3 ms·

If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). After three decades

If the solution is so simple, why claude did not found it? At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). After three decades of outsourcing to lowest bidder, I do not buy that humans are somehow better! > patient, old school troubleshooting I usually see similar arguments around systems with major red flags (no docs, poor CI, decade ago no CVS...). And engineers with private stash of workarounds for job security! Claude does not do anything special. Or perhaps claude was misconfigured, it had no access to relevant part of system, and it tryied to work within its limitation. Often it means decompiling binaries in desperate loop...

shakna 29d ago
Claude regular spits out six helper functions instead of... A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase. If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.
- adjejmxbdjdn 29d ago
  The funny thing is that if you never understand the codebase then you will keep thinking Claude is doing a great work delivering all this incredible software, when all it has done is created unnecessary tech debt.
  - noir_lord 29d ago
    Which at some point the developers who actually still do know how to program are either going to have to clean up or in terminal cases rewrite. In a way all we've done (currently) is drastically expand the amount of technical debt across the whole industry. Should be profitable for the ones who can still actually program though and haven't let their skills atrophy by letting Claude do everything. I don't deny there are use cases for LLM's, I just don't buy the hype about them either. As with all tools, you have to understand how to use them to get done what you need to get done without sticking the chisel through your hand.
    - sigseg1v 29d ago
      But this is leaving out the part where the developers that clean up or rewrite... will do it using LLMs. Have you tried refactoring or porting codebases larger than a million lines of code pre-gen-AI and again post-gen-AI? It's night and day difference. One would be insane to schedule a team on 8 months worth of grunt work porting from one language or framework to another which can now be done by 1 person in 4 weeks. Of course the person driving it has to tell it exactly what to do and has to have the requisite knowledge to understand how to effectively structure or fix the software. Maybe new developers don't build this skill so easily anymore. But I don't see why a strong developers skills would atrophy in this case though unless they just never use their knowledge and never give instructions to the AI. To developers speaking of skill atrophy: are you still making sure that when using LLMs you are actively exercising skills like system design, debugging, reviewing for clean code and just in general doing effective code review? If you are doing that, why do you feel skill atrophy? And if you aren't doing it, why not? What about LLMs prevents us from exercising these skills?
    - budman1 29d ago
      2040. The demand for real programming skills will become infinite (again). someone who can actually read, understand, and debug code. when the clankers get stuck. unfortunately, there will be only be a dozen people.
- throw839948499 29d ago
  I am former java enterprise dev, so yes I often code this way. Unit testing, decomposition... Some projects CI refuse to merge commits with 20 line loop and duplicated code... But that is not a point. Claude can code tight compact loops, it just needs to be instructed to do so! If it does "enterprise code", it means it had no instructions about code style. If your documentation, spec, agent.md does not have proper guidance on coding style... yet another red flag!
  - shakna 29d ago
    > it just needs to be instructed to do so! Considering how often it overrules, its own rules?
- jjav 29d ago
  > A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Anecdote I like to tell.. I was working on a financial planning software, intentionally purely vibe coded as an experiment. I eventually discovered AI had implemented seven duplicate copies of tax calculation functions. All of them different. All of them wrong. All of them giving different answers for same input. Not even the most junior of newbie junior engineers would do something this crazy. But AI was happy to do it. It will solve the immediate problem, efficiently. Even if the most efficient solution is something ridiculous like this.
  - UpsideDownRide 29d ago
    For some definitions of efficiency.
  - ilija139 29d ago
    I have also a weird story to tell that a human did and it is as crazy as this. It happen in 2019 so no LLMs at all. A person that was hired as an expert in our startup spent more than one week full time working on implementing his solution to the problem we were having. I checked the code after one week to see the progress and was curious how they are implementing an already crazy sounding idea. I found that the whole week was spent re-implementing in python, python's built-in "float" function. That was it, the whole code was just that. Our problem was related to financial services and their implementation of "float" was not even correct.
    - lmf4lol 29d ago
      Jesus Christ... and then? What happened to him? What was the conclusion? Did he get paid?
      - budman1 29d ago
        of course he got paid. that is the deal for an employee, you put in the hours, you get a check. today, this individual is CTO- Vibecoding at Uber.
- Foobar8568 29d ago
  Oh and how is it any different than most software engineers? How many times I heard ORM are bad only to recreate the same shit? How many times I heard ORM had bad performance and see 1+n stuff everywhere? How many times I have seen tight coupling in the name of DRY?
  - shakna 29d ago
    Its different, in that when you teach that engineer, they either leave because now they hate you, or they grow. They change to meet the standards of a project, rather than inventing their own. We don't get seniors, without juniors. I'd say more than half the job, is just... Learning. People grow.
    - spockz 29d ago
      Exactly. People ask how we get seniors with juniors using llm. The answer is the same. Review the code. Analyse write down what is wrong. What you expect to have been better. Force every change to be documented and explained enough.
      - orwin 29d ago
        It just takes forever now. The understanding is lower, the effort is lower, and frankly, I think the interest is lower too. I might be in the last generation who truly had fun working on a 'shrodinger' bug.
        spockz 29d ago
