5 ms·

I'm a huge fan of Claude Code. That being said it blows my mind people can use this at a higher level than I do. I really need to approve every single edit and

I'm a huge fan of Claude Code. That being said it blows my mind people can use this at a higher level than I do. I really need to approve every single edit and keep an eye on it at ALL TIMES, otherwise it goes haywire very very fast! How are people using auto-edits and these kind of higher-level abstraction?

grim_io 1y ago
Deep down you know the answer already :) There is no magic way. It boils down to less strict inspection. I try to maintain an overall direction and try to care less about the individual line of code.
allisdust 1y ago
Through multi pass development. It's a bit like how processes happen inside a biological cell. There is no structure there. Structure emerges out of chaos. Same thing is with AI coding tools. Especially Claude code. We are letting code evolve to pass our quality gates. I do get to sit on my hands a lot though which frees up my time.
- aroussi 1y ago
  Yeah, I agree. I never let the AI make any architectural decisions (and I also watch Claude Code like a hawk lol). That being said, since we started using this system, we noticed that our PRDs and implementation plans (epics) became more detailed, giving the AI a lot less wiggle room. Essentially, I'm treating Claude Code as a very fast junior developer who needs to be spoon-fed with the architecture.
blitzar 1y ago
The secret to being an elite 10x dev - push 1000's of lines of code, soak up the ooo's and ahhh's at the standup when management highlight your amazingly large line count, post to linkedin about how great and humble you are, then move to the next role before anyone notices you contribute nothing but garbage and some loser 0.1x dev has to spend months fixing something they could have writting in a week or two from scratch.
- fzeindl 1y ago
  This. I‘m always amazed on how LLMs are praised for being able to churn out the large amount of code we apparently all need. I keep wondering why. All projects I ever saw need lines of code, nuts and bolts removed instead of added. My best libraries consist of a couple of thousand lines.
  - semitones 1y ago
    LLMs are a godsend when it comes to developing things that fit into one of the tens of thousands (or however many) of templates they have memorized. For instance, a lot of modern B2B software development involves updating CRUD interfaces and APIs to data. If you already have 50 or so CRUD functions in an existing layered architecture implemented, asking an LLM to implement the 51st, given a spec, is a _huge_ time-saver. Of course, you still need to use your human brain to verify before hand that there aren't special edge cases that need to be considered. Sometimes, you can explain the edge cases to the LLM and it will do a perfect job of figuring them out (assuming you do a good job of explaining it, and it's not too complicated). And if there aren't any real edge cases to worry about, then the LLM can one-shot a perfect PR (assuming you did the work to give it the context). Of course, there are many many other kinds of development - when developing novel low-level systems for complicated requirements, you're going to get much poorer results from an LLM, because the project won't as neatly fit in to one of the "templates" that it has memorized, and the LLM's reasoning capabilities are not yet sophisticated enough to handle arbitrary novelty.
    - NewsaHackO 1y ago
      The elephant in the room though is that the vast majority of programming fits into the template style that LLM’s are good at. That’s why so many people are afraid of it.
      - semitones 1y ago
        Yes - and I think those people need to expand their skillsets to include the things that the LLMs _cannot_ (yet) do, and/or expand their productivity by wielding the LLMs to do their work for them in a very efficient manner.
rs186 1y ago
