plan office farms. The owners changed, the IDEs got fancier, but the deal stayed the same: build the machine, never own it. You upskill constantly just to not fall behind. You work nights “for the launch.” You get gaslit into thinking stock options in a private company are equity. Then you’re laid off via email - while the founders post yacht selfies. And the worst part? Most of you still believe you’re lucky. That’s the grift: teach engineers to think they’re “not like other workers” - then extract surplus value just like any other industry has done since the 19th century. Developers are poorly paid - not because the salary is low, but because the upside is stolen. You created the wealth, they captured it.

scoreandmore 1y ago

That’s a good way to put it. I hadn’t realized how gamified it has become. I originally felt like Claude and I were a team, but it goes off the rails so much that I find myself pulling the lever with increasing febrility. Fortunately I’m old enough to know when to quit but I’ve seen a friend just disappear into coaxing Claude for hours instead of writing code himself. I wonder if he’s got Claude gambling addiction

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

stillpointlab 1y ago

The irony is I alt-tabbed to HN to read this article after starting Claude Code on an implementation pass. My usage of Claude Code sounds different to a lot of ways I hear people using it. I write medium detail task breakdowns with strict requirements and then get Claude to refine them. I review every single line of code methodically, attempting to catch every instance Claude missed a custom rule. I frequently need to fix up broken implementations, or propose complete refactors. It is a totally different experience to any other dev experience I have had previously. Despite the effort that I have to put in, it gets the job done. A lot of the code written is better than equivalent code from junior engineers I have worked with in the past (or at worst, no worse).

jonator 1y ago

For me the fun part of coding is having visions of products or systems I'd like to exist, and writing code only as a means to an end. Claude Code (AI coding agents/assistants) are perhaps the best thing to happen to my programming career. Up until this point, the constraint going from vision to reality has always been the tedious process of typing out code and unit tests or spending time tweaking the structure/algorithm of some unimportant subset of the system. At a high level, it's the mental labor of making thousands of small (but necessary) decisions. Now, I work alongside Claude to fast track the manifestation of my vision. It completely automates away the small exhaustive decision making (what should I name this variable, where should I put this function, I can refactor this function in a better way, etc). Further, sometimes it comes up with ideas that are even better than what I had in my head initially, resulting in a higher quality output than I could have achieved on my own. It has an amazing breadth of knowledge about programming, it is always available, and it never gives up. With AI in general, I have questions around the social implications of such a system. But, without a doubt, it's delivering extreme value to the world of software, and will only continue the acceleration of demand for new software. The cost of software will also go down, even though net more opportunities will be uncovered. I'm excited to see software revolutionize the under represented fields, such as schools, trades, government, finance, etc. We don't need another delivery app, despite how lucrative they can be.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
> and it never gives up. Not to impede your overall point, but have you not encountered a situation where Claude gives up? I definitely have, it'll say something like "Given X, Y and Z, your options are [a bunch of things that do not literally but might as well amount to 'go outside and touch grass']."
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jonator 1y ago
  I agree and do experience that. Perhaps to clarify, I mean that it (unlike humans), is always down to code alongside you. It will never complain, get sick, have a life event. etc.

cmrdporcupine 1y ago

The tool is insanely powerful, but Anthropic needs to build a more interactive structure into the tool. Just "accept this diff or not" is not ideal. If you prompt it correctly and rigidly, and review everything it does large or small, it's a 10x tool for grinding through some very hard problems very quickly. But it can very easily lead you into overconfidence and bloat. And it can "cheat" without you even realizing it. Claude Code is best used as an augmentation, not automation tool. And it's best that the tool makers and investors realize that and stop pretending they're going to replace programmers with things like this. They only work well when combined with a skilled programmer who can properly direct and sift through the results. What they do allow is the ability to focus on higher level thinking and problems and let the tool help you get there.

hugodan 1y ago

In both scenarios (slot machines and vibecoding) anticipation is the name of the game. Much like doomscrolling.

sergiotapia 1y ago

Anyone else kind of lose the high of solving a difficult problem since LLMs became the workflow? You still have to really guide the AI, none of this is automatic. Yet I no longer feel the mega joys I once felt hand building something and watching it work correctly. The thrill is gone! Don't know if this is good or bad yet. I don't miss the plumbing bullshit. I do miss the joy.