        Yes. So find someone with intrinsic desire to engineer. Mentor them. In the mean time put a plethora of guardrails in place to make sure the AI Train doesn’t derail production. Oh. And keep showing your value. In the end every org can do with less low paid overeager uninterested juniors. Might as well let agents Do those tasks.
    - KronisLV 29d ago
      > Its different, in that when you teach that engineer, they either leave because now they hate you, or they grow. Or they just have their own hubris and ignore your (provably better) suggestions because their way is "better/easier/how we've always done things". And then you end up with someone sprinkling N+1 issues throughout the system and making systems with bad architectures throughout the years, not thinking about backpressure etc., as well as shoving ALL the dependencies into a single codebase cause they're not used to creating new ones, turning patches into eventual month long version upgrades because everything keeps breaking with anything newer than JDK 8 and some of the packages are deprecated and gahhhh I should pick up woodworking as a hobby. Though, to address the original claim: >> If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice. This feels like a thought terminating cliche. Like, it will spit out bullshit every now and then, and make assumptions that I don't think that many engineers would (e.g. since a lot of each app is environment-specific), but at the same time when you guide it and give it examples, it can really be quite good! So not that unlike humans at all, even competent devs might not necessarily know about every pattern in any given codebase, especially when one has been around for 10 years and grown quite a bit. It can be quite good if you have something like ArchUnit or your own tools for linting project architecture and patterns, alongside proper documentation that doesn't assume that you're a team member with X years of experience on system Y. AI just forces people to be less lazy and ignorant about knowledge transfer, which they should have also been for the sake of other humans!
- raverbashing 29d ago
  100% It is my pet peeve with Claude and why I don't prefer it for most stuff (also the comment spam - but that's a all of them in a way or another)
bob1029 29d ago
That final 10% is the hard part. 90% is easy.
- orwin 29d ago
  I think people on this website have a way, way to high opinion of themselves. Barring a few exceptions, we are middling developers, or way worse than this. Just read the comments from a year or twoon how chatgpt4.5 is the best at coding or how Claude sonnet 4 is better than a lot of Devs... At least I don't have imposter syndrome anymore.
Sharlin 29d ago
So after 30 years of outsourcing to the bottom 10%, you think Claude is better than the bottom 90% even though it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even know it should ask for advice or more information when it’s stuck?
- throw839948499 29d ago
  It just follows instructions you give it. Some asian devs will go for weeks without asking for help, all while giving amazing fake status reports. Loosing face etc...
  - tannertech 29d ago
    You're comparing scammers to incompetence
  - Sharlin 29d ago
    Do you think those devs are in the top 10% of all devs like you said Claude is? Or is the bar suddenly much lower after all?
- wallst07 29d ago
  Claude asks me all the time when it's stuck, what are your prompts? I think some of these anti-claude comments have some face, then I get a peek into how people use them, and it seems all wrong. The tooling is incredibly configurable, but comes out of the box with a big auto button, because thats what people want. Doesn't mean advanced users have to use it.
gspr 29d ago
> At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). Hard disagree. We absolutely cannot assume that. You can posit it, and we can have an informed debate about it. This is what irks me the most about LLM fans: they constantly try to reframe the debate to have their worldview as the agreed-upon starting point.
SyneRyder 29d ago
While I actually agree with you (though, outsourcing to lowest bidder would account for much of what you're seeing with humans), I just saw Bug Hunt Bench scores that gave me some pause: https://x.com/PawelHuryn/status/2095982259761475945 https://x.com/PawelHuryn/status/2095982259761475945 https://bughunt.productcompass.pm/?preset=all https://bughunt.productcompass.pm/?preset=all Claude Opus 4.8 ranks near last on this Bug Hunt benchmark, and missed 96% of the deliberately introduced bugs. If you're a developer who has been falling back to Opus 4.8 because of how Opus 5 talks, and Fable 5 being so expensive that it needs to be rationed... well, turns out Opus 4.8 can actually be quite poor for finding bugs. (Which feels weird to me, because Opus 4.6 fixed a bug that myself and a group of humans had been hunting down for over a decade. Models are spiky.) Also surprising to me: Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High, at least on this benchmark. But Astra 6 & Fable 5.1 on Max both perform at the top as you would expect.
- throw839948499 29d ago
  Still, basic debuging and trouble shooting is where LLM generally shine. Any model can bisect git history and isolate newly introduced bug. If model can not automatically reproduce bug, while human manually can... you got a problem in CI. > Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High Perhaps you are reading too many benchmarks. Edit for answer : I agree Luna is great cheap model. But if Fable was hitting security limits, yet was still included in benchmarks... What flies better? Elephant or paper plane. You can make objective benchmark about that. But not much value for logistics company
  - SyneRyder 29d ago
    > Perhaps you are reading too many benchmarks. Maybe, but at least the benchmark provides an objective measurement of the codebase it is tested on. You're also assuming the bugs are newly introduced / regressions. I can give a concrete example - Fable will not interact with bugs that result in writing to null pointers in C code. That triggers the guardrails and ends the session. If Luna (or GLM Flash, etc) will fix those kinds of memory bugs, that immediately puts it ahead of Fable in some ways, no matter how tiny Luna is. Again, models are spiky. I still agree with your initial point! It's LLMs all the way down over here. It would need to be a particularly gnarly bug & an exceptionally talented human for me to want to pay another human to work on fixing it now.
alex_smart 29d ago
Because simplicity is hard and often the result of careful thought. Anybody can keep piling pile of shit on top of pile of shit which is why that sort of code is so common in our industry.