You can't, at least for production code. I have used Claude Code for vibe coding several side projects now, some just for fun, others more serious and need to be well written and maintainable. For the former, as long as it works, I don't care, but I could easily see issues like dependency management. Then for the latter, because I actually need to personally verify every detail of the final product and review (which means "scan" at the least) the code, I always see a lot of issues -- tightly coupled code that makes testing difficult, missing test cases, using regex when it shouldn't, having giant classes that are impossible to read/maintain. Well, many of the issues you see humans do. I needed to constantly interrupt and ask it to do something different.
- the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
  > You can't, at least for production code. You can. People do. It's not perfect at it yet, but there are success stories of this.
  - stavros 1y ago
    Do you know of any links to writeups (or just mentions) of this?
    - threecheese 1y ago
      Check out the_mitsuhiko’s youtube, he has been showing some good techniques in the past few weeks.
      - stavros 1y ago
        I don't trust Armin for that, he's too good a developer for vibe coding. The question is whether someone who can't program at all can make something that works well with LLMs, not whether Armin can.
        unshavedyak 1y ago
        Is that the question? I definitely don't think that's remotely reasonable for someone who can't program. For small things yes, but large things? They're going to get into a spin cycle with the LLM on some edge case it's confused about where they consistently say "the button is blue!" and the bot confirms it is indeed not blue. It really depends on the area though. Some areas are simple for LLMs, others are quite difficult even if objectively simple. Granted atm i'm not a big believer in vibe coding in general, but imo it requires quite a bit of knowledge to be hands off and not have it fall into wells of confusion.
ddxv 1y ago
I think a lot of the AI stuff suffers from being better suited to showing off than actually working. How often have I thought, or worse told my friends, that it one shotted some issue of mine only to realize later that it was only partially working. Devils in the details.
rockyj 1y ago
I could not even (as of yesterday) get some boilerplate code out of AI. It very confidently spitted code which would not even compile (multiple times). Yes, it is better than parsing StackoverFlow pages when I have some specific task or error and sometimes slightly better than reading a bunch of docs for a library, but even then I have to verify if it is giving code / examples from latest versions.
- machiaweliczny 1y ago
  You can just tell it to read library code in npm_modules or wherever you have vendored libs in your framework. I for example give it whole demo examples and just say look at @demos/ how to do this. Cursor / CC authors don't add these prompts as this would be costly for them (and they run at loss likely now).
Nizoss 1y ago
Same, I manually approve and steer each operation. I don't see how cleaning up and simplifying after the fact is easier or faster.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  That kills iteration speed. Carefully outline, get it to write tests first, then let it go wild and verify the tests while it's doing that. If there are test issues, tell it so without interrupting it, and it'll just queue up those fixes without having to stop and be re-routed. You want to periodically have coverage improvement -> refactor loops after implementing a few features. You can figure out the refactors you want while the agent is implementing the code, after you've sussed out any test issues, then just queue up instructions on how to refactor once the tests are passing.
siva7 1y ago
Oh boy, they can't. Those are inexperienced vibe coding their idea of how product management could be done but lacking the experience to realize it doesn't work that way. How many of these claude code wrappers have been posted here in the last weeks? Must be a higher two digit.
lanthissa 1y ago
you cant make 90% of your codebase ai generated if you reuse code all the time, just dont abstract.
onel 1y ago
I've seen that happen but usually with code bases that are either not very well documented (reference docs) or that have a lot of abstractions and are complicated

