[HN Gopher] Claude Code is all you need
___________________________________________________________________
Claude Code is all you need
Author : sixhobbits
Score : 411 points
Date : 2025-08-11 14:03 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dwyer.co.za)
(TXT) w3m dump (dwyer.co.za)
| doppelgunner wrote:
| Is Claude Code really that good? I'm currently using Cursor and I
| let it pick the LLM model to use.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Most of these are Anthropic models under the hood, so I think
| 'whatever fits your workflow best' is the main deciding factor.
| That's definitely Claude Code for me, and I do think there's
| some 'secret sauce' in the exact prompting and looping logic
| they use, but I haven't tried Cursor a lot to be sure.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| any secret sauce in prompting etc could be trivially reverse
| engineered by the companies building the other agents, since
| they could easily capture all the prompts it sends to the
| LLM. If there's any edge, it's probably more around them
| fine-tuning the model _itself_ on Claude Code tasks.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Interesting that the other vendors haven't done this
| "trivial" task, then, and have pretty much ceded the field
| to Claude Code. _Every_ CLI interface I've used from
| another vendor has been markedly inferior to Claude Code,
| and that includes Codex CLI using GPT-5.
| dangus wrote:
| Claude code seems like the obvious choice for someone using
| Vim but even in the context of someone using a graphical IDE
| like VSCode I keep hearing that Claude is "better" but I just
| can't fathom how that can be the case.
|
| Even if the prompting and looping logic is better, the direct
| integration with the graphical system along with the
| integrated terminal is a huge benefit, and with graphical
| IDEs the setup and learning curve is minimal.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| You can run Claude Code in the terminal window of VS Code,
| and it has IDE integration so you can see diffs inline,
| etc. It's not fully integrated like Cursor but you get a
| lot of the benefits of the IDE in that way.
| CodingJeebus wrote:
| If Cursor works for you, then stick with it. Claude Code is
| great for terminal-based workflows. Whatever makes you more
| productive is the better tool.
|
| I'm just glad we're getting past the insufferable "use Cursor
| or get left behind" attitude that was taking off a year ago.
| bicx wrote:
| I use Cursor with Claude Code running in the integrated
| terminal (within a dev container in yolo mode). I'll often
| have multiple split terminals with different Claude Code
| instances running on their own worktrees. I keep Cursor
| around because I love the code completions.
| vemv wrote:
| When it comes to diffs (edits), Cursor is batch-oriented, while
| CC suggests one edit at a time and can be steered in real time.
|
| That's a critical feature for keeping a human in the loop,
| preventing big detours and token waste.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I feel like as tool Claude code is superior to "regular code
| editor with ai plugin". This method of having the ai do your
| tasks feels like the future.
| cyprien_g wrote:
| I'm a long-time GitHub Copilot subscriber, but I have also
| tested many alternatives, such as Cursor.
|
| Recently, I tried using Claude Code with my GitHub Copilot
| subscription (via unofficial support through
| https://github.com/ericc-ch/copilot-api), and I found it to be
| quite good. However, in my opinion, the main difference comes
| down to your preferred workflow. As someone who works with
| Neovim, I find that a tool that works in the terminal is more
| appropriate for me.
| threecheese wrote:
| Isn't that usage a violation of ToS? In that repo there's
| even an issue thread that mentions this. The way I rely on
| GitHub these days, losing my account would be far more than
| annoying.
| cyprien_g wrote:
| That's indeed a valid concern. I set a low rate limit for
| copilot-api, but I'm not sure if it's enough.
|
| I may stop my experiment if there is any risk of being
| banned.
| bfeynman wrote:
| there is no reason to pay for cursor when claude is definitely
| the best coding model and you are paying essentially for just a
| bigger middle man.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Claude is the best agent model. Its one shot performance and
| large codebase comprehension both lag Gemini/GPT though.
| suninsight wrote:
| I think if you use Cursor, using Claude Code is a huge upgrade.
| The problem is that Cursor was a huge upgrade from the IDE, so
| we are still getting used to it.
|
| The company I work for builds a similar tool - NonBioS.ai. It
| is in someways similar to what the author does above - but
| packaged as a service. So the nonbios agent has a root VM and
| can write/build all the software you want. You access/control
| it through a web chat interface - we take care of all the
| orchestration behind the scene.
|
| Its also in free Beta right now, and signup takes a minute if
| you want to give it a shot. You can actually find out quickly
| if the Claude code/nonbios experience is better than Cursor.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I think the path forward there is slack/teams/discord/etc
| integration of agents, so you can monitor and control
| whatever agent software you like via a chat interface just
| like you would interact with any other teammate.
| suninsight wrote:
| So we tried that route - but problem is that these
| interfaces aren't suited for asynchronous updates. Like if
| the agent is working for the next hour or so - how do you
| communicate that in mediums like these. An Agent, unlike a
| human, is only invoked when you give it a task.
|
| If you use the interface at nonbios.ai - you will quickly
| realize that it is hard to reproduce on slack/discord. Even
| though its still technically 'chat'
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| On Slack I think threads are fine for this. Have an agent
| work channel, and they can just create a thread for each
| task and just dump updates there. If an agent is really
| noisy about its thinking you might need a loglevel toggle
| but in my experience with Claude Code/Cursor you could
| dump almost everything they're currently emitting to the
| UI into a thread.
|
| It's still nice to have a direct web interface to agents,
| but in general most orgs are dealing with
| service/information overload and chat is a good single
| source of truth, which is why integrations are so hot.
| irskep wrote:
| Letting Cursor pick the model for you is inviting them to pick
| the cheapest model for them, at the cost of your experience.
| It's better to develop your own sense of what model works in a
| given situation. Personally, I've had the most success with
| Claude, Gemini Pro, and o3 in Cursor.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I love this article just for the spirit of fun and
| experimentation on display. Setting up a VPS where Claude is just
| asked to go nuts - to the point where you're building a little
| script to keep Claude humming away - is a really fun idea.
|
| This sort of thing is a great demonstration of why I remain
| excited about AI in spite of all the hype and anti-hype. It's
| just _fun_ to mess with these tools, to let them get friction out
| of your way. It 's a revival of the feelings I had when I first
| started coding: "wow, I really can do _anything_ if I can just
| figure out how. "
|
| Great article, thanks for sharing!
| pyrale wrote:
| On one hand, I agree with you that there is some fun in
| experimenting with silly stuff. On the other hand...
|
| > Claude was trying to promote the startup on Hackernews
| without my sign off. [...] Then I posted its stuff to Hacker
| News and Reddit.
|
| ...I have the feeling that this kind of fun experiments is just
| setting up an automated firehose of shit to spray places where
| fellow humans congregate. And I have the feeling that it has
| stopped being fun a while ago for the fellow humans being
| sprayed.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic
| for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of
| CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go
| through a period where internet communications (like HN,
| Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable.
| Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the
| defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a
| stable balance.
| mettamage wrote:
| I hope you're right. I don't think you will be, AI will be
| too good at impersonating humans.
| lukan wrote:
| "we will just be offline more"
|
| I think it will be quite some time into the future,
| before AI can impersonate humans in real life. Neither
| hardware, nor software is there, maybe something to fool
| humans for a first glance maybe, but nothing that would
| be convincing for a real interaction.
| johnecheck wrote:
| Indeed. I worry though. We need those defense systems ASAP.
| The misinformation and garbage engulfing the internet does
| real damage. We can't just tune it out and wait for it to
| get better.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| My theory (and hope) is the rise of a web of trust system.
|
| Implemented so that if a person in your web vouches for a
| specific url ("this is made by a human") you can see it in
| your browser.
| gowld wrote:
| "Web of Trust" has been the proposed answer for, what, 30
| years now? But everyone is too lazy to implement and
| abide by it.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Don't worry, it's coming for real this time. The
| governments have been proposing a requirement that web
| companies connect accounts to government IDs.
|
| If that isn't exciting enough, Sam Altman (yea the one
| who popularized this LLM slop) will gladly sell you his
| WorldCoin to store your biometric data on the blockchain!
| Analemma_ wrote:
| If your solution to this problem is the web of trust, to
| be blunt, you don't have a solution. I am techie whose
| social circle is mostly other techies, and I know
| precisely _zero_ people who have ever used PGP keys or
| any other WoT-based system, despite 30 years of
| evangelism. It 's just not a thing anybody wants.
| kbar13 wrote:
| it's annoying but it'll be corrected by proper moderation on
| these forums
|
| as an aside i've made it clear that just posting AI-written
| emoji slop PR review descriptions and letting claude code
| directly commit without self reviewing is unacceptable at
| work
| DrSiemer wrote:
| I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way
| forward for online interaction is very strong identification
| on any place where you can post anything.
| xnorswap wrote:
| That can be automated away too.
|
| People will be more than willing to say, "Claude,
| impersonate me and act on my behalf".
| pyrale wrote:
| > People will be more than willing to say, "Claude,
| impersonate me and act on my behalf".
|
| I'm now imagining a future where actual people's
| identities are blacklisted just like some IP addresses
| are dead to email, and a market develops for people to
| sell their identity to spammers.
| simonw wrote:
| That's always been the biggest flaw in the Worldcoin idea
| in my opinion: if you have a billion+ humans get their
| eyeball scanned in exchange for some kind of
| cryptographic identity, you can guarantee that a VERY
| sizable portion of those billion people will happily sell
| that cryptographic identity (which they don't understand
| the value of) to anyone who offers them some money.
|
| As far as I can tell the owner of the original iris can
| later invalidate an ID that they've sold, but if you buy
| an ID from someone who isn't strongly technically
| literate you can probably extract a bunch of value from
| it anyway.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I mean, that's fine I guess as long as its respectable
| and respects the forum.
|
| "Claude write a summary of the word doc I wrote about x
| and post it as a reply comment," is fine. I dont see why
| it wouldnt be. Its a good faith effort to post.
|
| "Claude, post every 10 seconds to reddit to spam people
| to believe my politics is correct," isn't but that's not
| the case. Its not a good faith effort.
|
| The moderation rules for 'human slop' will apply to AI
| too. Try spamming a well moderated reddit and see how far
| you get, human or AI.