shakna 29d ago

Claude regular spits out six helper functions instead of... A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Overabstracting, deduplicating things that don't need to be. Building metaclasses because it saw a single orchestrator in the whole codebase. If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice.

adjejmxbdjdn 29d ago
The funny thing is that if you never understand the codebase then you will keep thinking Claude is doing a great work delivering all this incredible software, when all it has done is created unnecessary tech debt.
- noir_lord 29d ago
  Which at some point the developers who actually still do know how to program are either going to have to clean up or in terminal cases rewrite. In a way all we've done (currently) is drastically expand the amount of technical debt across the whole industry. Should be profitable for the ones who can still actually program though and haven't let their skills atrophy by letting Claude do everything. I don't deny there are use cases for LLM's, I just don't buy the hype about them either. As with all tools, you have to understand how to use them to get done what you need to get done without sticking the chisel through your hand.
  - sigseg1v 29d ago
    But this is leaving out the part where the developers that clean up or rewrite... will do it using LLMs. Have you tried refactoring or porting codebases larger than a million lines of code pre-gen-AI and again post-gen-AI? It's night and day difference. One would be insane to schedule a team on 8 months worth of grunt work porting from one language or framework to another which can now be done by 1 person in 4 weeks. Of course the person driving it has to tell it exactly what to do and has to have the requisite knowledge to understand how to effectively structure or fix the software. Maybe new developers don't build this skill so easily anymore. But I don't see why a strong developers skills would atrophy in this case though unless they just never use their knowledge and never give instructions to the AI. To developers speaking of skill atrophy: are you still making sure that when using LLMs you are actively exercising skills like system design, debugging, reviewing for clean code and just in general doing effective code review? If you are doing that, why do you feel skill atrophy? And if you aren't doing it, why not? What about LLMs prevents us from exercising these skills?
  - budman1 29d ago
    2040. The demand for real programming skills will become infinite (again). someone who can actually read, understand, and debug code. when the clankers get stuck. unfortunately, there will be only be a dozen people.
throw839948499 29d ago
I am former java enterprise dev, so yes I often code this way. Unit testing, decomposition... Some projects CI refuse to merge commits with 20 line loop and duplicated code... But that is not a point. Claude can code tight compact loops, it just needs to be instructed to do so! If it does "enterprise code", it means it had no instructions about code style. If your documentation, spec, agent.md does not have proper guidance on coding style... yet another red flag!
- shakna 29d ago
  > it just needs to be instructed to do so! Considering how often it overrules, its own rules?
jjav 29d ago
> A twenty line for loop. It overengineers most things. Anecdote I like to tell.. I was working on a financial planning software, intentionally purely vibe coded as an experiment. I eventually discovered AI had implemented seven duplicate copies of tax calculation functions. All of them different. All of them wrong. All of them giving different answers for same input. Not even the most junior of newbie junior engineers would do something this crazy. But AI was happy to do it. It will solve the immediate problem, efficiently. Even if the most efficient solution is something ridiculous like this.
- UpsideDownRide 29d ago
  For some definitions of efficiency.
- ilija139 29d ago