minimaxir 1y ago
This is a common argument against AI generation and I dislike it because people derive their joy from different things. Some engineers get their joy from the process of creation, others get their joy from the final result. Neither way is inherently better or more morally correct than the other.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

antirez 1y ago

There are other ways to use AI for coding. Watch this, if you want to see my (different than the vibe coding approach) way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z7T0DgHrWM&ab_channel=SalvatoreSanfilippo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z7T0DgHrWM&ab_channel=Salva...

minimaxir 1y ago

See also Anthropic's blog post directly comparing Claude Code to a slot machine, and the top comment pointing out said comparison: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44678535 I compared vibe coding to gambling in one of my recent blog posts and thought that metaphor was slightly uncharitable, but I didn't expect "slot machine" to actually now be the term of art.

kregasaurusrex 1y ago

On Friday I was converting a constrained solver from python to another language, and ran into some difficulty with subsituting an optimzer that's a few lines of easily written Scipy; but barely being supported in another language. One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. But another AI tool was really struggling with getting the right syntax to be compatible with the common existing optimization libaries, and I felt like I was repeatedly putting queries (read: $) into the software equivalent of a slot machine that was constantly apologizing for not giving a testable answer while eating tens of dollars in direct costs waiting for the "jackpot" of working code. The feedback loop of "maybe the next time it'll be right" turned into a few hundred queries resulting in finding the LLM's attempts were a ~20 node cycle of things it tried and didn't work, and now you're out a couple dollars and hours of engineering time.

brookst 1y ago
A very relatable experience. But not all that different from how humans work when in unfamiliar domains.
- leptons 1y ago
  I'd rather work with a human. Even with our flaws, it's still better than constantly being lied to by a tin can. If a junior kept delivering broken results as much as the "AI" does, they wouldn't be on my team that long.
- th0ma5 1y ago
  Except... Completely different
moregrist 1y ago
> One AI tool found this out and fully re-implemented the solver using a custom linear algebra library it wrote from scratch. So slow, untested, and likely buggy, especially as the inputs become less well-conditioned? If this was a jr dev writing code I’d ask why they didn’t use <insert language-relevant LAPACK equivalent>. Neither llm outcome seems very ideal to me, tbh.

api 1y ago

One of the reasons a lot of things look like gambling is that a lot of things look like gambling. Hunting, gathering, and other baseline pre-civilization survival activities look like gambling. Dating looks like gambling. Reproduction even looks like gambling with each offspring, as a product of genetic recombination, being a dice roll. Investing, of course, looks like gambling. It's why we get so addicted to gambling. We're built for it because a lot of legitimate real things look like gambling.

ankit219 1y ago

One unpopular opinion I hold is that in recent times programming became a lot more about integrating libraries and frameworks vs writing your own thing. This was fine because if someone open sourced it, why repeat the same work. That ended up in cases where a lot of work was modifying the libraries to your use case. With vibe coding, I suspect this is a group that has adapted to it really well (alongside hobby coders and non coders). The thrill comes from problem solving, and when you can try out the solution quickly and validate, it is just addictive. The other side is how open source frameworks have increased, and there are a lot of oss libraries for just about everything. (A personal experience is implementing Cmd bar (like linear) in react when i was just learning. It took me a week or so, and then i just inserted an oss thing for comparison. It was super smooth, but i did not know the assumptions. In production, i will prefer that, and dont always have time to learn and implement from scratch). We see this with langchain etc in LLMs too, and other agentic frameworks as well. The shift is not towards less code but getting the thing to work faster. Claude code accelerates that exponentially as well.

ivanjermakov 1y ago
Unpopular opinion would be that if the project is not much more than a bunch of libraries/tools/techs integrated together than the need for its existence is questionable. Diversity there breaks "one way of doing things" and makes it harder to learn actual tech that makes it work.
- ankit219 1y ago
  i meant in a way that programming is always synthesis. (to my brain) combining stuff from multiple places is good, but not great synthesis you can do on your own. Many developer feel there is not much of a difference between the two. No comment on whether there is a need for the existence.