| antonvs wrote:
| The problem is speed and quantity. Humans weren't able to
| fight off the original email spam, it took automated
| systems. Forums will have to institute much stronger rate
| limiting and other such measures.
| gowld wrote:
| That's fine, because once someone is banned, the
| impersonations are also banned.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I do this every time I find myself typing something I
| could get written up over or even fired for.
|
| 1. I'm usually too emotional to write out why I feel that
| way instead of saying what I feel.
|
| 2. I really don't like the person (or their idea) but I
| don't want to get fired over it.
|
| Claude is really great at this: "Other person said X, I
| think it is stupid and they're a moron for suggesting
| this. Explain to them why this is a terrible idea or tell
| me I'm being an idiot."
|
| Sometimes it tells me I'm being an idiot, sometimes it
| gives me nearly copy-pasta text that I can use and agree
| with.
| postexitus wrote:
| Back in FidoNet days, some BBSs required identification
| papers for registering and only allowed real names to be
| used. Though not known for their level headed discussions,
| it definitely added a certain level of care in online
| interactions. I remember the shock seeing the anonymity
| Internet provided later, both positive and negative. I
| wouldn't be surprised if we revert to some central
| authentication mechanism which has some basic level of
| checks combined with some anonymity guarantees. For
| example, a government owned ID service, which creates a new
| user ID per website, so the website doesn't know you, but
| once they blacklist that one-off ID, you cannot get a new
| one.
| andoando wrote:
| id.me?
|
| Not government owned, but even irs.gov uses it
| benterix wrote:
| Honestly, having seen how it can be used against you,
| retroactively, I would never ever engage in a discussion
| under my real name.
|
| (The fact that someone could correlate posts[0] based on
| writing style, as previously demonstrated on HN and used
| to doxx some people, makes things even more convoluted -
| you should think twice what you write and where.)
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Smaller communities too.
|
| I grew up in... slightly rural america in the 80s-90s, we
| had probably a couple of dozen local BBSes the community
| was small enough that after a bit I just knew who
| everyone was OR could find out very easily.
|
| When the internet came along in the early 90s and I
| started mudding and hanging out in newsgroups I liked
| them small where I could get to know most of the
| userbase, or at least most of the posing userbase. Once
| mega 'somewhat-anonymous' (i.e. posts tied to a username,
| not like 4chan madness) communities like slashdot, huge
| forums, etc started popping up and now with even more
| mega-communities like twitter and reddit. We lost
| something, you can now throw bombs without consequence.
|
| I now spend most of my online time in a custom built
| forum with ~200 people in it that we started building in
| an invite only way. It's 'internally public' information
| who invited who. It's much easier to have a civil
| conversation there, though we still do get the occasional
| flame-out. Having a stable identity even if it's not tied
| to a government name is valuable for a thriving and
| healthy community.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860174
| (posted 12 hours ago)
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I definitely understand the concern - I don't think I'd have
| hung out on HN for so long if LLM generated postings were
| common. I definitely recognize this is something you don't
| want to see happening _at scale_.
|
| But I still can't help but grin at the thought that the bot
| knows that the thing to do when you've got a startup is to go
| put it on HN. It's almost... cute? If you give AI a VPS, of
| course it will eventually want to post its work on HN.
|
| It's like when you catch your kid listening to Pink Floyd or
| something, and you have that little moment of triumph - "yes,
| he's learned _something_ from me! "
| sixhobbits wrote:
| (author here) I did feel kinda bad about it as I've always
| been a 'good' HNer until that point but honestly it didn't
| feel that spammy to me compared to some human generated slop
| I see posted here, and as expected it wasn't high quality
| enough to get any attention so 99% of people would never have
| seen it.
|
| I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with
| human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an
| influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through
| then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?
| felixgallo wrote:
| That kind of attitude is exactly why we're all about to get
| overwhelmed by the worst slop any of us could ever have
| imagined.
|
| The bar is not 'oh well, it's not as bad as some, and I
| think maybe it's fine.'
| taude wrote:
| well, he was arguing that it's not worse than 99% of the
| human slop that gets posted, so where do you draw the
| line?
|
| * well crafted, human only? * Well crafted, whether human
| or AI? * Poorly crafted, human * well crafted, AI only *
| Poorly crafted, AI only * Just junk?
|
| etc.
|
| I think people will intuitively get a feel for when
| content is only AI generated. If people spend time
| writing a prompt that doesn't make it so wordy, and has
| personality, and it OK, then fine.
|
| Also, big opportunity going to be out there for AI
| detected content, whether in forums, coming in inmail
| inboxes, on your corp file share, etc...
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Did you?
|
| Spoiler: no he didn't.
|
| But the article is interesting...
|
| It really highlights to me the pickle we are in with AI:
| because we are at a historical maximum already of "worse is
| better" with Javascript, and the last two decades have put
| out a LOT of javascript, AI will work best with....
|
| Javascript.
|
| Now MAYBE better AI models will be able to equivalently
| translate Javascript to "better" languages, and MAYBE AI
| coding will migrate "good" libraries in obscure languages
| to other "better" languages...
|
| But I don't think so. It's going to be soooo much
| Javascript slop for the next ten years.
|
| I HOPE that large language models, being language models,
| will figure out language translation/equivalency and enable
| porting and movement of good concepts between programming
| models... but that is clearly not what is being invested
| in.
|
| What's being invested in is slop generation, because the
| prototype sells the product.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I mean I can spam HN right now with a script.
|
| Forums like HN, reddit, etc will need to do a better job
| detecting this stuff, moderator staffing will need to be
| upped, AI resistant captchas need to be developed, etc.
|
| Spam will always be here in some form, and its always an arms
| race. That doesnt really change anything. Its always been
| this way.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| The Internet is already 99% shit and always has been. This
| doesn't change anything.
| zanellato19 wrote:
| It's gotten much worse. Before it was shit from people, now
| it's corporate shit. Corporate shit is so much worse.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| For me, I can't get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As
| far as I go is chat style where I'm mostly in control. I enjoy
| the actual process of crafting code myself. For similar
| reasons, I could never be a manager.
|
| Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it
| gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I'll
| probably just find a new career
| starfallg wrote:
| Pretty sure we can make LLM agents to transform declarative
| inputs to agentic action.
| fsloth wrote:
| I strongly disagree agents are for extroverts.
|
| I do agree it's definetly a tool category with a unique set
| of features and am not surprised it's offputting to some. But
| it's appeal is definetly clear to me as an introvert.
|
| For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program
| using natural language.
|
| I think I'm slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things
| but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort.
|
| Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my
| mental energy on the interesting stuff!
|
| It's a great time to be a software engineer!
| pron wrote:
| > For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can
| program using natural language.
|
| I wish they were, but they're not that yet because LLMs
| aren't very good at logical reasonsing. So it's more like
| an _attempt_ to program using natural language. Sometimes
| it does what you ask, sometimes not.
|
| I think "programming" implies that the machine _will_
| always do what you tell it, whatever the language, or
| reliably fail and say it can 't be done because the
| "program" is contradictory, lacks sufficient detail, or
| doesn't have the necessary permissions/technical
| capabilities. If it only sometimes does what you ask, then
| it's not quite programming yet.
|
| > Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend
| my mental energy on the interesting stuff!
|
| I wish that, too, were true, and maybe it will be someday
| soon. But if I need to manually review the agent's output,
| then it doesn't feel like offloading much aside from the
| typing. All the same concentration and thought are still
| required, even for the boring things. If I could at least
| trust the agent to tell me if it did a good job or is
| unsure that would have been helpful, but we're not even
| there yet.
|
| That's not to say the tools aren't useful, but they're not
| yet "programming in a natural language" and not yet able to
| "offload" stuff to.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| You can view Claude Code as a non-deterministic compiler
| where you input english and get functioning code on the
| other end.
|
| The non-determinism is not as much as a problem because
| you are reading over the results and validating that what
| it is created matches what you tell it to do.
|
| I'm not talking about vibe-coding here, I'm grabbing the
| steering wheel with both hands because this car allows me
| to go faster than if I was driving myself, but sometimes
| you have to steer or brake. And the analogy favors Claude
| Code here because you don't have to react in milliseconds
| while programming.
|
| TL;DR: if you do the commit you are responsible for the
| code it contains.
| pron wrote:
| Sure, and that may be valuable, but it's neither
| "programming" nor "offloading mental effort" (at least
| not much).
|
| Some have compared it to working with a very junior
| programmer. I haven't done that in a long while, but when
| I did, it didn't really feel like I was "offloading"
| much, and I could still trust even the most junior
| programmer to tell me whether the job was done well or
| not (and of any difficulties they encountered or insight
| they've learnt) much more than I can an agent, at least
| today.
|
| Trust is something we have, for the most part, when we
| work with either other people or with tools. Working
| without (or with little) trust is something quite novel.
| Personally, I don't mind that an agent can't accomplish
| many tasks; I mind a great deal that I can't trust it to
| tell me whether it was able to do what I asked or not.
| gf000 wrote:
| There is probably a significant factor of what domain you
| work in, that might be part of the reason why you have
| different experiences.
|
| I don't know your current domain, but stuff like Loom
| requires very complex reasoning capabilities, most of
| which lives outside the actual codebase itself. Business
| code on the other hand often has a more direct mapping
| from idea to code, so LLMs might show more promise there.
| keeda wrote:
| _> ... LLMs aren 't very good at logical reasonsing._
|
| I'm curious about what experiences led you to that
| conclusion. IME, LLMs are very good at the type of
| logical reasoning required for most programming tasks.
| E.g. I only have to say something like "find the entries
| with the lowest X and highest Y that have a common Z from
| these N lists / maps / tables / files / etc." and it
| spits out mostly correct code instantly. I then review it
| and for any involved logic, rely on tests (also AI-
| generated) for correctness, where I find myself reviewing
| and tweaking the test cases much more than the business
| logic.
|
| But then I do all that for all code anyway, including my
| own. So just starting off with a fully-fleshed out chunk
| of code, which typically looks like what I'd pictured in
| my head, is a huge load off my cognitive shoulders.
