10 ms·

I really think a lof of people tried AI coding earlier, got frustrated at the errors and gave up. That's where the rejection of all these doomer predictions com

• AstroBen 9mo ago
  my issue hasn't been for a long time now that the code they write works or doesn't work. My issues all stem from that it works, but does the wrong thing
  • jmathai 9mo ago
    I think it's worth understanding why. Because that's not everyone's experience and there's a chance you could make a change such that you find it extremely useful. There's a lesser chance that you're working on a code base that Claude Code just isn't capable of helping with.
  • simonw 9mo ago
    If it does the wrong thing you tell it what the right thing is and have it try again. With the latest models if you're clear enough with your requirements you'll usually find it does the right thing on the first try.
    • cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
      Even better, have it write code to describe the right thing then run its code against that, taking yourself out of that loop.
    • giancarlostoro 9mo ago
      And if you've told it too many times to fix it, tell it someone has a gun to your head, for some reason it almost always gets it right this very next time.
      • dare944 9mo ago
        If you're a developer at the dawn of the AI revolution, there is absolutely a gun to your head.
        • giancarlostoro 9mo ago
          Yeah, if anyone can truly afford the AI empire. Remember all these "leading" companies are running it at a loss, so most companies paying for it are severely underpaying the cost of it all. We would need an insane technological breakthrough of unlimited memory and power before I start to worry, and at that point, I'll just look for a new career.
    • aurumque 9mo ago
      In a circuitous way, you can rather successfully have one agent write a specification and another one execute the code changes. Claude code has a planning mode that lets you work with the model to create a robust specification that can then be executed, asking the sort of leading questions for which it already seems to know it could make an incorrect assumption. I say 'agent' but I'm really just talking about separate model contexts, nothing fancy.
      • mikestorrent 9mo ago
        Cursor's planning functionality is very similar and I have found that I can even use "cheap" models like their Composer-1 and get great results in the planning phase, and then turn on Sonnet or Opus to actually produce the plan. 90% of the stuff I need to argue about is during the planning phase, so I save a ton of tokens and rework just making a really good spec. It turns out that Waterfall was always the correct method, it's just really slow ;)
        • aurumque 9mo ago
          Did you know that software specifications used to be almost entirely flow charts? There is something to be said for that and waterfall.
    • GoatInGrey 9mo ago
      There are several rubs with that operating protocol extending beyond the "you're holding it wrong" claim. 1) There exists a threshold, only identifiable in retrospect, past which it would have been faster to locate or write the code yourself than to navigate the LLM's correction loop or otherwise ensure one-shot success. 2) The intuition and motivations of LLMs derive from a latent space that the LLM cannot actually access. I cannot get a reliable answer on why the LLM chose the approaches it did; it can only retroactively confabulate. Unlike human developers who can recall off-hand, or at least review associated tickets and meeting notes to jog their memory. The LLM prompter always documenting sufficiently to bridge this LLM provenance gap hits rub #1. 3) Gradually building prompt dependency where one's ability to take over from the LLM declines and one can no longer answer questions or develop at the same velocity themselves. 4) My development costs increasingly being determined by the AI labs and hardware vendors they partner with. Particularly when the former will need to increase prices dramatically over the coming years to break even with even 2025 economics.
      • simonw 9mo ago
        The value I'm getting from this stuff is so large that I'll take those risks, personally.
        • th0ma5 9mo ago
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          • scubbo 9mo ago
            Many people - simonw is the most visible of them, but there are countless others - have given up trying to convinced folks who are determined to not be convinced, and are simply enjoying their increased productivity. This is not a competition or an argument.
            • llmslave2 9mo ago
              Maybe they are struggling to convince others because they are unable to produce evidence that is able to convince people? My experience scrolling X and HN is a bunch of people going "omg opus omg Claude Code I'm 10x more productive" and that's it. Just hand wavy anecdotes based on their own perceived productivity. I'm open to being convinced but just saying stuff is not convincing. It's the opposite, it feels like people have been put under a spell. I'm following The Primeagen, he's doing a series where he is trying these tools on stream and following peoples advice on how to use them the best. He's actually quite a good programmer so I'm eager to see how it goes. So far he isn't impressed and thus neither am I. If he cracks it and unlocks significant productivity then I will be convinced.
