5 ms·

The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. For example, I've had t

The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. For example, I've had the opposite experience of yours, generating very high quality work using Claude (such as https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai). Just in dealing with all the bugs and idiosyncrasies in the technologies I'm using, the agent has been a godsend in discovering and cataloguing them so that the implementation phase doesn't keep tripping over them: https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/docs/dev/backend-idiosyncrasies.md https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai/blob/main/docs/dev/backe... And the agents keep getting better all the time. Even in the past month I've noticed a considerable jump in its ability to anticipate issues and correctly infer implications as we build out research, design, architecture and planning docs. By the time it comes to coding, it's mostly a mechanical process that can be passed off to sonnet with a negligible defect rate.

hollowturtle 5mo ago
Don't want to be rough, but I'd like to read experiences about novelty ideas that solve people real problems in the real world, your project it's just about selling new shovels. As I commented on another thread > If you're trying to solve a HARD problem people REALLY have, it's a novelty that agents can't help with, otherwise if it gets 97% there MAYBE it's just a signal that your idea isn't that novel!
- paulluuk 5mo ago
  This is a pretty wild take. What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? I work in R&D and even my work is 90% doing things that other people already solved. If you are really doing cutting edge SOTA work that has never been done by another human in some form or another, then kudos to you and I want your job.
  - hollowturtle 5mo ago
    > What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems. Otherwise we will be stuck, as we are now, with big tech paying you mountains of money for doing nothing, incentivizing you to embark on useless activities for letting other managers have a career, fear layoffs and when that happen complaining about it because "it's a year i'm looking for a new job" pretending same compensation and environment. Web development jobs are particularly affected by that. In the game industry, for example, if you don't do something interesting your game won't sell a copy. Let me stress this out again, if LLMs get you 97% there, maybe you should try another idea.
    - pell 5mo ago
      > IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems. Yet typically 95% of software developers mainly work on CRUD-type apps. Coding agents are not perfect there either but they’re really a lot more reliable than they were a few months ago.
    - infecto 5mo ago
      Please you don’t need to stress anything. I think you are conflating ideas. Unique game loops ideas make a good game, it has very little to do with the engineering. This is true for most software engineering products. Most engineering work is just reinventing or reimplementing existing ideas, what you describe rarely exists. It may exist in that the people learning the new ideas think it’s novel but very little is truly unique.
- ThrowawayTestr 5mo ago
  Claude wrote me a little python script to help me sort and rank all the AI videos I've generated. It also extracted the metadata and organized it into a CSV. I sent it some hex dumps of the header and it got it first try. The header structure of webms generated by comfy are pretty novel.
- jiggawatts 5mo ago
  As a random example of a "hard" problem solved by AI that I couldn't have realistically done myself, despite having decades of wide industry experience: Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol from a binary executable. I heard about people finding security vulnerabilities in compiled code with the combination of Claude Mythos wired up to a disassembler like NSA's Ghidra. Someone here mentioned that GPT 5.5 "extra high" is just as capable, I had a problem to solve, spare token quota for the week, so... I gave it a go. My problem was that I'm working with a product that uses a legacy 1990s style network appliance output log format that is proprietary, undocumented, and has no publicly available decoders other than an app by the same vendor, and that app has fundamental limitations. (I.e.: it's nothing like Splunk or Elastic.) Codex with a Ghidra MCP bridge figured it all out: the framing, bit and byte packing, endian order, field names, data types, etc. It made me a neat little protocol parser in a modern language that I can use to spit out something sane like NDJSON or OTLP protobufs. There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise!