| pron wrote:
| The experience was that I once asked an LLM to write a
| simple function and it produced something _very_ wrong
| that nothing with good reasoning abilities should _ever_
| do. Of course, a drunk or very tired human could have
| done the same mistake, but they would have at least told
| me that they were impaired and unsure of their work.
|
| I agree that most of the time it does most simple tasks
| mostly right, but that's not good enough to truly
| "offload" my mental effort. Again, I'm not saying it's
| not useful, but more than working with a junior developer
| it's like working with a junior developer who may or may
| not be drunk or tired and doesn't tell you.
|
| But mostly my point is that LLMs seem to do logical
| reasoning worse than other things they do better, such as
| generating prose or summarising a document. Of course,
| even then you can't trust them yet.
|
| > But then I do all that for all code anyway, including
| my own
|
| I don't, at least not constantly. I review other people's
| code only towards the very end of a project, and in
| between I trust that they tell me about any pertinent
| challenge or insight, precisely so that I can focus on
| other things unless they draw my attention to something I
| need to think about.
|
| I still think that working with a coding assistant is
| interesting and even exciting, but the experience of not
| being able to trust _anything_ , for me at least, is
| unlike working with another person or with a tool and
| doesn't yet allow me to focus on other things. Maybe with
| more practice I could learn to work with something I
| can't trust at all.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can
| program using natural language.
|
| Sort of. You still can't get a reliable output for the same
| input. For example, I was toying with using ChatGPT with
| some Siri shortcuts on my iPhone. I do photography on the
| side, and finding a good time for lighting for photoshoots
| is a usecase I use a lot so I made a shortcut which sends
| my location to the API along with a prompt to get the
| sunset time for today, total amount of daylight, and golden
| hour times.
|
| Sometimes it works, sometimes it says "I don't have
| specific golden hour times, but you can find those on the
| web" or a useless generic "Golden hour is typically 1 hour
| before sunset but can vary with location and season"
|
| Doesn't feel like programming to me, as I can't get
| reproducible output.
|
| I could just use the LLM to write some API calling script
| from some service that has that data, but then why bother
| with that middle man step.
|
| I like LLMs, I think they are useful, I use them everyday
| but what I want is a way to get consistent, reproducible
| output for any given input/prompt.
| stirfish wrote:
| For things where I don't want creativity, I tell it to
| write a script.
|
| For example, "write a comprehensive spec for a script
| that takes in the date and a location and computes when
| golden hour is." | "Implement this spec"
|
| That variability is nice when you want some creativity,
| e.g. "write a beautiful, interactive boids simulation as
| a single file in html, css, and JavaScript."
|
| Words like "beautiful" and interactive" are open to
| interpretation, and I've been happy with the different
| ways they are interpreted.
| klipklop wrote:
| >I think I'm slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_
| things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort. >Now - I
| can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental
| energy on the interesting stuff!
|
| I agree and I feel that having LLM's do boilerplate type
| stuff is fantastic for ADD people. The dopamine hit you get
| making tremendous progress before you get utterly bored is
| nice. The thing that ADD/ADHD people are the WORST at is
| finishing projects. LLM will help them once the thrill of
| prototyping a green-field project is over.
| 80hd wrote:
| Seconding this. My work has had the same problem - by the
| time I've got things all hooked up, figured out the
| complicated stuff - my brain (and body) clock out and I
| have to drag myself through hell to get to 100%. Even
| with ADHD stimulant medication. It didn't make it
| emotionally easier, just _possible_ lol.
|
| LLMs, particularly Claude 4 and now GPT-5 are fantastic
| at working through these todo lists of tiny details.
| Perfectionism + ADHD not a fun combo, but it's way more
| bearable. It will only get better.
|
| We have a huge moat in front of us of ever-more
| interesting tasks as LLMs race to pick up the pieces.
| I've never been more excited about the future of tech
| whartung wrote:
| I'm kind of in this cohort. While in the groove, yea,
| things fly but, inevitably, my interest wanes. Either
| something too tedious, something too hard (or just a lot
| of work). Or, just something shinier shows up.
|
| Bunch of 80% projects with, as you mentioned, the
| interesting parts finished (sorta -- you see the line at
| the end of the tunnel, it's bright, just don't bother
| finishing the journey).
|
| However, at the same time, there's conflict.
|
| Consider (one of) my current projects, I did the whole
| back end. I had ChatGPT help me stand up a web front end
| for it. I am not a "web person". GUIs and what not are a
| REAL struggle for me because on the one hand, I don't
| care how things look, but, on the other, "boy that sure
| looks better". But getting from "functional" to "looks
| better" is a bottomless chasm of yak shaving, bike
| shedding improvements. I'm even bad at copying styles.
|
| My initial UI was time invested getting my UI to work,
| ugly as it was, with guidance from ChatGPT. Which means
| it gave me ways to do things, but mostly I coded up the
| actual work -- even if it was blindly typing it in vs
| just raw cut and paste. I understood how things were
| working, what it was doing, etc.
|
| But then, I just got tired of it, and "this needs to be
| Better". So, I grabbed Claude and let it have its way.
|
| And, its better! it certainly looks better, more
| features. It's head and shoulders better.
|
| Claude wrote 2-3000 lines of javascript. In, like, 45m.
| It was very fast, very responsive. One thing Claude knows
| is boiler plate JS Web stuff. And the code looks OK to
| me. Imperfect, but absolutely functional.
|
| But, I have zero investment in the code. No "ownership",
| certainly no pride. You know that little hit you get when
| you get Something Right, and it Works? None of that. Its
| amazing, its useful, its just not mine. And that's really
| weird.
|
| I've been striving to finish projects, and, yea, for me,
| that's really hard. There is just SO MUCH necessary to
| ship. AI may be able to help polish stuff up, we'll see
| as I move forward. If nothing else it may help gathering
| up lists of stuff I miss to do.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Ironically, I find greenfield projects the least
| stimulating and the most rote, aside from thinking about
| system design.
|
| I've always much preferred figuring out how to improve or
| build on existing messy systems and codebases, which is
| certainly aided by LLMs for big refactoring type stuff,
| but to be successful at it requires thinking about how
| some component of a system is already used and the
| complexity of that. Lots of edge cases and nuances,
| people problems, relative conservativeness.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| It's interesting that every task in the world is boring to
| somebody, which means nothing left in the world will be
| done by those interested in it, because somebody will
| gladly shotgun it with an AI tool.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Programming implies that it's going to do what i say. I
| wish it did.
| kiitos wrote:
| > For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can
| program using natural language. ... boring tasks cause
| extreme discomfort ... Now - I can offload the most boring
| task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting
| stuff!
|
| The problem with this perspective, is that when you try to
| offload exactly the same boring task(s), to exactly the
| same LLM, the results you get back are never even close to
| being the same. This work you're offloading via natural
| language prompting _is not programming_ in any meaningful
| sense.
|
| Many people don't care about this non-determinism. Some,
| because they don't have enough knowledge to identify, much
| less evaluate, the consequent problems. Others, because
| they're happy to deal with those problems, under the belief
| that they are a cost that's worth the net benefit provided
| by the LLM.
|
| And there are also many people who _do_ care about this
| non-determinism, and _aren 't_ willing to accept the
| consequent problems.
|
| Bluntly, I don't think that anyone in group (1) can call
| themselves a software engineer.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _I can't get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far
| as I go is chat style where I'm mostly in control._
|
| Try aider.chat (it's in the name), but specifically start
| with "ask" mode then dip a toe into "architect" mode, not
| "code" which is where Claude Code and the "vibe" nonsense is.
|
| Let aider.chat use Opus 4.1 or GPT-5 for thinking, with no
| limit on reasoning tokens and --reasoning-effort high.
|
| > _agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people._
|
| On the contrary, I think the non-vibe tools are force
| multipliers for those with an ability to communicate so
| precisely they find "extraverts and neurotypical people"
| confounding when attempting to specify engineering work.
|
| I'd put both aider.chat and Claude Code in the non-vibe class
| if you use them Socratically.
| dionian wrote:
| thanks for this, going to try it out - i need to use paid
| api and not my claude max or gpt pro subn, right?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Aider actually has a mode that is called "copy-paste"
| where it basically gives you a context to paste in an LLM
| chat and then you copy-paste back the reply to aider
| garciasn wrote:
| Agents are boon for introverts who fucking hate dealing with
| other people (read: me). I can iterate rapidly with another
| 'entity' in a technical fashion and not have to spend hours
| explaining in relatable language what to do next.
|
| I feel as if you need to work with these things more, as you
| would prefer to work, and see just how good they are.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You are leaving a lot of productivity on the table by not
| parallelizing agents for any of your work. Seemingly for
| psychological comfort quirks rather than earnestly seeking
| results.
|
| Automation productivity doesn't remove your own agency. It
| frees more time for you to apply your desire for control more
| discerningly.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people
|
| As a neurodivergent introvert, please don't speak for the
| rest of us.
| antonvs wrote:
| That stuck out to me as well. People will make up all sorts
| of stories to justify their resistance to change.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| It's the same as saying that writing good commit messages
| is a boon for extroverts and neurotypicals. It's a
| computer. You're giving it instructions, and the only
| difference to traditional coding is that the input is
| English text.
| kevinsync wrote:
| I kind of think we will see some industry attrition as a
| result of LLM coding and agent usage, simply because the ~
| _vIbEs_ ~ I'm witnessing boil down to quite a lot of
| resistance (for multiple reasons: stubbornness, ethics,
| exhaustion from the hype cycle, sticking with what you know,
| etc)
|
| The thing is, they're just tools. You can choose to learn
| them, or not. They aren't going to make or break your career.
| People will do fine with and without them.
|
| I do think it's worth learning new tools though, even if
| you're just a casual observer / conscientious objector -- the
| world is changing fast, for better or worse, and you'll be
| better prepared to do anything with a wider breadth of tech
| skill and experience than with less. And I'm not just talking
| about writing software for a living, you could go full Uncle
| Ted and be a farmer or a carpenter or a barista in the middle
| of nowhere, and you're going to be way better equipped to
| deal with logistical issues that WILL arise from the very
| nature of the planet hurtling towards 100% computerization.
| Inventory management, crop planning, point of sale,
| marketing, monitoring sensors on your brewery vats, whatever.
|
| Another thought I had was that introverts often blame their
| deficits in sales, marketing and customer service on their
| introversion, but what if you could deploy an agent to either
| guide, perform, or prompt (the human) with some of those
| activities? I'd argue that it would be worth the time to kick
| the tires and see what's possible there.
|
| It feels like early times still with some of these pie in the
| sky ideas, but just because it's not turn-key YET doesn't
| mean it won't be in the near future. Just food for thought!