    • Capricorn2481 9mo ago
      > With the latest models if you're clear enough with your requirements you'll usually find it does the right thing on the first try That's great that this is your experience, but it's not a lot of people's. There are projects where it's just not going to know what to do. I'm working in a web framework that is a Frankenstein-ing of Laravel and October CMS. It's so easy for the agent to get confused because, even when I tell it this is a different framework, it sees things that look like Laravel or October CMS and suggests solutions that are only for those frameworks. So there's constant made up methods and getting stuck in loops. The documentation is terrible, you just have to read the code. Which, despite what people say, Cursor is terrible at, because embeddings are not a real way to read a codebase.
      • simonw 9mo ago
        I'm working mostly in a web framework that's used by me and almost nobody else (the weird little ASGI wrapper buried in Datasette) and I find the coding agents pick it up pretty fast. One trick I use that might work for you as well: Clone GitHub.com/simonw/datasette to /tmp then look at /tmp/docs/datasette for documentation and search the code if you need to Try that with your own custom framework and it might unblock things. If your framework is missing documentation tell Claude Code to write itself some documentation based on what it learns from reading the code!
        • Capricorn2481 9mo ago
          > I'm working mostly in a web framework that's used by me and almost nobody else (the weird little ASGI wrapper buried in Datasette) and I find the coding agents pick it up pretty fast Potentially because there is no baggage with similar frameworks. I'm sure it would have an easier time with this if it was not spun off from other frameworks. > If your framework is missing documentation tell Claude Code to write itself some documentation based on what it learns from reading the code! If Claude cannot read the code well enough to begin with, and needs supplemental documentation, I certainly don't want it generating the docs from the code. That's just compounding hallucinations on top of each other.
  • solumunus 9mo ago
    Correct it then, and next time craft a more explicit plan.
    • wubrr 9mo ago
      The more explicit/detailed your plan, the more context it uses up, the less accurate and generally functional it is. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing, but on a complex problem with large enough context it will consistently shit the bed.
      • solumunus 9mo ago
        It usually works well for me. With very big tasks I break the plan into multiple MD files with the relevant context included and work through in individual sessions, updating remaining plans appropriately at the end of each one (usually there will be decision changes or additions during iteration).
      • rectang 9mo ago
        The human still has to manage complexity. A properly modularized and maintainable code base is much easier for the LLM to operate on — but the LLM has difficulty keeping the code base in that state without strong guidance. Putting “Make minimal changes” in my standard prompt helped a lot with the tendency of basically all agents to make too many changes at once. With that addition it became possible to direct the LLM to make something similar to the logical progression of commits I would have made anyway, but now don’t have to work as hard at crafting. Most of the hype merchants avoid the topic of maintainability because they’re playing to non-technical management skeptical of the importance of engineering fundamentals. But everything I’ve experienced so far working with LLMs screams that the fundamentals are more important than ever.
      • pigpop 9mo ago
        It takes a lot of plan to use up the context and most of the time the agent doesn't need the whole plan, they just need what's relevant to the current task.
  • zmmmmm 9mo ago
    > My issues all stem from that it works, but does the wrong thing It's an opportunity, not a problem. Because it means there's a gap in your specifications and then your tests. I use Aider not Claude but I run it with Anthropic models. And what I found is that comprehensively writing up the documentation for a feature spec style before starting eliminates a huge amount of what you're referring to. It serves a triple purpose (a) you get the documentation, (b) you guide the AI and (c) it's surprising how often this helps to refine the feature itself. Sometimes I invoke the AI to help me write the spec as well, asking it to prompt for areas where clarification is needed etc.