  - bluGill 5mo ago
    > There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise! I think you could have. However I don't think you would have - there is a big difference. It is a lot of work to to that, and people who try normally give up. However if your boss told you could have. Note that I suspect from your story this is more like give this to a dozen people and in 2 years you get results - at a cost of several million dollars.
    - jiggawatts 5mo ago
      Of course, there is a philosophical difference between "impossible" and "intractable", but to a business with a budget and a schedule there isn't.
- kstenerud 5mo ago
  The comment was directed at: > For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not, not quite there not even close in my experience. As I said, this is an example of using AI successfully to produce a high quality product (one that I use every day). But to your point: I am solving hard problems that people really have. You just don't see those because I haven't mentioned them publicly yet. And they won't be released or talked about until they're ready.
Philip-J-Fry 5mo ago
I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit: yes it's wrapping Claude. It's BREAKING the TUI. Not sure what people aren't getting here...
- kstenerud 5mo ago
  You do realize that you're complaining about the Claude Code TUI, right? That's not what this product is; merely a tool it uses.
  - pprotas 5mo ago
    You claim "very high quality" but can't even get the basic UI working properly. You wrap tmux and a container in 2k lines of code and claim quality, I think the comment above was aimed at this claim.
    - kstenerud 5mo ago
      The UI is working properly. Interfering with Anthropic's UI, or any of the other agent harness' UIs it supports, would be madness incarnate. I also strongly suspect that you'd only taken a cursory glance at the top of the readme prior to passing judgment.
      - deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      - embedding-shape 5mo ago
        I did not much more than a cursory glance too, but found "./sandbox/create.go", a ~1300 lines long file with so much duplication even within just itself that I stopped counting. Now it was a long time ago I did Go professionally, but I'm also in the camp of "That doesn't really count as high-quality", although I know for a fact you can get quality code out of LLMs, but I don't think that's a good showcase of that.
wickedsight 5mo ago
> The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. Not just when using tools, also when using humans. The frame of reference of what is considered 'production code' differs immensely between organizations, teams and people. The code I get from LLM's is usually much better than what I get from my peers. Maybe not one shot, but after some steering it gets there. It also isn't lazy. When generating test cases for relatively simple pieces of code, it usually tests pretty much every path and doesn't stop right at the 80% code coverage quality gate. I can imagine if you're at the level of Linus or something, you might conclude differently, but most people aren't there at all.
- kstenerud 5mo ago
  Absolutely! I find its test generation, properly steered, to be top notch. In many ways it's like having a second head, because it'll spontaneously come up with test paths that I'd normally only get to after a month or so in one of my "aha! What about XYZ?" shower thoughts. You'll also notice that Linus doesn't poo-poo AI at all. His only gripe is with people using it wrong, such as flooding security lists with drive-by security reports after pointing their agent to the code and saying "find me some VULNS!!1!1!!"
- hollowturtle 5mo ago
  > The code I get from LLM's is usually much better than what I get from my peers Then you should seriously question for who you're working for imo. > It also isn't lazy. It is indeed lazy in my experience, as in being overly zealous when creating useless test cases and ignoring the important ones. I don't want it to test a sum I want to know a test that can "guarantee" me that a further change doesn't break existing code. And producing this high quality in tests is HARD, and requires a lot of steering with agents. This culture of tests code coverage is just wrong, the best code base I worked with had code coverage only on the net percent of code that matters, the rest is covered by for static type checking and integration tests