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| "ethics"
|
| I agree with all of your reasons but this one sticks out.
| Is this a big issue? Are many people refusing to use LLMs
| due to (I'm guessing here): perceived copyright issues, or
| power usage, or maybe that they think that automation is
| unjust?
| kevinsync wrote:
| I can't tell how widespread any of is, to be honest..
| mostly because it's anecdata, and impossible to determine
| if what I'm seeing is just ragebait, or shallow dunks by
| reply-guys in comment sections, or particularly-loud
| voices on social media that aren't representative of the
| majority opinion, etc
|
| That said, the amount of sort-of-thoughtless, I'm-just-
| repeating-something-I-heard-but-don't-really-understand
| outrage towards AI that I'm seeing appears to be
| increasing -- "how many bottles of water did that slop
| image waste??", "Clanker"-adjacent memes and commentary
| (include self-driving + robots in this category), people
| ranting about broligarchs stealing art, music, movies,
| books to train their models (oddly often while also
| performatively parroting party lines about how Spotify
| rips artists off), all the way to refusing to interact
| with people on dating apps if they have anything AI in
| their profiles hahaha (file "AI" alongside men holding
| fish in their pics, and "crypto" lol)
|
| It's all chronically-online nonsense that may well just
| be perception that's artificially amplified by "the
| algorithm".
|
| Me, I have no fundamental issue with any of it -- LLMs,
| like anything else, aren't categorically good or bad.
| They can be used positively and negatively. Everything we
| use and consume has hidden downsides and unsavory
| circumstances.
| cpldcpu wrote:
| I think you misunderstand what this does. It is not only a
| coding agent. It is an abstraction layer between you and the
| computer.
| klipklop wrote:
| >Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
|
| I completely disagree. Juggling several agents (and hopping
| from feature-to-feature) at once, is perfect for somebody
| with ADHD. Being an agent wrangler is great for introverts
| instead of having to talk to actual people.
| filoleg wrote:
| > Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
|
| This sounds like a wild generalization.
|
| I am in neither of those two groups, and I've been finding
| tools like Claude Code becoming increasingly more useful over
| time.
|
| Made me much more optimistic about the direction of AI
| development in general too. Because with each iteration and
| new version it isn't getting anywhere closer to replacing me
| or my colleagues, but it is becoming more and more useful and
| helpful to my workflow.
|
| And I am not one of those people who are into "prompt
| engineering" or typing novels into the AI chatbox. My entire
| interaction is typically short 2-3 sentences "do this and
| that, make sure that XYZ is ABC", attach the files that are
| relevant, let it do its thing, and then manual
| checks/adjustments. Saves me a boatload of work tbh, as I
| enjoy the debugging/fixing/"getting the nuanced details
| right" aspect of writing code (and am pretty decent at it, I
| think), but absolutely dread starting from a brand new empty
| file.
| joshred wrote:
| I think they're fantastic at generating the sort of thing I
| don't like writing out. For example, a dictionary mapping
| state names to their abbreviations, or extracting a data
| dictionary from a pdf so that I can include it with my
| documentation.
| burnte wrote:
| > Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
|
| As an extrovert the chances I'll use an AI agent in the next
| year is zero. Not even a billion to one but a straight zero.
| I understand very well how AI works, and as such I have
| absolutely no trust in it for anything that isn't
| easy/simple/solved, which means I have virtually no use for
| generative AI. Search, reference, data transformation, sure.
| Coding? Not without verification or being able to understand
| the code.
|
| I can't even trust Google Maps to give me a reliable route
| anymore, why would I actually believe some AI model can code?
| AI tools are helpers, not workers.
| taftster wrote:
| For me (an introvert), I have found great value in these
| tools. Normally, I kind of talk to myself about a problem /
| algorithm / code segment as I'm fleshing it out. I'm not
| telling myself complete sentences, but there's some sort of
| logical dialog I am having with myself.
|
| So I just have to convert that conversation into an AI
| prompt, basically. It just kind of does the typing for the
| construct already in my head. The trick is to just get the
| words out of my head as prompt input.
|
| That's honestly not much different than an author writing a
| book, for example. The story line is in their head, they just
| have to get it on paper. And that's really the tricky part of
| writing a novel as much as writing code.
|
| I therefore don't believe this is an introvert/extrovert
| thing. There are plenty of book authors which are both. The
| tools available as AI code agents are really just an advanced
| form of dictation.
| sixo wrote:
| At one point in my life I liked crafting code. I took a
| break, came back, and I no longer liked it--my thoughts
| ranged further, and the fine-grained details of
| implementations were a nuisance rather than ~pleasurable to
| deal with.
|
| Whatever you like is probably what you should be doing right
| now. Nothing wrong with that.
| wredcoll wrote:
| > Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
|
| Please stop with this kind of thing. It isn't true, it
| doesn't make sense and it doesn't help anyone.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Not sure if I'd want Claude doing whatever on a production
| vps/node, but I like the idea of a way to use Claude Code on
| the go/wherever you are. I'm going to setup KASM workspaces on
| my free OCI server and see how it works there.
|
| https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm
| prashantsengar wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this! I have been trying on and off to run
| RooCode on a VPS to use it on the go. I tried Code Server but
| it does not share "sessions". KASM seems interesting for
| this. Do share if you write a blog post on setting it up
| indigodaddy wrote:
| It's pretty straightforward through the Linuxserver docker
| image deployment. I have some notes here re: configuration
| and package persistence strategy via brew:
|
| https://gist.githubusercontent.com/jgbrwn/28645fcf4ac5a4176
| f...
| Lerc wrote:
| This is the kind of thing people should be doing with AI. Weird
| and interesting stuff that has a "Let's find out!" Attitude.
|
| Often there's as much to be learned from why it doesn't work.
|
| I see the AI hype to be limited to a few domains.
|
| People choosing to spend lots of money on things speculatively
| hoping to get a slice of whatever is cooking, even if they
| don't really know if it's a pie or not.
|
| Forward looking imagining of what would change if these things
| get massively better.
|
| Hyperbolic media coverage of the above two.
|
| There are companies taking about adding AI for no other reason
| than they feel like that's what they should be doing, I think
| that counts as a weak driver of hype, but only because
| cumulatively, lots of companies are doing it. If anything I
| would consider this an outcome of hype.
|
| Of these the only one that really affects me is AI being
| shoehorned into places it shouldn't
|
| The media coverage stokes fires for and against, but I think it
| only changes the tone of annoyance I have to endure. They would
| do the same on another topic in the absence of AI. It used to
| be crypto,
|
| I'm ok with people spending money that is not mine on high
| risk, high potential reward. It's not for me to judge how they
| calculate the potential risk or potential reward. It's their
| opinion, let them have it.
|
| The weird thing I find is the complaints about AI hype
| dominating. I have read so many pieces where the main thrust of
| their argument is about the dominance of fringe viewpoints that
| I very rarely encounter. Frequently they take the stance that
| anyone imagining how the world might change from any particular
| form of AI as a claim that that form is inevitable and usually
| imminent. I don't see people making those claims.
|
| I see people talking about what they tried, what they can do,
| and what they can't do. Everything they can't do is then held
| up by others as if it were a trophy and proof of some
| catestrophic weakness.
|
| Just try stuff, have fun, if that doesn't interest you, go do
| something else. Tell us about what you are doing. You don't
| need to tell us that you aren't doing this particular thing,
| and why. If you find something interesting tell us about that,
| maybe we will too.
| dizlexic wrote:
| every vibe coded thing I've built is trash, but it's amazingly
| fun to do.
|
| I've tried to explain it to other devs that it's like dumping
| out a 10000 piece jigsaw puzzle and trying to put it together
| again.
|
| it's just fun.
| burntpineapple wrote:
| if I don't see aider in the first sentence, I send it back
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Particularly with the VSCode extension. I was a loyal Cline user
| until recently because of how good the editor experience was, but
| the ability for Claude to go off and run for 10+ minutes
| effectively autonomously, and show me the diffs in realtime is a
| gamechanger. The token usage has also gotten _much_ more
| efficient in the last few months. With proper IDE support now I
| don 't see any reason at all to use anything else, especially not
| the "credit" based middle-man providers (Windsurf/Cursor et. al).
| monkpit wrote:
| Same here, I was convinced Cline+OpenRouter was the way to go.
| But with Claude code I'm getting better results and saving
| money, even compared to planning with Sonnet and transitioning
| to act mode with DeepSeek, I was still using more than $20/mo
| easily.
| chaosprint wrote:
| The title is a bit exaggerated. The depth of the projects covered
| in the article is clearly not representative of "all".
|
| In fact, I now prefer to use a purely chat window to plan the
| overall direction and let LLM provide a few different
| architectural ideas, rather than asking LLM to write a lot of
| code whose detail I have no idea about.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Most harnesses provide this as a "plan" vs. "act" mode now. You
| first "chat" in plan mode (no access to tools, no instructions
| to write any code basically), you then can optionally write
| those plans in a memorybank / plan.md, and then say "now go
| implement it", and it moves to the "act" mode where it goes
| through and does it, updating progress in plan.md as it goes.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| I've found it very useful to have items like requirements.md,
| plans.md, or todo.md, in my LLM focused projects. I'll use AI
| to help take the ideas I have at that stage and refine them
| into something more appropriate for ingestion into the next
| stage. So, when I want it to come up with the plans, it is
| going to base is mostly on requirements.md, and then I'll
| have it act on the plans step by step after that.
| skerit wrote:
| I like using Claude-Code, it can be a real timesaver in certain
| cases.
|
| But it's far from perfect. Really difficult things/big projects
| are nearly impossible. Even if you break it down into hundred
| small tasks.