quatonion 1y ago

I have been programming since 1978 and thoroughly enjoy it. Nothing more satisfying to me than thinking about nifty algorithms, how to wring out every last drop of performance from a system, or more recently train AI models or build agentic systems. From object models to back end, graphics to communications protocols, I love it all. But that said, I am getting on a bit now and don't particularly enjoy all the typing. When AI rolled around back in 2022 I threw myself into seeing how far I could push it. Copy pasting code back and forth between the chat window and the editor. It was a very interesting experience that felt fresh, even if the results were not amazing. Now I am a hundred percent using Claude Code with a mixture of other models in the mix. It's amazing. Yesterday I worked with CC on a CLAP plugin for Bitwig written in C and C++. It did really well - with buffer management, worker threads and proper lock-free data structures and synchronization. It even hand rolled its own WebSocket client! I was totally blown away. Sure, it needs some encouragement and help here and there, and having a lot of experience for this kind of stuff is important right now for success, but I can definitely see it won't be that way for much longer. I'm just so happy I can finally get round to all these projects I have had on the back burner all these years. The productivity is incredible, and things mostly just work. It really brings me a lot of joy and makes me happy.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

abhinavsns 1y ago

So is our brain. We pay with time.

righthand 1y ago

I've been reading Hooked by Nir Eyal and this was my conclusion too about all LLMs after just the introduction.

firemelt 1y ago
elaborate more as I dont read the book yet
- righthand 1y ago
  Without explaining the book: Feedback loops + random chance llm is right When it’s wrong, what do you do? Pull the lever.

globular-toast 1y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't find CC makes me faster? I mean, it could, if I let it, but that means not reading or understanding what it's writing. Basically I just don't really believe anyone is writing software of the same quality in less time. But I can totally see how you can write software of lower quality in a fraction of the time. The interesting thing is going to be how this all holds up in a year or five. I suspect it's going to be a lot of rewriting the same old shit with LLMs again and again because the software they've already made is unmaintainable. I didn't get into software to labour like a factory worker day in, day out. I like to solve problems and see them deliver value over years and even decades, like an engineer.

bgwalter 1y ago

Yes, the gamification is why some people like it. It is another addiction. Most proponents and bloggers are tied to "AI" money though, directly or indirectly. I've seen little organic praise from high profile programmers. There aren't many, and once you search they all at least work on a commercial "AI" application.

RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
Simon Willison[1] of Django Framework founder[2] fame is a pretty big AI programming proponent at his blog. He's pretty high profile, as far as real-world programmers (as in, not executives and not promoters) go. You could argue, he makes money off of AI with his newsletter and whatnot, so he does stand to gain something, but it's a lot less than the executives and investors who've filled the news. [1] https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)

jgb1984 1y ago

Any code that chatgpt or claude ever gave me was overly verbose and highly inefficient in the best case, and riddled with subtle or not so subtle bugs in the worst case. Before the average junior dev will even discover those bugs his grasp on the codebase will have fallen so far behind that he won't stand a chance to redeem the project. Software quality is taking a nosedive. Our industry is vibecoding itself off the cliff.

bubblyworld 1y ago

You definitely need to be careful of the addition mechanics of CC, but is it still a slot machine if there are loads of steps you can take to improve your odds of success? For instance, only allowing it to code within a feedback loop of some kind. I find the author's premise that the skill here is just "knowing which model to use" way too reductive. Seems like an entirely different beast to gambling, where the odds are fixed by the house.

yuvadam 1y ago

avoid any gambling addiction, run with --dangerously-skip-permissions

wyldfire 1y ago

Love it or hate it, at the very least you can grant it this: Claude Code can mitigate some of the cost of Yak Shaving [1]. You need this digression/distraction feature, even though it's not the main attraction. Testing/infrastructure etc -- whatever it is, let's just have the automaton do the tedium. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

eric-burel 1y ago

Can we collectively stop upvoting low quality 300 words random opinions about llm based dev? As a professional in the field I find the qualify of what's posted on HN really super low in this area, compared to posts eg related to cloud infrastructure or software engineering. There are better posts and sources than that.

dwaltrip 1y ago
The post may not have a ton of meat, but it resonates and seems ripe for discussion. It’s quite timely as we all try to figure out how and when to use these tools. Your comment doesn’t add much. Where’s the substance to your critique?
- eric-burel 1y ago
  For instance this one is a great, valuable read about AI and developers productivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912 Post that are just opinions doesn't really fuel discussions as they don't bring enough raw material to build on. Some opinions are still worthy because they are original, but here I see nothing new.
- Too 1y ago
  There are several topics like this on the front page every day, since many months back now, and the comments are all the same. It’s enough.
raincole 1y ago
People don't upvote low quality 300 words random opinions. People upvote funny and catchy headlines. If you're asking whether we can collectively stop upvoting such headlines, the answer is probably no.