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  > The frame of reference of what is considered 'production code' differs immensely between organizations, teams and people. I think it’s really down to this. Nobody can agree on what counts as production-quality code. I remember joining a company with what I think (hope) most of us would call horrible quality code. It was an absolute mess, barely compiled with hundreds of warnings, and had uncountable number of bugs. They didn’t even have a bug tracker so nobody even knew how many they had. But the people working there already were so proud of it! None of them had ever worked for another company so they had no idea how bad their code was in comparison with the rest of the software industry (which itself is a very low bar). I told the founder we had a huge code quality problem and he looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head. When someone says their LLM is producing “production-quality” code, actually look at it and see. Arguing about it on HN is pointless because everyone’s quality bar is different.
timr 5mo ago
While reading this thread, I literally just caught an agent putting in the following CSS selector in a rule: > .row > div > div, .alert This is fairly simple CSS, not multi-threaded systems development. A bar low enough that you could trip over it. I catch this kind of stuff all the time (literally every run), but only because I read every line. Most of it wouldn't be the end of the world for any particular task, but would eventually result in a complete mess. I think the people doing the heaviest breathing around the elimination of programmers either aren't very good at programming, or they're not paying close attention. Or they're hyping their book.
- kstenerud 5mo ago
  I haven't done any CSS/HTML/JS level work with Claude yet. I've mainly been using it for systems level stuff. LLMs have traditionally had problems with visual rendering (the good ol' pelican on the bicycle test). I wonder if this is more of the same?
  - timr 5mo ago
    In this case, the visual display was fine -- I was instructing it to fix bad code from a previous round that happened to deliver the right results. Like I said, this is just an example that happens to be CSS. I see this stuff daily, if not hourly.
    - kstenerud 5mo ago
      That's interesting. As I said I haven't tried using LLMs at this level, although I'm about to embark on some this week. What I've found helps (at least at the other layers) is to have principles documents and standards documents for the AI to reference when it's modifying code. Principles documents describe the why, and standards documents describe the how. So for example a few parts from my initial CSS-standards.md (still needs a lot of revision): ## Utility-first discipline **Raw utilities everywhere by default. Never `@apply` for "components."** `@apply` exists only for true low-level primitives that can't live in a template (e.g., `prose` overrides, embedded third-party widget shells). Wathan's stated position: extract only on "worrisome duplication." The Tailwind team explicitly describes `@apply` as a tool you reach for after first reaching for templates. **Premature CSS abstraction is the failure mode.** ## Spacing Use only the default scale (`0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24…`). **Never `p-[13px]`.** If you need a value, change the scale in `@theme`: ```css @theme { --spacing: 0.25rem; } ``` v4 uses a single `--spacing` multiplier; everything derives from it. ## Anti-patterns (banned) - **`!` important prefix** (`!bg-red-500`). Fix specificity properly. - **Arbitrary values for colour** (`bg-[#1da1f2]`). Define in `@theme`. - **Arbitrary pixel offsets** as default (`top-[3px]`). Use the spacing scale. Tolerated only as rare one-offs. - **Nested custom CSS more than one level deep.** - **`@apply` for any class that wraps fewer than ~5 utilities** or appears in fewer than ~3 templates. - **Dynamic class string interpolation** (`text-${level}-500`) — purger can't see these. - **Custom breakpoints in v1.** - **Inline `<style>` blocks.** All CSS goes through `assets/css/app.css`.
dominotw 5mo ago
not going to look at your vibeslop
windexh8er 5mo ago
A standard Docker container, with the container UID/GID mirrored to the host user, holding the host user's API keys, with the host user's project directory bind-mounted. The tooling doesn't even use gVisor / Kata by default which could implement the claim made, but in reality this entire project appears to be security theater.
- timacles 5mo ago
  I’d like people to notice that those who claim this amazing AI productivity boost are always: pushing out software they don’t know how to judge the quality of and pushing projects that are 70% done. Every. Single. Time. I use Claude all the time, it is immensely helpful. It is also very nuanced and requires a high level of expertise in a specific domain to produce quality work. Even then, that take time and effort. Anyone saying otherwise, quite frankly, doesn’t know what they’re doing.
- kstenerud 5mo ago
  [dead]