    • giancarlostoro 9mo ago
      This is how Beads works, especially with Claude Code. What I do is I tell Claude to always create a Bead when I tell it to add something, or about something that needs to be added, then I start brainstorming, and even ask it to do market research what are top apps doing for x, y or z. Then ask it to update the bead (I call them tasks) and then finally when its got enough detail, I tell it, do all of these in parallel.
      • beoberha 9mo ago
        Beads is amazing. It’s such a simple concept but elevates agentic coding to another levels
• biammer 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Gud 9mo ago
    Frankly, in this comment thread you appear to be the oppressor.
    • biammer 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • santoshalper 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        • justinclift 9mo ago
          Please don't go down the path of making personal attacks.
        • biammer 9mo ago
          > Why are you afraid of using your real account Careful with being blindly led by your own assumptions. I actually disagree with your thesis here. I think if every comment was posted under a new account this site would improve its average veracity. As it stands certain 'celebrity', or high karma, accounts are artificially bolstered by the network effect indifferent to the defensibility of their claims.
    • goatlover 9mo ago
      Who is the parent oppressing? Making a comment and companies looking to automate labor are a little bit different. One might disagree that automation is oppressive or whatever goals the major tech CEOs have in developing AIs (surveillance, influencing politics, increasing wealth gap), but certainly commenting that they are oppressive is not the same thing.
  • Workaccount2 9mo ago
• ryandrake 9mo ago
  This was me. I was a huge AI coding detractor on here for a while (you can check my comment history). But, in order to stay informed and not just be that grouchy curmudgeon all the time, I kept up with the models and regularly tried them out. Opus 4.5 is so much better than anything I've tried before, I'm ready to change my mind about AI assistance. I even gave -True Vibe Coding- a whirl. Yesterday, from a blank directory and text file list of requirements, I had Opus 4.5 build an Android TV video player that could read a directory over NFS, show a grid view of movie poster thumbnails, and play the selected video file on the TV. The result wasn't exactly full-featured Kodi, but it works in the emulator and actual device, it has no memory leaks, crashes, ANRs, no performance problems, no network latency bugs or anything. It was pretty astounding. Oh, and I did this all without ever opening a single source file or even looking at the proposed code changes while Opus was doing its thing. I don't even know Kotlin and still don't know it.
  • yieldcrv 9mo ago
    I recently replaced my monitor with one that could be vertically oriented, because I'm just using Claude Code in the terminal and not looking at file trees at all but I do want a better way to glance and keep up with what its doing in longer conversations, for my own mental context window
    • adastra22 9mo ago
      Ah, but you’re at the beginning stage young grasshopper. Soon you will be missing that horizontal ultra wide monitor as you spin up 8 different Claude agents in parallel seasons.
      • yieldcrv 9mo ago
        oh I noticed! I've begun doing that on my laptop. I just started going down all my list of sideprojects one by one, then two by two, a Claude Code instance in a terminal window for each folder. It's a bit mental I'm finding that branding and graphic design is the most arduous part, that I'm hoping to accelerate soon. I'm heavily AI assisted there too and I'm evaluating MCP servers to help, but so far I do actually have to focus on just that part as opposed to babysit
• troupo 9mo ago
  > Opus 4.5 really is at a new tier however. It just...works. Literally tried it yesterday. I didn't see a single difference with whatever model Claude Code was using two months ago. Same crippled context window. Same "I'll read 10 irrelevant lines from a file", same random changes etc.
  • mikestorrent 9mo ago
    200k+ tokens is a pretty big context window if you are feeding it the right context. Editors like Cursor are really good at indexing and curating context for you; perhaps it'd be worth trying something that does that better than Claude CLI does?