  I have also a weird story to tell that a human did and it is as crazy as this. It happen in 2019 so no LLMs at all. A person that was hired as an expert in our startup spent more than one week full time working on implementing his solution to the problem we were having. I checked the code after one week to see the progress and was curious how they are implementing an already crazy sounding idea. I found that the whole week was spent re-implementing in python, python's built-in "float" function. That was it, the whole code was just that. Our problem was related to financial services and their implementation of "float" was not even correct.
  - lmf4lol 29d ago
    Jesus Christ... and then? What happened to him? What was the conclusion? Did he get paid?
    - budman1 29d ago
      of course he got paid. that is the deal for an employee, you put in the hours, you get a check. today, this individual is CTO- Vibecoding at Uber.
Foobar8568 29d ago
Oh and how is it any different than most software engineers? How many times I heard ORM are bad only to recreate the same shit? How many times I heard ORM had bad performance and see 1+n stuff everywhere? How many times I have seen tight coupling in the name of DRY?
- shakna 29d ago
  Its different, in that when you teach that engineer, they either leave because now they hate you, or they grow. They change to meet the standards of a project, rather than inventing their own. We don't get seniors, without juniors. I'd say more than half the job, is just... Learning. People grow.
  - spockz 29d ago
    Exactly. People ask how we get seniors with juniors using llm. The answer is the same. Review the code. Analyse write down what is wrong. What you expect to have been better. Force every change to be documented and explained enough.
    - orwin 29d ago
      It just takes forever now. The understanding is lower, the effort is lower, and frankly, I think the interest is lower too. I might be in the last generation who truly had fun working on a 'shrodinger' bug.
      - spockz 29d ago
        Yes. So find someone with intrinsic desire to engineer. Mentor them. In the mean time put a plethora of guardrails in place to make sure the AI Train doesn’t derail production. Oh. And keep showing your value. In the end every org can do with less low paid overeager uninterested juniors. Might as well let agents Do those tasks.
  - KronisLV 29d ago
    > Its different, in that when you teach that engineer, they either leave because now they hate you, or they grow. Or they just have their own hubris and ignore your (provably better) suggestions because their way is "better/easier/how we've always done things". And then you end up with someone sprinkling N+1 issues throughout the system and making systems with bad architectures throughout the years, not thinking about backpressure etc., as well as shoving ALL the dependencies into a single codebase cause they're not used to creating new ones, turning patches into eventual month long version upgrades because everything keeps breaking with anything newer than JDK 8 and some of the packages are deprecated and gahhhh I should pick up woodworking as a hobby. Though, to address the original claim: >> If it is a better engineer than you... You need practice. This feels like a thought terminating cliche. Like, it will spit out bullshit every now and then, and make assumptions that I don't think that many engineers would (e.g. since a lot of each app is environment-specific), but at the same time when you guide it and give it examples, it can really be quite good! So not that unlike humans at all, even competent devs might not necessarily know about every pattern in any given codebase, especially when one has been around for 10 years and grown quite a bit. It can be quite good if you have something like ArchUnit or your own tools for linting project architecture and patterns, alongside proper documentation that doesn't assume that you're a team member with X years of experience on system Y. AI just forces people to be less lazy and ignorant about knowledge transfer, which they should have also been for the sake of other humans!
raverbashing 29d ago
100% It is my pet peeve with Claude and why I don't prefer it for most stuff (also the comment spam - but that's a all of them in a way or another)

bob1029 29d ago

That final 10% is the hard part. 90% is easy.