hollowturtle 5mo ago

Don't want to be rough, but I'd like to read experiences about novelty ideas that solve people real problems in the real world, your project it's just about selling new shovels. As I commented on another thread > If you're trying to solve a HARD problem people REALLY have, it's a novelty that agents can't help with, otherwise if it gets 97% there MAYBE it's just a signal that your idea isn't that novel!

paulluuk 5mo ago
This is a pretty wild take. What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? I work in R&D and even my work is 90% doing things that other people already solved. If you are really doing cutting edge SOTA work that has never been done by another human in some form or another, then kudos to you and I want your job.
- hollowturtle 5mo ago
  > What percentage of human engineers are creating novel solutions for hard problems, you think? IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems. Otherwise we will be stuck, as we are now, with big tech paying you mountains of money for doing nothing, incentivizing you to embark on useless activities for letting other managers have a career, fear layoffs and when that happen complaining about it because "it's a year i'm looking for a new job" pretending same compensation and environment. Web development jobs are particularly affected by that. In the game industry, for example, if you don't do something interesting your game won't sell a copy. Let me stress this out again, if LLMs get you 97% there, maybe you should try another idea.
  - pell 5mo ago
    > IMO Every engineer should try spending his time in a company that tries to solve new problems. Yet typically 95% of software developers mainly work on CRUD-type apps. Coding agents are not perfect there either but they’re really a lot more reliable than they were a few months ago.
  - infecto 5mo ago
    Please you don’t need to stress anything. I think you are conflating ideas. Unique game loops ideas make a good game, it has very little to do with the engineering. This is true for most software engineering products. Most engineering work is just reinventing or reimplementing existing ideas, what you describe rarely exists. It may exist in that the people learning the new ideas think it’s novel but very little is truly unique.
ThrowawayTestr 5mo ago
Claude wrote me a little python script to help me sort and rank all the AI videos I've generated. It also extracted the metadata and organized it into a CSV. I sent it some hex dumps of the header and it got it first try. The header structure of webms generated by comfy are pretty novel.
jiggawatts 5mo ago
As a random example of a "hard" problem solved by AI that I couldn't have realistically done myself, despite having decades of wide industry experience: Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol from a binary executable. I heard about people finding security vulnerabilities in compiled code with the combination of Claude Mythos wired up to a disassembler like NSA's Ghidra. Someone here mentioned that GPT 5.5 "extra high" is just as capable, I had a problem to solve, spare token quota for the week, so... I gave it a go. My problem was that I'm working with a product that uses a legacy 1990s style network appliance output log format that is proprietary, undocumented, and has no publicly available decoders other than an app by the same vendor, and that app has fundamental limitations. (I.e.: it's nothing like Splunk or Elastic.) Codex with a Ghidra MCP bridge figured it all out: the framing, bit and byte packing, endian order, field names, data types, etc. It made me a neat little protocol parser in a modern language that I can use to spit out something sane like NDJSON or OTLP protobufs. There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise!
- bluGill 5mo ago
  > There is no way I could have reverse engineered this myself from compiled C++ code and/or packet captures! The format isn't self-describing and is incredibly dense (similar to NetFlow). In a hex viewer it looks like line noise! I think you could have. However I don't think you would have - there is a big difference. It is a lot of work to to that, and people who try normally give up. However if your boss told you could have. Note that I suspect from your story this is more like give this to a dozen people and in 2 years you get results - at a cost of several million dollars.
  - jiggawatts 5mo ago
    Of course, there is a philosophical difference between "impossible" and "intractable", but to a business with a budget and a schedule there isn't.
kstenerud 5mo ago
The comment was directed at: > For generating production code even with a lot of steering and baby sitting? Absolutely not, not quite there not even close in my experience. As I said, this is an example of using AI successfully to produce a high quality product (one that I use every day). But to your point: I am solving hard problems that people really have. You just don't see those because I haven't mentioned them publicly yet. And they won't be released or talked about until they're ready.

Philip-J-Fry 5mo ago

I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit: yes it's wrapping Claude. It's BREAKING the TUI. Not sure what people aren't getting here...

kstenerud 5mo ago
You do realize that you're complaining about the Claude Code TUI, right? That's not what this product is; merely a tool it uses.
- pprotas 5mo ago
  You claim "very high quality" but can't even get the basic UI working properly. You wrap tmux and a container in 2k lines of code and claim quality, I think the comment above was aimed at this claim.
  - kstenerud 5mo ago
    The UI is working properly. Interfering with Anthropic's UI, or any of the other agent harness' UIs it supports, would be madness incarnate. I also strongly suspect that you'd only taken a cursory glance at the top of the readme prior to passing judgment.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - embedding-shape 5mo ago
      I did not much more than a cursory glance too, but found "./sandbox/create.go", a ~1300 lines long file with so much duplication even within just itself that I stopped counting. Now it was a long time ago I did Go professionally, but I'm also in the camp of "That doesn't really count as high-quality", although I know for a fact you can get quality code out of LLMs, but I don't think that's a good showcase of that.

wickedsight 5mo ago

> The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. Not just when using tools, also when using humans. The frame of reference of what is considered 'production code' differs immensely between organizations, teams and people. The code I get from LLM's is usually much better than what I get from my peers. Maybe not one shot, but after some steering it gets there. It also isn't lazy. When generating test cases for relatively simple pieces of code, it usually tests pretty much every path and doesn't stop right at the 80% code coverage quality gate. I can imagine if you're at the level of Linus or something, you might conclude differently, but most people aren't there at all.

