8 ms·

Wasn't Claude supposed to do all the coding by now? Did we have a change of mind or did we run out of tokens?

crystal_revenge 2mo ago
I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less). This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.
- eventualcomp 2mo ago
  Programming without writing, to me, feels like doing mathematics by reading proofs but not doing proofs. Which quite frankly works very poorly for me. I write code if, for nothing else, so that I can spot bad code/proofs with an easier time, rather than dealing with an equation that blew up in prod.
- zero-sharp 2mo ago
  >I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? I hear this from time to time. But I still write code at my job. I'm not a software engineer and I don't work for a software engineering firm.
- my-next-account 2mo ago
  I do! A lot of the work I do is not simple CRUD, and I have to think about what's going on. Reading code doesn't do that to the same degree.
  - soulofmischief 2mo ago
    Cutting-edge models are capable of much more than generating CRUD apps and understanding the details is orthogonal to whether you wrote the lines yourself or not.
    - my-next-account 2mo ago
      Yeah, I disagree on the latter point by a lot :-). Really, is it truly "orthogonal"? Not really, you will understand the details better by writing them yourself. On your first point, they are pretty good at a lot of stuff, given that they have seen it before. A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before. That sounds super smug, but it's "da tru tru".
      - soulofmischief 2mo ago
        I welcome you to prove this conjecture, otherwise it's just vibes. > A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before I hear this tired point over and over from people who cannot fathom that others who use LLMs successfully could possibly also be working in a specialized domain. Frontier models are excelling at difficult, long-horizon tasks now. I write all sorts of esoteric stuff, and I can confidently hand a frontier model specification for a language it's never even seen before, working in a domain it's never encountered, and likely get good results, provided I have the knowledge and experience to guide the model. The reality is that this "they are only good at things they have 'seen before'" talking point that often gets parroted is vaguely defined and largely based in opinion. Obviously, models perform worse when the input or expected output are out of distribution. But this was much more true a couple years ago than it is today; the gap has closed considerably, and those who are learning to think deeply with these tools will be better positioned than those who arrogantly think that their process cannot be augmented by the most intelligent systems ever created.
        my-next-account 2mo ago
        This is HN, most of it is vibes. Lol, conjecture, touch grass man. I do PL research, it's not that good at that stuff, do you think I'm not trying using it?
- wannabe44 2mo ago
  Reading the code will not give you the same mental model as writing it. Sure you can catch some high level issues, but the brain is incentivized to skip over the lines which look like boilerplate. any issue in between boilerplate is going to be unnoticed. The original sin of the programming industry is not valuing expressive notation and expressive programming languages. (I am not talking about map/filter/reduce level party tricks but better metaprogramming and coherent abstractions). No amount of sacrificing tokens for Anthropicus is going to give you the same amount of understanding as writing the program.
- bigstrat2003 2mo ago
  I do not know anyone competent who stopped writing code. You have to write the code yourself if you want good results, or spend so much time reviewing the clanker that you may as well have written it yourself.
LoganDark 2mo ago
Was this known in 1998?
threethirtytwo 2mo ago
The utility of this stuff is largely going away. It’s more just hobbyists now or old timers like me who actually “learned” programming. There are HS interns at my company who admire me because I lived through a time without AI and I actually had to learn that stuff. I’m not kidding.
- MichaelMoser123 2mo ago
  At some point there will be no one left to review Claude generated code. I think that will be an interesting time, given our reliance on software based systems... A linked-in post on CS enrollment at universities: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eric-pop_has-computer-science-enrollment-peaked-recent-ugcPost-7434024127142989824-GfAw/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eric-pop_has-computer-science... "In the past two years, the drop was ~20% at UC Berkeley and ~30% at UC Davis, while UC San Diego is the only one still rising." On the other hand: LeetCode traffic rankings are up, so some people still solve programming problems by hand - or they hope to get a job, by being able to solve them. https://www.semrush.com/website/leetcode.com/overview/ https://www.semrush.com/website/leetcode.com/overview/ I think this is a confusing time. It will probably take a while, until things become clearer.
taneq 2mo ago
Two things: 1) By the time I’ve determined, and expressed to my satisfaction, exactly what I want, I’ve already done the hard work of coding that thing. The rest is fairly mechanical by comparison. 2) It’s a universal truth (which I know someone’s gonna argue with :D ) that reading and working with other peoples’ code is much less fun than reading and working with your own. This applies even if the other people are robots. 3) When checking and troubleshooting code, the bulk of the time is spent understanding it in the first place. If you wrote the code yourself this already implicitly happened and is ‘free’. Put those four[1] things together and at least for me personally, AI-assisted coding isn’t a better experience than just doing it myself. It’s still great for bootstrapping yourself into a new unfamiliar language/environment though. [1] Yeah it’s an off-by-one joke. ;)
- QuercusMax 2mo ago
  "I love building software, I just don't like the data entry parts", to paraphrase a guy I worked with once who explained how he loved writing design docs for junior engineers to implement.
AnonC 2mo ago
Claude isn’t even good enough for Anthropic to release native desktop applications for each OS. As someone said in a comment in a different post here, it seems like these tools are good at web and web related (like Electron) development. Anthropic intentionally missed the opportunity to show that its models can develop really good native applications. OpenAI’s latest desktop applications seem to be worse than before too.