    • troupo 9mo ago
      > a pretty big context window if you are feeding it the right context. Yup. There's some magical "right context" that will fix all the problems. What is that right context? No idea, I guess I need to read a yet-another 20 000-word post describing magical incantations that you should or shouldn't do in the context. The "Opus 4.5 is something else/nex tier/just works" claims in my mind means that I wouldn't need to babysit its every decision, or that it would actually read relevant lines from relevant files etc. Nope. Exact same behaviors as whatever the previous model was. Oh, and that "200k tokens context window"? It's a lie. The quality quickly degrades as soon as Claude reaches somewhere around 50% of the context window. At 80+% it's nearly indistinguishable from a model from two years ago. (BTW, same for Codex/GPT with it's "1 million token window")
      • CuriouslyC 9mo ago
        I realize your experience has been frustrating. I hope you see that every generation of model and harness is converting more hold-outs. We're still a few years from hard diminishing returns assuming capital keeps flowing (and that's without any major new architectures which are likely) so you should be able to see how this is going to play out. It's in your interest to deal with your frustration and figure out how you can leverage the new tools to stay relevant (to the degree that you want to). Regarding the context window, Claude needs thinking turned up for long context accuracy, it's quite forgetful without thinking.
• littlestymaar 9mo ago
  > I really think a lof of people tried AI coding earlier, got frustrated at the errors and gave up. That's where the rejection of all these doomer predictions comes from. It's not just the deficiencies of earlier versions, but the mismatch between the praise from AI enthusiasts and the reality. I mean maybe it is really different now and I should definitely try uploading all of my employer's IP on Claude's cloud and see how well it works. But so many people were as hyped by GPT-4 as they are now, despite GPT-4 actually being underwhelming. Too much hype for disappointing results leads to skepticism later on, even when the product has improved.
  • roadside_picnic 9mo ago
    I feel similar, I'm not against the idea that maybe LLMs have gotten so much better... but I've been told this probably 10 times in the last few years working with AI daily. The funny part about rapidly changing industries is that, despite the fomo, there's honestly not any reward to keeping up unless you want to be a consultant. Otherwise, wait and see what sticks. If this summer people are still citing the Opus 4.5 was a game changing moment and have solid, repeatable workflows, then I'll happily change up my workflow. Someone could walk into the LLM space today and wouldn't be significantly at a loss for not having paid attention to anything that had happened in the last 4 years other than learning what has stuck since then.
    • baq 9mo ago
      If the trend line holds you’ll be very, very surprised.
    • kaydub 9mo ago
      > The funny part about rapidly changing industries is that, despite the fomo, there's honestly not any reward to keeping up unless you want to be a consultant. LMAO what???
      • roadside_picnic 9mo ago
        I've lived through multiple incredibly rapid changes in tech throughout my career, and the lesson always learned was there is a lot of wasted energy keeping up. Two big examples: - Period from early mvc JavaScript frontends (backbone.js etc) and the time of the great React/Angular wars. I completely stepped out of the webdev space during that time period. - The rapid expansion of Deep Learning frameworks where I did try to keep up (shipped some Lua torch packages and made minor contributions to Pylearn2). In the first case, missing 5 years of front-end wars had zero impact. After not doing webdev work at all for 5-years I was tasked with shipping a React app. It took me a week to catch up, and everything was deployed in roughly the same time as someone would have had they spent years keeping up with changes. In the second case, where I did keep up with many of the developing deep learning frameworks, it didn't really confer any advantage. Coworkers who I worked with who started with Pytorch fresh out of school were just as proficient, if not more so, with building models. Spending energy keeping up offered no value other than feeling "current" at the time. Can you give me a counter example of where keeping up with a rapidly changing area that's unstable has conferred a benefit to you? Most of FOMO is really just fear. Again, unless you're trying to sell your self specifically as a consultant on the bleeding edge, there's no reason to keep up with all these changes (other than finding it fun).
• iwontberude 9mo ago
  Opus 4.5 is fucking up just like Sonnet really. I don't know how your use is that much different than mine.