grim_io 1y ago

Deep down you know the answer already :) There is no magic way. It boils down to less strict inspection. I try to maintain an overall direction and try to care less about the individual line of code.

allisdust 1y ago

Through multi pass development. It's a bit like how processes happen inside a biological cell. There is no structure there. Structure emerges out of chaos. Same thing is with AI coding tools. Especially Claude code. We are letting code evolve to pass our quality gates. I do get to sit on my hands a lot though which frees up my time.

aroussi 1y ago
Yeah, I agree. I never let the AI make any architectural decisions (and I also watch Claude Code like a hawk lol). That being said, since we started using this system, we noticed that our PRDs and implementation plans (epics) became more detailed, giving the AI a lot less wiggle room. Essentially, I'm treating Claude Code as a very fast junior developer who needs to be spoon-fed with the architecture.

blitzar 1y ago

The secret to being an elite 10x dev - push 1000's of lines of code, soak up the ooo's and ahhh's at the standup when management highlight your amazingly large line count, post to linkedin about how great and humble you are, then move to the next role before anyone notices you contribute nothing but garbage and some loser 0.1x dev has to spend months fixing something they could have writting in a week or two from scratch.

fzeindl 1y ago
This. I‘m always amazed on how LLMs are praised for being able to churn out the large amount of code we apparently all need. I keep wondering why. All projects I ever saw need lines of code, nuts and bolts removed instead of added. My best libraries consist of a couple of thousand lines.
- semitones 1y ago
  LLMs are a godsend when it comes to developing things that fit into one of the tens of thousands (or however many) of templates they have memorized. For instance, a lot of modern B2B software development involves updating CRUD interfaces and APIs to data. If you already have 50 or so CRUD functions in an existing layered architecture implemented, asking an LLM to implement the 51st, given a spec, is a _huge_ time-saver. Of course, you still need to use your human brain to verify before hand that there aren't special edge cases that need to be considered. Sometimes, you can explain the edge cases to the LLM and it will do a perfect job of figuring them out (assuming you do a good job of explaining it, and it's not too complicated). And if there aren't any real edge cases to worry about, then the LLM can one-shot a perfect PR (assuming you did the work to give it the context). Of course, there are many many other kinds of development - when developing novel low-level systems for complicated requirements, you're going to get much poorer results from an LLM, because the project won't as neatly fit in to one of the "templates" that it has memorized, and the LLM's reasoning capabilities are not yet sophisticated enough to handle arbitrary novelty.
  - NewsaHackO 1y ago
    The elephant in the room though is that the vast majority of programming fits into the template style that LLM’s are good at. That’s why so many people are afraid of it.
    - semitones 1y ago
      Yes - and I think those people need to expand their skillsets to include the things that the LLMs _cannot_ (yet) do, and/or expand their productivity by wielding the LLMs to do their work for them in a very efficient manner.

rs186 1y ago

You can't, at least for production code. I have used Claude Code for vibe coding several side projects now, some just for fun, others more serious and need to be well written and maintainable. For the former, as long as it works, I don't care, but I could easily see issues like dependency management. Then for the latter, because I actually need to personally verify every detail of the final product and review (which means "scan" at the least) the code, I always see a lot of issues -- tightly coupled code that makes testing difficult, missing test cases, using regex when it shouldn't, having giant classes that are impossible to read/maintain. Well, many of the issues you see humans do. I needed to constantly interrupt and ask it to do something different.

the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
> You can't, at least for production code. You can. People do. It's not perfect at it yet, but there are success stories of this.
- stavros 1y ago
  Do you know of any links to writeups (or just mentions) of this?
  - threecheese 1y ago
    Check out the_mitsuhiko’s youtube, he has been showing some good techniques in the past few weeks.
    - stavros 1y ago
      I don't trust Armin for that, he's too good a developer for vibe coding. The question is whether someone who can't program at all can make something that works well with LLMs, not whether Armin can.
      - unshavedyak 1y ago
        Is that the question? I definitely don't think that's remotely reasonable for someone who can't program. For small things yes, but large things? They're going to get into a spin cycle with the LLM on some edge case it's confused about where they consistently say "the button is blue!" and the bot confirms it is indeed not blue. It really depends on the area though. Some areas are simple for LLMs, others are quite difficult even if objectively simple. Granted atm i'm not a big believer in vibe coding in general, but imo it requires quite a bit of knowledge to be hands off and not have it fall into wells of confusion.

ddxv 1y ago

I think a lot of the AI stuff suffers from being better suited to showing off than actually working. How often have I thought, or worse told my friends, that it one shotted some issue of mine only to realize later that it was only partially working. Devils in the details.

rockyj 1y ago

I could not even (as of yesterday) get some boilerplate code out of AI. It very confidently spitted code which would not even compile (multiple times). Yes, it is better than parsing StackoverFlow pages when I have some specific task or error and sometimes slightly better than reading a bunch of docs for a library, but even then I have to verify if it is giving code / examples from latest versions.

machiaweliczny 1y ago
You can just tell it to read library code in npm_modules or wherever you have vendored libs in your framework. I for example give it whole demo examples and just say look at @demos/ how to do this. Cursor / CC authors don't add these prompts as this would be costly for them (and they run at loss likely now).

Nizoss 1y ago

Same, I manually approve and steer each operation. I don't see how cleaning up and simplifying after the fact is easier or faster.

CuriouslyC 1y ago
That kills iteration speed. Carefully outline, get it to write tests first, then let it go wild and verify the tests while it's doing that. If there are test issues, tell it so without interrupting it, and it'll just queue up those fixes without having to stop and be re-routed. You want to periodically have coverage improvement -> refactor loops after implementing a few features. You can figure out the refactors you want while the agent is implementing the code, after you've sussed out any test issues, then just queue up instructions on how to refactor once the tests are passing.

siva7 1y ago

Oh boy, they can't. Those are inexperienced vibe coding their idea of how product management could be done but lacking the experience to realize it doesn't work that way. How many of these claude code wrappers have been posted here in the last weeks? Must be a higher two digit.

lanthissa 1y ago

you cant make 90% of your codebase ai generated if you reuse code all the time, just dont abstract.

onel 1y ago

I've seen that happen but usually with code bases that are either not very well documented (reference docs) or that have a lot of abstractions and are complicated