I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less). This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.

eventualcomp 2mo ago
Programming without writing, to me, feels like doing mathematics by reading proofs but not doing proofs. Which quite frankly works very poorly for me. I write code if, for nothing else, so that I can spot bad code/proofs with an easier time, rather than dealing with an equation that blew up in prod.
zero-sharp 2mo ago
>I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you? I hear this from time to time. But I still write code at my job. I'm not a software engineer and I don't work for a software engineering firm.
my-next-account 2mo ago
I do! A lot of the work I do is not simple CRUD, and I have to think about what's going on. Reading code doesn't do that to the same degree.
- soulofmischief 2mo ago
  Cutting-edge models are capable of much more than generating CRUD apps and understanding the details is orthogonal to whether you wrote the lines yourself or not.
  - my-next-account 2mo ago
    Yeah, I disagree on the latter point by a lot :-). Really, is it truly "orthogonal"? Not really, you will understand the details better by writing them yourself. On your first point, they are pretty good at a lot of stuff, given that they have seen it before. A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before. That sounds super smug, but it's "da tru tru".
    - soulofmischief 2mo ago
      I welcome you to prove this conjecture, otherwise it's just vibes. > A lot of the time, I'm writing code that no LLM has seen before I hear this tired point over and over from people who cannot fathom that others who use LLMs successfully could possibly also be working in a specialized domain. Frontier models are excelling at difficult, long-horizon tasks now. I write all sorts of esoteric stuff, and I can confidently hand a frontier model specification for a language it's never even seen before, working in a domain it's never encountered, and likely get good results, provided I have the knowledge and experience to guide the model. The reality is that this "they are only good at things they have 'seen before'" talking point that often gets parroted is vaguely defined and largely based in opinion. Obviously, models perform worse when the input or expected output are out of distribution. But this was much more true a couple years ago than it is today; the gap has closed considerably, and those who are learning to think deeply with these tools will be better positioned than those who arrogantly think that their process cannot be augmented by the most intelligent systems ever created.
      - my-next-account 2mo ago
        This is HN, most of it is vibes. Lol, conjecture, touch grass man. I do PL research, it's not that good at that stuff, do you think I'm not trying using it?
wannabe44 2mo ago
Reading the code will not give you the same mental model as writing it. Sure you can catch some high level issues, but the brain is incentivized to skip over the lines which look like boilerplate. any issue in between boilerplate is going to be unnoticed. The original sin of the programming industry is not valuing expressive notation and expressive programming languages. (I am not talking about map/filter/reduce level party tricks but better metaprogramming and coherent abstractions). No amount of sacrificing tokens for Anthropicus is going to give you the same amount of understanding as writing the program.
bigstrat2003 2mo ago
I do not know anyone competent who stopped writing code. You have to write the code yourself if you want good results, or spend so much time reviewing the clanker that you may as well have written it yourself.

LoganDark 2mo ago

Was this known in 1998?

threethirtytwo 2mo ago

The utility of this stuff is largely going away. It’s more just hobbyists now or old timers like me who actually “learned” programming. There are HS interns at my company who admire me because I lived through a time without AI and I actually had to learn that stuff. I’m not kidding.

MichaelMoser123 2mo ago
At some point there will be no one left to review Claude generated code. I think that will be an interesting time, given our reliance on software based systems... A linked-in post on CS enrollment at universities: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eric-pop_has-computer-science-enrollment-peaked-recent-ugcPost-7434024127142989824-GfAw/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eric-pop_has-computer-science... "In the past two years, the drop was ~20% at UC Berkeley and ~30% at UC Davis, while UC San Diego is the only one still rising." On the other hand: LeetCode traffic rankings are up, so some people still solve programming problems by hand - or they hope to get a job, by being able to solve them. https://www.semrush.com/website/leetcode.com/overview/ https://www.semrush.com/website/leetcode.com/overview/ I think this is a confusing time. It will probably take a while, until things become clearer.

taneq 2mo ago

Two things: 1) By the time I’ve determined, and expressed to my satisfaction, exactly what I want, I’ve already done the hard work of coding that thing. The rest is fairly mechanical by comparison. 2) It’s a universal truth (which I know someone’s gonna argue with :D ) that reading and working with other peoples’ code is much less fun than reading and working with your own. This applies even if the other people are robots. 3) When checking and troubleshooting code, the bulk of the time is spent understanding it in the first place. If you wrote the code yourself this already implicitly happened and is ‘free’. Put those four[1] things together and at least for me personally, AI-assisted coding isn’t a better experience than just doing it myself. It’s still great for bootstrapping yourself into a new unfamiliar language/environment though. [1] Yeah it’s an off-by-one joke. ;)

QuercusMax 2mo ago
"I love building software, I just don't like the data entry parts", to paraphrase a guy I worked with once who explained how he loved writing design docs for junior engineers to implement.

AnonC 2mo ago

Claude isn’t even good enough for Anthropic to release native desktop applications for each OS. As someone said in a comment in a different post here, it seems like these tools are good at web and web related (like Electron) development. Anthropic intentionally missed the opportunity to show that its models can develop really good native applications. OpenAI’s latest desktop applications seem to be worse than before too.