• ern 9mo ago
  I have been out of the loop for a couple of months (vacation). I tried Claude Opus 4.5 at the end of November 2025 with the corporate Github Copilot subscription in Agent mode and it was awful: basically ignoring code and hallucinating. My team is using it with Claude Code and say it works brilliantly, so I'll be giving it another go. How much of the value comes from Opus 4.5, how much comes from Claude Code, and how much comes from the combination?
  • Dusseldorf 9mo ago
    I suspect that's the other thing at play here; many people have only tried Copilot because it's cheap with all the other Microsoft subscriptions many companies have. Copilot frankly is garbage compared to Cursor/Claude, even with the same exact models.
  • everfrustrated 9mo ago
    As someone coming from GitHub copilot in vscode and recently trying Claude Code plugin for vscode I don't get the fuss about Claude. Copilot has by far the best and most intuitive agent UI. Just make sure you're in agent mode and choose Sonnet or Opus models. I've just cancelled my Claude sub and gone back and will upgrade to the GH Pro+ to get more sonnet/opus.
    • ern 9mo ago
      I'd used both CC and Copilot Agent Mode in VSCode, but not the combination of CC + Opus 4.5, and I agree, I was happy enough with Copilot. The gap didn't seem big, but in November (which admittedly was when Opus 4.5 was in preview on Copilot) Opus 4.5 with Copilot was awful.
    • indigodaddy 9mo ago
      Check out Antigravity+Google AI Pro $20 plan+Opus 4.5. apparently the Opus limits are insanely generous (of course that could change on a dime).
    • pluralmonad 9mo ago
      I strongly concur with your second statement. Anything other than agent mode in GH copilot feels useless to me. If I want to engage Opus through GH copilot for planning work, I still use agent mode and just indicate the desired output is whatever.md. I obviously only do this in environments lacking a better tool (Claude Code).
• animegolem 9mo ago
  I know someone who is using a vibe coded or at least heavily assisted text editor, praising it daily, while also saying llms will never be productive. There is a lot of dissonance right now.
• scubbo 9mo ago
  This was me. I have done a full 180 over the last 12 months or so, from "they're an interesting idea, and technically impressive, but not practically useful" to "holy shit I can have entire days/weeks where I don't write a single line of code".
• theshrike79 9mo ago
  > "asking it to fix it." This is what people are still doing wrong. Tools in a loop people, tools in a loop. The agent has to have the tools to detect whatever it just created is producing errors during linting/testing/running. When it can do that, I can loop again, fix the error and again - use the tools to see whether it worked. I _still_ encounter people who think "AI programming" is pasting stuff into ChatGPT on the browser and they complain it hallucinates functions and produces invalid code. Well, d'oh.
  • ikornaselur 9mo ago
    Last weekend I was debugging some blocking issue on a microcontroller with embassy-rs, where the whole microcontroller would lock up as soon as I started trying to connect to an MQTT server. I was having Opus investigate it and I kept building and deploying the firmware for testing.. then I just figured I'd explain how it could do the same and pull the logs. Off it went, for the next ~15 minutes it would flash the firmware multiple times until it figured out the issue and fixed it. There was something so interesting about seeing a microcontroller on the desk being flashed by Claude Code, with LEDs blinking indicating failure states. There's something about it not being just code on your laptop that felt so interesting to me. But I agree, absolutely, red/green test or have a way of validating (linting, testing, whatever it is) and explain the end-to-end loop, then the agent is able to work much faster without being blocked by you multiple times along the way.
  • nprateem 9mo ago
    Jules is slow incompetent shit and that uses tools in a loop, so no...
  • gck1 9mo ago
    This is kind of why I'm not really scared of losing my job. While Claude is amazing at writing code, it still requires human operators. And even experienced human operators are bad at operating this machinery. Tell your average joe - the one who thinks they can create software without engineers - what "tools-in-a-loop" means, and they'll make the same face they made when you tried explaining iterators to them, before LLMs. Explain to them how typing system, E2E or integration test helps the agent, and suddenly, they now have to learn all the things they would be required to learn to be able to write on their own.
• deleted 9mo ago
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