|
| I've tried to make it port an existing, big codebase from one
| language to another. So it has all of the original codebase in
| one folder, and a new project in another folder. No matter how
| much guidance you give it, or how clear you make your todos, it
| will not work.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What specifically are its modes of failure? I've never tried
| doing that, do very curious what the roadblocks are.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| I've done something similar for a refactor.
|
| It simply forgets code exists during a port. It will port
| part of a function and ignore the rest, it will scan a
| whole file into context and then forget that a different
| codepath exists.
|
| I would never rely on it for a 1:1 mapping of large
| features/code transformations. Small stuff sure, but beyond
| say a few large files it will miss things and you will be
| scratching your head for why it's not working.
| OldfieldFund wrote:
| It's a play on the name of the paper that jump-started ChatGPT:
| "Attention Is All You Need:" https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
| dabedee wrote:
| This article feels like it was written as a dialectical exercise
| between an AI and a human. It would probably benefit from some
| more heavy human editing to make it more succinct and to give the
| overall article a structure. As it is, it's very difficult to
| follow along.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| very
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| >1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip
| permissions', even on important resources like your production
| server and your main dev machine.
|
| I thought the article was a satire after I read this ... but it
| wasn't!
| bubblyworld wrote:
| Haha, well at least they warned you!
|
| > If you're from infosec, you might want to stop reading now --
| the rest of this article isn't going to make you any happier.
| Keep your medication close at hand if you decide to continue...
| glitchc wrote:
| You're just making a case for why developers cannot be
| trusted with sensitive information, and why cyber depts lock
| the machine down so extensively.
| bubblyworld wrote:
| Eh? I'm making no such case. It was a quote from the
| article.
| csomar wrote:
| I just came for the comments for this... I am not sure at what
| point we are. Think AI and Crypto are a match in hell,
| especially given that a lot of Crypto projects are made by bros
| who have no interest in tech. estimate we'll be seeing
| projects/companies that get hacked as soon as they launch by
| Claude itself.
| Thrymr wrote:
| > I hit a small snag where Anthropic decides that running
| Claude as root with --dangerously-skip-permissions / yolo-mode
| is not allowed. You can get past this dumb nanny-state stuff by
| running [fun dangerous command that lets you run as root]
|
| Still not convinced it is not satire.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Obviously you wouldn't want to do this to any revenue
| generating code, but when just mucking around on prototypes
| this seems fine.
| newtwilly wrote:
| I run with the dangerous option on my work computer. At first I
| was thinking I would be good if I just regularly kept full disk
| backups. But my company at least pays lip service to the fact
| that we want to protect our intellectual property. Plus I think
| it might be irresponsible to allow an AI model full internet
| access unsupervised.
|
| So now I use a docker compose setup where I install Claude and
| run it in a container. I map source code volumes into the
| container. It uses a different container with dnsmasq with an
| allowlist.
|
| I initially wanted to do HTTP proxying instead of DNS filtering
| since it would be more secure, but it was quite hard to set it
| up satisfactorily.
|
| Running CLI programs with the dangerous full permissions is a
| lot more comfortable and fast, so I'm quite satisfied.
| devmor wrote:
| This article seems fun, and it's interesting, but I was waiting
| for the point and it never came.
|
| The author didn't do anything actually useful or impactful, they
| played around with a toy and mimicked a portion of what it's like
| to spin up pet projects as a developer.
|
| But hey, it could be that this says something after all. The
| first big public usages of AI were toys and vastly performed as a
| sideshow attraction for amused netizens. Maybe we haven't come
| very far at all, in comparison to the resources spent. It seems
| like all of the truly impressive and _useful_ applications of
| this technology are still in specialized private sector work.
| jofer wrote:
| I appreciate this writeup. I live in the terminal and work
| primarily in vim, so I always appreciate folks talking about
| tooling from that perspective. Little of the article is that, but
| it's still interesting to see the workflow outlined here, and it
| gives me a few ideas to try more of.
|
| However, I disagree that LLMs are anywhere near as good as what's
| described here for most things I've worked with.
|
| So far, I'm pretty impressed with Cursor as a toy. It's not a
| usable tool for me, though. I haven't used Claude a ton, though
| I've seen co-workers use it quite a bit. Maybe I'm just not
| embracing the full "vibe coding" thing enough and not allowing AI
| agents to fully run wild.
|
| I will concede that Claude and Cursor have gotten quite good at
| frontend web development generation. I don't doubt that there are
| a lot of tasks where they make sense.
|
| However, I still have yet to see a _single_ example of any of
| these tools working for my domain. Every single case, even when
| the folks who are trumpeting the tools internally run the
| prompting/etc, results in catastrophic failure.
|
| The ones people trumpet internally are cases where folks can't be
| bothered to learn the libraries they're working with.
|
| The real issue is that people who aren't deeply familiar with the
| domain don't notice the problems with the changes LLMs make. They
| _seem_ reasonable. Essentially by definition.
|
| Despite this, we are being nearly forced to use AI tooling on
| critical production scientific computing code. I have been told I
| should never be editing code directly and been told I must use AI
| tooling by various higher level execs and managers. Doing so is
| 10x to 100x slower than making changes directly. I don't have
| boilerplate. I do care about knowing what things do because I
| need to communicate that to customers and predict how changes to
| parameters will affect output.
|
| I keep hearing things described as an "overactive intern", but
| I've never seen an intern this bad, and I've seen a _lot_ of
| interns. Interns don't make 1000 line changes that wreck core
| parts of the codebase despite being told to leave that part
| alone. Interns are willing to validate the underlying
| mathematical approximations to the physics and are capable of
| accurately reasoning about how different approximations will
| affect the output. Interns understand what the result of the
| pipeline will be used for and can communicate that in simple
| terms or more complex terms to customers. (You'd think this is
| what LLMs would be good at, but holy crap do they hallucinate
| when working with scientific terminology and jargon.)
|
| Interns have PhDs (or in some cases, are still in grad school,
| but close to completion). They just don't have much software
| engineering experience yet. Maybe that's the ideal customer base
| for some of these LLM/AI code generation strategies, but those
| tools seem especially bad in the scientific computing domain.
|
| My bottleneck isn't how fast I can type. My bottleneck is
| explaining to a customer how our data processing will affect
| their analysis.
|
| (To our CEO) - Stop forcing us to use the wrong tools for our
| jobs.
|
| (To the rest of the world) - Maybe I'm wrong and just being a
| luddite, but I haven't seem results that live up to the hype yet,
| especially within the scientific computing world.
| smithkl42 wrote:
| This is roughly my experience with LLMs. I've had a lot of
| friends that have had good experience vibe coding very small
| new apps. And occasionally I've had AI speed things up for me
| when adding a specific feature to our main app. But at roughly
| 2 million lines of code, and with 10 years of accumulated
| tribal knowledge, LLMs really seem to struggle with our current
| codebase.
|
| The last task I tried to get an LLM to do was a fairly
| straightforward refactor of some of our C# web controllers -
| just adding a CancellationToken to the controller method
| signature whenever the underlying services could accept one. It
| struggled so badly with that task that I eventually gave up and
| just did it by hand.
|
| The widely cited study that shows LLMs slow things down by 20%
| or so very much coheres with my experience, which is generally:
| fight with the LLM, give up, do it by hand.
| zanellato19 wrote:
| My experience is that sometimes they give you a 10x speedup
| but then you hit a wall and take 30 times longer to do a
| simple thing and a lot of people just keep hammering because
| of the first feeling. Outside of boilerplate, I haven't seen
| it be this magical tool people keep claiming it is.
| alberth wrote:
| OT: my 14-year old nephew would like to use Claude Code. How do
| they signup for an account given they don't have a cellphone?
|
| (Sure, I could let them use my credentials but that isn't really
| legit/fair use.)
| colechristensen wrote:
| Have someone who isn't ever going to use claude code sign up
| for him and then give him the credentials. (do you have a
| partner or other relative not in tech?)
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Surely your love for your nephew is priceless ?
|
| Do the right thing, sign up for an API account and put some
| credits on there...
|
| (and keep topping up those credits ;-)
| esafak wrote:
| Use a local model like Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507 or Gemini CLI,
| which has a generous free tier.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Note that they should be able to get GitHub Copilot Pro for
| free via k-12 student 13yrs+
| codazoda wrote:
| Like other posters said, maybe a local model is a good option.
| I've found the Qwen3:4B (reasoning) model works pretty well for
| many things.
|
| I'm planning to run a local model on a $149 mini-pc and host it
| for the world from my bedroom. You can read a bit more about my
| thinking below.
|
| https://joeldare.com/my_plan_to_build_an_ai_chat_bot_in_my_b...
|
| These hosted models are better but it feels like the gap is
| closing and I hope it continues to close.
| lvl155 wrote:
| If Anthropic is smart they would open it up to other models now
| to make it default for everyone. Otherwise you are banking on
| Sonnet remaining the best coding model.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| There's Claude Code Router, that lets you use any model with
| Claude Code. Claude is a really good model for agents though,
| even though Gemini 2.5 and GPT5 are better models overall,
| Claude uses tools and plans tasks more effectively. A better
| pattern is to provide sub agents in Claude Code that call out
| to other LLMs as tools for planning/architecture.
| tommy_axle wrote:
| This piece is also covered by a bunch of other cli/tui agents
| (like codex-cli and opencode) allowing you to switch between
| Claude and other models (comes in handy depending on the task)
| so it really all depends on the setup you like. As mentioned in
| the sibling comment there are ways to get it to work with
| Claude Code too.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| There's also opencode which is a fork(?) of Claude Code that
| runs on any model: https://github.com/sst/opencode
|
| And of course, not the same, but Aider still exists and is
| still a great tool for AI dev.
|
| It's interesting how everyone is suddenly OK with vendor lock-
| in, quite a change from years past!
| chrismustcode wrote:
| Not a fork opencode is a from scratch project
|
| Claude code is completely closed source and even DMCA'd
| people reverse engineering it.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/25/anthropic-sent-a-
| takedown-...