zaphodq42 1y ago

Claude works best for context based pattern matching. I specifically use claude for tasks which are simply replicating the logic with minor contextual differences. I can’t even imagine Claude writing whole features by itself.

osigurdson 1y ago

>> AI disrupts the process. I completely agree when using synchronous tools like Windsurf and Cursor. This is why I much prefer the async workflow most of the time. Here you get a chance to think about how the AI should be constrained in order to have the highest probability of a "one shot" PR or at least something that would only require a few edits. I spend a lot of time on the AGENTS.md file and as well as thinking a lot about the prompt that I am going to use. I sometime converse with ChatGPT a little on the prompt as the feedback loop is very fast. Then, just send it and wait ~5 minutes for completion. I still use synchronous tools sometime for UI and other things were it is hard to specify up front and iteration is required. But realistically, I use async 50:1 over sync.

dewarrn1 1y ago

Claude Code is^W^W^WEvery LLM is a slot machine.

4gotunameagain 1y ago

It is just another tool. Novel and powerful, but a tool nonetheless. You cannot write everything using LLMs, you cannot maintain hodgepodge LLM codebases, but also you might want a break from writing scaffolding code or simple functions.

stlava 1y ago

My worry is we're going to have a generation of engineers that have not built up the necessary critical thinking/pattern matching skills needed to weigh tradeoffs and bring in context to ask the right questions and interpret the answers. Sure we can segment this into code generation models and code review models but are engineers really going to want to be questioned by a code review tool on "what are you trying to do?" or are they just going to merge and pull the slot lever again?

jaredcwhite 1y ago

The degree of after-the-fact ad hoc justifications for using these tools makes my brain hurt. "I'm in meetings all day anyway" …wtf?! So yay for the machines taking over our skillsets and hard-earned craft so we can attend more meetings*? Sure sounds like a hellscape to me! * How 'bout I deploy my "digital twin" to attend the meetings for me. That'll show 'em!

nunez 1y ago

In other words: code assistants are going to wipe out software engineering (and adjacent roles) as a lucrative career path for generations to come...but not before our generation retires and "gets ours."

halis 1y ago

I think you meant a slop machine

BadIron 1y ago

I started using Claude AI, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek for helping me to develop Windows applications using Delphi Pascal a few months ago. I absolutely love it. I learned Pascal when I was 16 (high school) and throughout college. I have never been a professional programmer in my life. I'm getting old. I want to start getting back into programming. AI has helped me tremendously. AI has helped me to develop many special procedures and functions which I could not figure out by myself anymore. I am a Vice President at a company that sells computer networking equipment. Still need to keep my day job. By the way, Claude AI is the best so far when it comes to Pascal. ChatGPT is disappointing, maybe it's better in other programming languages. DeepSeek depends, it's average.

firemelt 1y ago

anyone know how to make claude code to be less invasive?

hommes-r 1y ago

Typical dark pattern with your mystery boxes and player skins. Claude code just makes it easier to tell yourself that its ok to play.

_iobt 1y ago

If you actually can code and know to define testable constraints around what you want it's great. But it is amazing how many people really are playing it like a slot machine and hoping for the best. That's just people and as always some will better utilise new tech than others. On aggregate I think everyone still wins

dmh2000 1y ago

I'm a 72 year old dev. Ai and Claude specifically are great because I can't focus on code like I used to. Ai has extended my viability for a few years.

ryanegt 1y ago

I started writing software in 2001 - I loved problem solving, or the act of creating the perfect snowflakes of SOLID code, the most beautifully optimized database query or the most developer friendly SDK libraries - probably stemming my experience joining projects where the code base was trash. But parts of the job do feel like repetitive drudgery... which is where I think AI comes in beautifully. What I've learned so far is that AI is only as good as the average developer who writes code and is only as effective as the codebase is approachable... unless you let the AI contribute to the architecture at the ground floor it will get just as confused and write just as much spaghetti code as a human coder will. Like other professions before us... this is a moment where software engineers must adapt or perish. It was a battle to overcome the stubborn mindset of being unchanged in my ways (and adopt AI)... but the writing is on the wall. And now I'm building and refining the very same AI tools that do the jobs of data analysts and software engineers.