kstenerud 5mo ago
Absolutely! I find its test generation, properly steered, to be top notch. In many ways it's like having a second head, because it'll spontaneously come up with test paths that I'd normally only get to after a month or so in one of my "aha! What about XYZ?" shower thoughts. You'll also notice that Linus doesn't poo-poo AI at all. His only gripe is with people using it wrong, such as flooding security lists with drive-by security reports after pointing their agent to the code and saying "find me some VULNS!!1!1!!"
hollowturtle 5mo ago
> The code I get from LLM's is usually much better than what I get from my peers Then you should seriously question for who you're working for imo. > It also isn't lazy. It is indeed lazy in my experience, as in being overly zealous when creating useless test cases and ignoring the important ones. I don't want it to test a sum I want to know a test that can "guarantee" me that a further change doesn't break existing code. And producing this high quality in tests is HARD, and requires a lot of steering with agents. This culture of tests code coverage is just wrong, the best code base I worked with had code coverage only on the net percent of code that matters, the rest is covered by for static type checking and integration tests
ryandrake 5mo ago
> The frame of reference of what is considered 'production code' differs immensely between organizations, teams and people. I think it’s really down to this. Nobody can agree on what counts as production-quality code. I remember joining a company with what I think (hope) most of us would call horrible quality code. It was an absolute mess, barely compiled with hundreds of warnings, and had uncountable number of bugs. They didn’t even have a bug tracker so nobody even knew how many they had. But the people working there already were so proud of it! None of them had ever worked for another company so they had no idea how bad their code was in comparison with the rest of the software industry (which itself is a very low bar). I told the founder we had a huge code quality problem and he looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head. When someone says their LLM is producing “production-quality” code, actually look at it and see. Arguing about it on HN is pointless because everyone’s quality bar is different.

timr 5mo ago

While reading this thread, I literally just caught an agent putting in the following CSS selector in a rule: > .row > div > div, .alert This is fairly simple CSS, not multi-threaded systems development. A bar low enough that you could trip over it. I catch this kind of stuff all the time (literally every run), but only because I read every line. Most of it wouldn't be the end of the world for any particular task, but would eventually result in a complete mess. I think the people doing the heaviest breathing around the elimination of programmers either aren't very good at programming, or they're not paying close attention. Or they're hyping their book.

kstenerud 5mo ago
I haven't done any CSS/HTML/JS level work with Claude yet. I've mainly been using it for systems level stuff. LLMs have traditionally had problems with visual rendering (the good ol' pelican on the bicycle test). I wonder if this is more of the same?
- timr 5mo ago
  In this case, the visual display was fine -- I was instructing it to fix bad code from a previous round that happened to deliver the right results. Like I said, this is just an example that happens to be CSS. I see this stuff daily, if not hourly.
  - kstenerud 5mo ago
    That's interesting. As I said I haven't tried using LLMs at this level, although I'm about to embark on some this week. What I've found helps (at least at the other layers) is to have principles documents and standards documents for the AI to reference when it's modifying code. Principles documents describe the why, and standards documents describe the how. So for example a few parts from my initial CSS-standards.md (still needs a lot of revision): ## Utility-first discipline **Raw utilities everywhere by default. Never `@apply` for "components."** `@apply` exists only for true low-level primitives that can't live in a template (e.g., `prose` overrides, embedded third-party widget shells). Wathan's stated position: extract only on "worrisome duplication." The Tailwind team explicitly describes `@apply` as a tool you reach for after first reaching for templates. **Premature CSS abstraction is the failure mode.** ## Spacing Use only the default scale (`0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24…`). **Never `p-[13px]`.** If you need a value, change the scale in `@theme`: ```css @theme { --spacing: 0.25rem; } ``` v4 uses a single `--spacing` multiplier; everything derives from it. ## Anti-patterns (banned) - **`!` important prefix** (`!bg-red-500`). Fix specificity properly. - **Arbitrary values for colour** (`bg-[#1da1f2]`). Define in `@theme`. - **Arbitrary pixel offsets** as default (`top-[3px]`). Use the spacing scale. Tolerated only as rare one-offs. - **Nested custom CSS more than one level deep.** - **`@apply` for any class that wraps fewer than ~5 utilities** or appears in fewer than ~3 templates. - **Dynamic class string interpolation** (`text-${level}-500`) — purger can't see these. - **Custom breakpoints in v1.** - **Inline `<style>` blocks.** All CSS goes through `assets/css/app.css`.

dominotw 5mo ago

not going to look at your vibeslop

windexh8er 5mo ago

A standard Docker container, with the container UID/GID mirrored to the host user, holding the host user's API keys, with the host user's project directory bind-mounted. The tooling doesn't even use gVisor / Kata by default which could implement the claim made, but in reality this entire project appears to be security theater.

timacles 5mo ago
I’d like people to notice that those who claim this amazing AI productivity boost are always: pushing out software they don’t know how to judge the quality of and pushing projects that are 70% done. Every. Single. Time. I use Claude all the time, it is immensely helpful. It is also very nuanced and requires a high level of expertise in a specific domain to produce quality work. Even then, that take time and effort. Anyone saying otherwise, quite frankly, doesn’t know what they’re doing.
kstenerud 5mo ago
[dead]