| nikcub wrote:
| The entire point of CC is to drive anthropic subscriptions and
| it's working. even with the release of the long-awaited gpt5
| the anthropic models are still the best coding models.
|
| There are plenty of alternatives for other models like opencode
| et al, and you can always just set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL with
| claude code to have it use another provider. I don't see why
| they need to do anything in addition to that.
|
| My only request would be for claude code to be a bit more open,
| less obfuscated and to accept PRs - but I understand the
| unwillingness of also wanting to manage what would be a very
| popular open source project.
| siva7 wrote:
| > I watched the autonomous startup builder a bit more.
|
| I think i'm done with this community in the age of vibe coding.
| The line between satire, venture capitalism, business idea guys
| and sane tech enthusiasts is getting too blurry.
| zb3 wrote:
| Umm, not really, you also need spare money to burn..
| not_a_bot_4sho wrote:
| Perhaps I'm a bit of a cynic but I'm no longer impressed by the
| AI slop websites and demo apps, like those showcased in the
| article.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| (author here) I think there's a difference between "I'm no
| longer impressed" (good) and "I was never impressed and never
| would have been impressed" (bad, but common).
|
| Yes it's easy now so its by definition no longer impressive,
| but that in itself is impressive if you can correctly remember
| or imagine what your reaction _would_ have been 6 months ago.
| Terretta wrote:
| _Never impressed_ , _no longer impressed_ , feeling depressed
| ... Another option, newly impressed by the next iteration.
|
| Up to a point these have been probability machines. There's
| _probably_ a lot of code that does certain _likely_ things.
| An almost astonishing amount doing the same things, in fact.
| As such, perhaps we shouldn 't be surprised or impressed by
| the stochastic parrot aspect any more than we're impressed by
| 80% of such sites being copy pasta from Stack Overflow a few
| years ago.
|
| However, what we perhaps didn't expect is that on the margins
| of the mass probability space, there are any number of less
| common things, yet still enough of those in aggregate that
| these tools can guess well how to do those things too, even
| things that we might not be able to search for. Same reason
| Perplexity has a business model when Google or DDG exist.
|
| And now, recently, many didn't expect one might be able to
| simulate a tiny "society of mind" made of "agents" out of
| these parrots, a tiny society that's proving actually useful.
|
| Parrots themselves still impress me, but a society of them
| making plans at our beck and call? That can keep us all
| peeking, pecking, and poking for a while yet.
|
| _/ / given enough time and typewriters, who wins: a million
| monkeys, a society of parrots, or six hobbits?_
| hattmall wrote:
| It's a lot like the first time taking a metal detector to a
| beach. It's really cool and exciting (dopamine hit) to find
| stuff, but after a while it wears off because realistically you
| only found trash.
|
| Buuut for some people it just clicks and it becomes their chore
| to go find trash in the beach everyday and the occasional
| nickel or broken bracelet they feel the need to tell people and
| show it off.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| I've asked copilot (Claude Sonnet 4) to edit some specific parts
| of a project. It removed the lines that specifically have
| comments that say "do not remove" with long explanation why. Then
| it went ahead and modified the unit tests to ensure 100%
| coverage.
|
| Using coding agent is great btw, but at least learn how to double
| check their work cuz they are also quite terrible.
| benterix wrote:
| This is the tricky part. The whole point of agents is, well, do
| things so that we don't have to. But if you need to check
| everything they do, you might as well copy and paste from a
| chat interface...
|
| Which makes me feel early adopters pay with their time. I'm
| pretty sure the agents will be much better with time, but this
| time is not exactly now, with endless dances around their
| existing limitations. Claude Code is fun to experiment with but
| to use it in production I'd give it another couple of years
| (assuming they will focus on code stability ans reducing its
| natural optimism as it happily reports "Phase 2.1.1 has been
| successfully with some minor errors with API tests failing only
| 54.3% of the time").
| tptacek wrote:
| You run a coding agent with no permissions checks on a production
| server anywhere I'm involved in security and I will strike down
| upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.
|
| Really, any coding agent our shop didn't write itself, though in
| those cases the smiting might be less theatrical than if you
| literally ran a yolo-mode agent on a prod server.
| sylens wrote:
| Author kindly asked you to stop reading:
|
| > 1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip
| permissions', even on important resources like your production
| server and your main dev machine. If you're from infosec, you
| might want to stop reading now--the rest of this article isn't
| going to make you any happier. Keep your medication close at
| hand if you decide to continue).
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Gotta exaggerate a bit to get attention :D
|
| But I think I'm getting to the point where "If I'd let an
| intern/junior dev have access while I'm watching then I'm
| probably OK with Claude having it too"
|
| The thing that annoys me about a lot of infosec people is that
| they have all of these opinions about bad practice that are
| removed from the actual 'what's the worst that could happen
| here' impact/risk factor.
|
| I'm not running lfg on a control tower that's landing boeing
| 737s, but for a simple non-critical CRUD app? Probably the
| tradeoff is worth it.
| nvch wrote:
| We allow juniors in risky areas because that's how they will
| learn. Not the case for current AIs.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think that's like, fractally wrong. We don't allow early-
| stage developers to bypass security policies so that they
| can learn, and AI workflow and tool development is itself a
| learning process.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Why in the world would you advocate explicitly for letting it
| run on production servers, rather than teaching it how to
| test in a development or staging environment like you would
| with a junior engineer?
| philipp-gayret wrote:
| My workflow is somewhat similar to yours. I also much love
| --dangerously-skip-permissions, as root! I even like to do it
| from multiple Claude Code instances in parallel when I have
| parallel ideas that can be worked out.
|
| Maybe my wrapper project is interesting for you?
| https://github.com/release-engineers/agent-sandbox It's to
| keep Claude Code containerized with a copy of the workspace
| and a firewall/proxy so it can only access certain sites.
| With my workflow I don't really risk much, and the "output"
| is a .patch file I can inspect before I git apply it.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I've often gotten the sense that fly.io is not completely
| averse to some degree of "cowboying," meaning you should
| probably take heed to this particular advice coming from them..
| tptacek wrote:
| I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about but nobody
| is running Claude Code on our server fleet here.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| You took it wrong. I'm with you here.
| tptacek wrote:
| We're pretty averse to "cowboying". We're a small team
| working on an enormously ambitious problem at a much
| earlier point on the maturity curve than incumbents. It's
| fine if that maturity concern impacts people's take on
| the product, but not at all fine if people use it as a
| reflection on the people and processes building that
| product.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I think I just meant perhaps fly isn't afraid of
| responsibly "moving fast" in certain situations. Sorry
| for any offense, didn't mean it like that at all and
| there was no ill intent (actually the opposite) in my OC.
| At the end of the day I was trying to convey that the
| security stances of fly should be paid attention to.
| tptacek wrote:
| Sorry, I was pretty knee-jerk here.
| Terretta wrote:
| Author (who also replied to you) might have been "doing it
| wrong" but no wonder, Anthropic only made Claude Code smarter
| about this 5 days ago and there's too much to keep up with:
|
| https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-security-review
|
| The new command is something like /security-review and should
| be in the loop before any PR or commit _especially_ for this
| type of web-facing app, which Claude Code makes easy.
|
| This prompt will make Claude's code _generally_ beat not just
| intern code, but probably most devs ' code, for security
| mindedness:
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anthropics/claude-code-sec...
|
| The false positives judge shown here is particularly well done.
|
| // Beyond that, run tools such as Kusari or Snyk. It's unlikely
| most shops have security engineers as qualified as these
| focused tools are becoming.
| mdasen wrote:
| Is Claude Code better than the Gemini CLI? I've been using the
| Gemini CLI with Gemini 2.5 Pro and haven't been impressed. Maybe
| these LLMs aren't as good with Rust codebases? I'm guessing there
| are a lot more people looking to use these tools with JS and
| Python.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Claude Code is insanely good with Rust.
| risho wrote:
| i've tried codex, cursor, and a few other agentic tools and
| nothing compares to claude code when it comes to UX. The other
| service's models are quickly catching up to claude, but the
| claude code ux is just magical to me. i havent used it with
| rust personally. like you suggested would be the average user,
| i've mostly stuck with js and python.
| irskep wrote:
| I was once a heavy user of Cursor with Gemini 2.5 Pro as a
| model, then a Claude Code convert. Occasionally I try out
| Gemini CLI and somehow it fails to impress, even as Cursor +
| Gemini still works well. I think it's something about the
| limited feature set and system prompt.
| nestorD wrote:
| I have found Claude code to be significantly better, both in
| how good the model ends up being and in how polished it is. To
| the point that I do not drop down to Gemini CLI when I reach my
| Claude usage limit.
| rancar2 wrote:
| You can make Gemini CLI much better by making it behave more
| like Claude Code. Claude Code has some lovely prompt
| engineering at the system and subsystem level that can be
| replicated with Gemini CLI. I'm having great results already. I
| am still perfecting process and prompts to be a fully agentic
| system that can do well on benchmarks but more importantly do
| the right work with steerability, which was an absolute pain
| with Gemini CLI out-of-the-box. If you are interested, I can
| publish some of the basics now and then I can keep you posted
| as I develop it into a more robust system. Just email me at
| randycarlton@gmail.com with the subject: SaaS.bot (where this
| work will likely reside).