orwin 29d ago
I think people on this website have a way, way to high opinion of themselves. Barring a few exceptions, we are middling developers, or way worse than this. Just read the comments from a year or twoon how chatgpt4.5 is the best at coding or how Claude sonnet 4 is better than a lot of Devs... At least I don't have imposter syndrome anymore.

Sharlin 29d ago

So after 30 years of outsourcing to the bottom 10%, you think Claude is better than the bottom 90% even though it’s so stupid that it doesn’t even know it should ask for advice or more information when it’s stuck?

throw839948499 29d ago
It just follows instructions you give it. Some asian devs will go for weeks without asking for help, all while giving amazing fake status reports. Loosing face etc...
- tannertech 29d ago
  You're comparing scammers to incompetence
- Sharlin 29d ago
  Do you think those devs are in the top 10% of all devs like you said Claude is? Or is the bar suddenly much lower after all?
wallst07 29d ago
Claude asks me all the time when it's stuck, what are your prompts? I think some of these anti-claude comments have some face, then I get a peek into how people use them, and it seems all wrong. The tooling is incredibly configurable, but comes out of the box with a big auto button, because thats what people want. Doesn't mean advanced users have to use it.

gspr 29d ago

> At this point we can assume, it is better than 90% of engineers (including me). Hard disagree. We absolutely cannot assume that. You can posit it, and we can have an informed debate about it. This is what irks me the most about LLM fans: they constantly try to reframe the debate to have their worldview as the agreed-upon starting point.

SyneRyder 29d ago

While I actually agree with you (though, outsourcing to lowest bidder would account for much of what you're seeing with humans), I just saw Bug Hunt Bench scores that gave me some pause: https://x.com/PawelHuryn/status/2095982259761475945 https://x.com/PawelHuryn/status/2095982259761475945 https://bughunt.productcompass.pm/?preset=all https://bughunt.productcompass.pm/?preset=all Claude Opus 4.8 ranks near last on this Bug Hunt benchmark, and missed 96% of the deliberately introduced bugs. If you're a developer who has been falling back to Opus 4.8 because of how Opus 5 talks, and Fable 5 being so expensive that it needs to be rationed... well, turns out Opus 4.8 can actually be quite poor for finding bugs. (Which feels weird to me, because Opus 4.6 fixed a bug that myself and a group of humans had been hunting down for over a decade. Models are spiky.) Also surprising to me: Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High, at least on this benchmark. But Astra 6 & Fable 5.1 on Max both perform at the top as you would expect.

throw839948499 29d ago
Still, basic debuging and trouble shooting is where LLM generally shine. Any model can bisect git history and isolate newly introduced bug. If model can not automatically reproduce bug, while human manually can... you got a problem in CI. > Luna Max performing better than Fable 5.1 High Perhaps you are reading too many benchmarks. Edit for answer : I agree Luna is great cheap model. But if Fable was hitting security limits, yet was still included in benchmarks... What flies better? Elephant or paper plane. You can make objective benchmark about that. But not much value for logistics company
- SyneRyder 29d ago
  > Perhaps you are reading too many benchmarks. Maybe, but at least the benchmark provides an objective measurement of the codebase it is tested on. You're also assuming the bugs are newly introduced / regressions. I can give a concrete example - Fable will not interact with bugs that result in writing to null pointers in C code. That triggers the guardrails and ends the session. If Luna (or GLM Flash, etc) will fix those kinds of memory bugs, that immediately puts it ahead of Fable in some ways, no matter how tiny Luna is. Again, models are spiky. I still agree with your initial point! It's LLMs all the way down over here. It would need to be a particularly gnarly bug & an exceptionally talented human for me to want to pay another human to work on fixing it now.

alex_smart 29d ago

Because simplicity is hard and often the result of careful thought. Anybody can keep piling pile of shit on top of pile of shit which is why that sort of code is so common in our industry.