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| I don't know if it's Gemini CLI or Gemini 2.5 Pro, but the
| combination is not even comparable to Claude Code with Sonnet.
| I was starting with these agent tools several weeks ago, so it
| was very tempting to use Gemini, instead of paying for Claude
| Pro, but the difference is huge. In my experience, Gemini was
| very quick to get stuck in debugging loop, fixing something
| "one last time" over and over again. Or it got into writing
| code, despite my explicitly saying not to do so. I'm still
| trying to figure out if I could use Gemini for something, but
| every time I try it, I regret it. Claude Code with GLM-4.5 is a
| good alternative to paying for Claude Pro, it's not as good as
| Sonnet, but close.
| mdasen wrote:
| I guess what seems surprising to me is that Gemini 2.5 Pro
| scores well above Claude Sonnet on Aider's leaderboard, even
| beating Claude Opus 4.
|
| I have been kinda wondering if there's something that just
| isn't as good between the CLI and model because the Gemini
| CLI has been a mostly frustrating experience - and it's kept
| me from wanting to pay for Claude because I don't want to pay
| money for the same frustrating experience. But maybe I should
| try Claude and see.
|
| https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
| csomar wrote:
| It is much better but only because Sonnet 4 is better at
| handling more complexity and being very code at writing code.
| modo_ wrote:
| I've been using both on a Rust codebase and have found both
| work fairly well. Claude code is definitely more capable than
| Gemini. What difficulties have you had?
|
| The biggest pain point I've had is that both tools will try to
| guess the API of a crate instead of referencing the
| documentation. I've tried adding an MCP for this but have had
| mixed results.
|
| https://github.com/d6e/cratedocs-mcp
| mdasen wrote:
| It might be that we have multiple features in our codebase
| and Gemini seems to struggle understanding that it needs to
| be aware of #[cfg(feature = "x")] and also that if it's
| trying to run things, it might need to specify the feature.
|
| And yes, when they guess APIs, it's highly annoying.
| esafak wrote:
| We really need an agent benchmark to explore their ability-
| efficiency frontier.
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is good stuff. While somebody could build a Trello clone or
| an image generator by typing "git clone " followed by any number
| of existing projects, the code you'd get might've been written by
| a person, plus if you do that you're not even spending any money,
| which just doesn't seem right.
|
| The future is vibe coding but what some people don't yet
| appreciate what that vibe _is_ , which is a Pachinko machine
| permanently inserted between the user and the computer. It's wild
| to think that anybody got anything done without the thrill of
| feeding quarters into the computer and seeing if the ball lands
| on "post on Reddit" or "delete database"
| expensive_news wrote:
| This is a great comment.
|
| I've noticed a new genre of AI-hype posts that don't attempt to
| build anything novel, just talk about how nice and easy
| building novel things has become with AI.
|
| The obvious contradiction being that if it was really so easy
| their posts would actually be about the cool things they built
| instead of just saying what they "can" do.
|
| I wouldn't classify this article as one since the author does
| actually create something of this, but LinkedIn is absolutely
| full of that genre of post right now.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| > their posts would actually be about the cool things they
| built
|
| Presumably, they are all startups in stealth mode. But in a
| few months, prepare to be blown away.
| t0md4n wrote:
| I'd personally rather use gpt-5. The sub price is cheap and
| offers more overall value than an Anthropic sub or paying per
| token. The chatgpt app on iPhone and Mac are native and nicer
| than Anthropic's and offer more features. Codex is close enough
| to Claude Code and also now native. For me it's nicer to use the
| "same" model across each use case like text, images, code etc.
| this way I better understand the limitations and quirks of the
| model rather than the constant context switching to different
| models to get maybe slightly better perf. To each their own
| though depending on your personal use case.
| bn-l wrote:
| I wish the app supported mcp. Is this "not invented here"?
| cpursley wrote:
| The problem is GPT-5 is not in the same league as even Claude
| 3.5. But I do hope their lower pricing puts some downward
| pressure on Anthropic's next release.
| t0md4n wrote:
| I don't believe this is true but I'm willing to be proven
| wrong. I believe people who think this are just used to
| Claude's models and therefore understand the capabilities and
| limitations due to their experience using them.
| js2 wrote:
| > export IS_SANDBOX=1 && claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
|
| FYI, this can be shortened to: IS_SANDBOX=1
| claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
|
| You don't need the export in this case, nor does it need to be
| two separate commands joined by &&. (It's semantically different
| in that the variable is set _only_ for the single `claude`
| invocation, not any commands which follow. That 's often what you
| want though.)
|
| > I asked Claude to rename all the files and I could go do
| something else while it churned away, reading the files and
| figuring out the correct names.
|
| It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks manually
| and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it doing
| something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to write a
| program to do the thing I want. e.g. I needed to change the shape
| of about 100 JSON files the other day and it wanted to go through
| them one-by-one. I stopped it after the third file, told it to
| write a script to import the old shape and write out the new
| shape, and 30 seconds later it was done. I also had it write me a
| script to... rename my stupidly named bank statements. :-)
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Does it even work with the &&? Iirc, I've never had luck
| putting env vars before the && and always had to do it the way
| you describe
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| It works because they exported it. VAR=foo bar only sets it
| for the env passed to that exec or subshell, export VAR=foo
| && bar adds it to the current env then executes bar.
|
| export VAR=foo && bar is dangerous because it _stays_ set.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Ah, that's what I had done wrong, thank you! And agree I
| wouldn't want to just one-off export it and have it be set,
| better to not export it for one-liner one-offs for sure
| ActionHank wrote:
| Can shorten further to rm -rf /
| kiitos wrote:
| make it work more generally via `env` env
| IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
|
| not all shells support FOO=bar prefixes, in particular fish
| does not, but the above works everywhere
| rirze wrote:
| This might have been the case for fish shell; but not
| anymore, it works in current version. I myself have used the
| popular syntax without specifying `env` in my aliases.
| Dragonai wrote:
| > It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks
| manually and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it
| doing something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to
| write a program to do the thing I want.
|
| This is so funny. Thank you for sharing :)
| felineflock wrote:
| Waiting for the follow up article "Claude Code considered
| harmful"
| narrator wrote:
| The follow up: Why I decided to go back to handcoding assembly
| language after using Claude code.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Separation of concerns..why AI and non-AI dependent code
| should never be mixed.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Locality of behavior - why separating AI and non-AI code
| introduces needless complexity.
| 1gn15 wrote:
| Why isn't anyone talking about the HackerNews Comment Ranker
| plugin? [1] That's amazing. I had this idea too -- to rank HN
| comments by their relevance to the actual article, and filter out
| comments that obviously didn't read it.
|
| Repo: https://github.com/sixhobbits/hn-comment-ranker
|
| I need to modify this to work with local models, though. But this
| does illustrate the article's point -- we both had an idea, but
| only one person actually went ahead and did it, because they're
| more familiar with agentic coding than me.
|
| [1] Oh. I think I understand why. /lh
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The screenshot was a really great example how bad that can end
| up in practice. One comment asking "What's the catch?" which is
| a good follow-up question to further conversation was ranked a
| 1/5.
| hext wrote:
| Probably just needs a slight update to expand the relevant
| context of child comments. I bet it's still comparing "What's
| the catch?" to the OP article.
| visarga wrote:
| And loads of money to pay for tokens, because every month I am
| out of tokens after a week or two.
| aantix wrote:
| Has anyone run with `dangerously skip permissions` and had
| something catastrophic happen?
|
| Are there internal guardrails within Claude Code to prevent such
| incidents?
|
| rm -rf, drop database, etc?
| browningstreet wrote:
| I don't know about Claude Code, but here's my story. With
| Replit, I have a bunch of tasks that I want Replit to do at the
| end of a coding session -- push to Github, update user visible
| Changelogs, etc. It's a list in my replit.md file.
|
| A couple of weeks ago I asked it to "clean up" instead of the
| word I usually use and it ended up deleting both my production
| and dev databases (a little bit my fault too -- I thought it
| deleted the dev database so I asked it to copy over from
| production, but it had deleted the production database and so
| it then copied production back to dev, leaving me with no data
| in either; I was also able to reconstruct my content from a ETL
| export I had handy).
|
| This was after the replit production db database wipe-out story
| that had gone viral (which was different, that dev was pushing
| things on purpose). I have no doubt it's pretty easy to do
| something similar in Claude Code, especially as Replit uses
| Claude models.
|
| Anyway, I'm still working on things in Replit and having a very
| good time. I have a bunch of personal purpose-built utilities
| that have changed my daily tech life in significant ways. What
| vibe coding does allow me to do is grind on "n" of unrelated
| projects in mini-sprints. There is personal, intellectual, and
| project cost to this context switching, but I'm exploring some
| projects I've had on my lists for a long time, and I'm also
| building my base replit.md requirements to match my own project
| tendencies.
|
| I vibe coded a couple of things that I think could be
| interesting to a broader userbase, but I've stepped back and
| re-implemented some of the back-end things to a more specific,
| higher-end vibe coded environment standard. I've also re-
| started a few projects from scratch with my evolved
| replit.md... I built an alpha, saw some issues, upgraded my
| instructions, built it again as a beta, saw some issues...
| working on a beta+ version.
|
| I'm finding the process to be valuable. I think this will be
| something I commit to commercially, but I'm also willing to be
| patient to see what each of the next few months brings in terms
| of upgraded maturity and improved devops.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Claude Code has minimal internal guardrails against destructive
| operations when using --dangerously-skip-permissions, which is
| why it's a major security risk for production environments
| regardless of how convenient it seems.
| azuanrb wrote:
| I run it locally all the time. Nothing catastrophic happened so
| far.
| swader999 wrote:
| It commits sometimes when I'm not ready, that's about it.
| danielbln wrote:
| An over eager helm update lead to some "uh oh, I hope the
| volume is still there" and it was. Otherwise no, haven't had
| anything bad happen. Of course, it's just a matter of time, and
| with the most recent version it's easy to toggle permissions
| back on without having to restart Claude Code, so for spicy
| tasks I tend to disable YOLO mode.
| almosthere wrote:
| I have noticed that using LLMs does not increase tech debt, it
| infact erases it, and can do so codebase wide in half an hour.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I use Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all together.
|
| I throw their results at each other, get them to debug and review
| each others work.
|
| Often a get all three to write the code for a given need and then
| ask all three to review all three answers to find the best
| solution.
|
| If I'm building something sophisticated there might be 50 cycles
| of three way code review until they are all agreed that there no
| critical problems.
|
| There's no way I could do without all three at the same time it's
| essential.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| I dont know about yall, but personally I love to see an AI
| running with "--dangerously-skip-permissions" in an infinite
| loop. Every day we get closer to the cyberpunk future we deserve.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I'm sorry but people who let an agent run on prod deserve what
| they get. Basically even saying you would do that should
| disqualify you from working in IT in the way saying "I like to
| drink when I'm working" should disqualify you from airtraffic
| control.
| noahjk wrote:
| I haven't been following too closely, but is there even a
| reason to do this? What are the benefits of allowing production
| access versus just asking for a simple build system which
| promotes git tags, writes database migration scripts, etc.?
| From my perspective, it should be easier than ever to use a
| "work" workflow for side projects, where code is being written
| to PR's, which could optionally be reviewed or even just auto
| approved as a historical record of changes, and use a trunk-
| based development workflow with simple CI/CD systems - all of
| which could even be a cookie cutter template/scaffolding to be
| reused on every project. Doesn't it make sense now more than
| ever to do something like that for every project?
| latexr wrote:
| > I'm sorry but people who let an agent run on prod deserve
| what they get.
|
| The problem is that whatever consequences come of it won't
| affect just them. You don't really have any way of knowing if
| any service you use or depend on has developers running LLMs in
| production. One day not too far off in the future, people who
| don't even like or use LLMs will be bitten hard by those who
| do.
| rglover wrote:
| How does Claude Code compare to just using a Sonnet/Opus model
| with Cline? Imagine the results have to be fairly similar?
| vibecoding-grft wrote:
| I've found Claude's CLI to be the best of what I've tried. I've
| moved away from cursor and found myself in a much better
| programming headspace wherein I can "toggle" this AI-enabled
| mode. It has to be a more mindful approach to when/how I use AI
| in my day-to-day work instead of it being a temptation to "AI"
| some of the work away in the Cursor IDE.
| g42gregory wrote:
| I read the section "Hitting a snag: the model builders are also
| the police now".
|
| It absolutely boggles my mind how anybody thinks that this is Ok?
|
| Unless you are in North Korea, of course.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| As I understood it, the AI company is trying to prevent itself
| and its customers from engaging in (probably unintentional, but
| any) criminal activity.
|
| When the AI company is "policing" your agent by requiring a
| "human in the loop", it's just CYA (cover your ass) for the AI
| company.
|
| If your agent goes off and does something illegal, the AI
| company would be liable _unless_ they have some legal
| deniability. By requiring _you_ the human account owner to
| sign-off on what your agent is doing, _you_ become liable for
| any crimes your agent commits on your behalf. I haven 't read
| their TOS but I can guarantee there is some clause like this in
| there.
|
| You are still _completely free to commit crimes_ with your
| agent and suffer whatever legal consequences follow!! You just
| have to be clear that you intentionally wanted those actions to
| occur which resulted in the crime. If you repeatedly allow your
| agents to take actions that could potentially be criminal
| without any human-in-the-loop, they 're going to ban you
| because it exposes themselves to potential criminal charges.
| nickradford wrote:
| I'm curious what the prompt is you used for the poster background
| generation. I really like the soft illustrated feel for the
| images I got back
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Fine make me spill all my secrets then xD
| system_instructions = """You will generate an image. The image
| will be used as the background of a poster, so keep it muted
| and not too detailed so text can still easily be seen on top.
| The actual poster elements like margin etc will be handled
| separately so just generate a normal image that works well in
| A4 ratio and that works well as a background."""
| full_prompt = f"{system_instructions}\n\nGenerate a background
| image for an A4 poster with the following description:
| {prompt}" openai_request = {
| 'model': 'gpt-4.1-mini', 'input':
| full_prompt, 'tools': [{
| 'type': 'image_generation', 'size':
| '1024x1536', 'quality': 'medium'
| }] } # Make request to
| OpenAI response_data =
| self.call_openai_api('/v1/responses', openai_request)
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| All this AI coding stuff is scaring the shit out of me. a few
| months ago my team were hiring for a new engineer. of the 9
| candidates we ran technical interviews with, only two could work
| without the ai. The rest literally just vibe coded their way
| though the app. as soon as it was taken away, they couldn't even
| write a basic sql query in ecto (we're a phoenix app). when
| questioned about tradeoffs inherent in the ai generated
| implementation, all but one was completely in the dark.
| danielbln wrote:
| Now take Google away, and LSP. And the computer. Write CTEs
| with a pencil or bust.
|
| I'm exaggerating of ourse, and I hear what you're saying, but
| I'd rather hire someone who is really really good at squeezing
| the most out of current day AI (read: not vibe coding slop)
| than someone who can do the work manually without assistance or
| fizz buzz on a whiteboard.
| dnoberon wrote:
| I think the point is how can you squeeze anything out of the
| AI without knowing the stuff at a deep enough level?
| instig007 wrote:
| > I'd rather hire someone [...] than someone who can do the
| work manually without assistance or fizz buzz on a whiteboard
|
| and the reason for you to do that would be to punish the
| remaining bits of competence in the name of "the current
| thing"? What's your strategy?
| timeon wrote:
| Used to write Perl scripts with pencil while waiting at the
| airport.
| christophilus wrote:
| And then later, when you couldn't read your own
| handwriting, you said, "This damn thing is illegible-- so
| it's probably valid Perl."
| runako wrote:
| > couldn't even write a basic sql query
|
| Not the point at all, but I have found it quite common among
| younger professional engineers to not know SQL at all. A
| combination of specialization (e.g. only work on microservices
| that do not directly touch a database) and NoSQL has made the
| skill of SQL more obscure than I would have thought possible as
| recently as 5 years ago.
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| I started to notice this in a big way at my last job which I
| started in 2013. We were a rails shop and by about 2016 I was
| noticing most new hires would have no idea how to write a SQL
| query.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > most new hires would have no idea how to write a SQL
| query.
|
| probably why people think rails is slow. our integration
| partners and our customers are constantly amazed by how
| fast and efficient our system is. The secret is I know how
| to write a damn query. you can push a lot of logic that
| would otherwise be done in the api layer into a query. if
| done properly with the right indexes, its going to be WAY
| faster than pulling the data into the api server and doing
| clumsy data transformations there.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| You actually confirmed that rails is slow if the
| optimization is on the database server and doing data
| mangling in ruby is less efficient
| richwater wrote:
| You've correctly identified that filtering a list is
| slower than looking up from an index. Congratulations.
| ggregoire wrote:
| That's so weird to me, SQL is the very first language they
| taught me in college 20 years ago, before even learning how
| to write a for loop in pseudo code. Nowadays it's still the
| language I use the most on a daily basis. I guess it depends
| of people's line of work.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Same. One candidate out of 6.
|
| I use claude code quite liberally, but I very often tell it why
| I won't accept it's changes and why; sometimes I just do it
| myself if it doesn't "get it".
| pryelluw wrote:
| This was my experience prior to any of the llm tools. It's hard
| to find people with all around knowledge. Plus someone good in
| one context is awful in another. Your hiring process should
| find people who are a good fit and not look for people with
| just certain technical skills. The basics of SQL can be learned
| quickly. Fit cannot be learned.
| lvl155 wrote:
| AI can also help you learn new things much faster. It's just a
| tool.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| I'd say "Learn the wrong things much faster". But I'd
| actually argue that learning isn't a fast process, it's
| rather a very slow journey, takes time and dedication to
| master deep knowledge. You won't learn anything that will
| stay with llms, if they got the output correct
| ramoz wrote:
| I've learned that I also need Gemini 2.5 and long context.
| cloudking wrote:
| Claude Code has very reliable tool calls, that's why I'm using
| it.
|
| Tried Cursor, Windsurf and always ran into tool failures, edit
| failures etc.
| throwaway-11-1 wrote:
| "ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its
| functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look
| really bad? I understand that more than anything engineers
| believe having to spend money on design is a total waste, but
| none of this is pleasing or balanced at all
| Hrun0 wrote:
| > "ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its
| functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look
| really bad?
|
| I agree that it's bad. What I noticed using AI was that it
| tends to introduce gradients whenever you want to make
| something look nice. Whenever I see a gradient now I
| immediately assume that it was designed with AI
| weego wrote:
| It's really bad if you value design as a primary part of your
| business language. If not then it's fine.
|
| For example, AI could produce Graphanas design standards, which
| is fine for the audience.
| mccoyb wrote:
| Just from personal experience, visual design is the task with
| the worst outcomes for Claude Code (w/ latest Opus 4.1, etc).
|
| It truly cannot reason well yet about geometry, visual
| aesthetics, placement, etc. The performance varies: it's quite
| good at matplotlib but terrible at any non-trivial LaTeX / TikZ
| layout or graphic. Why? Not a clear idea yet -- would love to
| think more about it.
|
| I've tried many things now to try and give it eyes (via text),
| and this is unavoidably a place where things are ... rough ...
| right now.
|
| I've had bad results with image screenshotting. More often than
| not, it has no idea what it is looking at -- won't even
| summarize the image correctly -- or will give me an incorrect
| take "Yes indeed we fixed the problem as you can tell by <this
| part of the UI> and <that part of the UI>" which is wrong.
|
| I typically have to come in and make a bunch of fine-grained
| changes to get something visually appealing. I'm sure at some
| point we'll have a system which can go all the way, and I'd be
| excited to find approaches to this problem.
|
| Note -- tasks which involve visual design which I've run into
| diminishing returns: * proper academic figures (had a good
| laugh at the GPT 5 announcement issues) * video game UI /
| assets * UI design for IDEs * Responsive web design for chat-
| based interfaces
|
| All of these feel like "pelican" tasks -- they enter into a
| valley which can't be effectively communicated via textual
| feedback yet ...
| mccoyb wrote:
| Just reflecting on my own comment -- what one might want is
| an automated layout system with a simple "natural
| language"-like API (perhaps similar to Penrose, although it's
| been awhile since I looked at that project).
|
| Hardened and long use systems like TikZ of course, do have
| something like this -- but in complex TikZ graphics, you end
| up with a mixture of "right of" and "left of" (etc) and low-
| level manual specification, which I think tends to fall into
| the zone of issues.
| alecco wrote:
| > I had some issues getting it to understand that it wasn't meant
| to terminate, so I instead told it to write a basic bash script
| that calls claude with the -p flag and "please continue" whenever
| it detects its not running.
|
| This is why we can't have nice things. Anthropic is placing more
| restrictive limits and now you risk being locked out for hours if
| you need to use it a bit more than usual (e.g. you have an
| impending deadline or presentation).
|
| I wish Anthropic just banned these abusive accounts instead of
| placing draconian (and fuzzy) limits. The other day there was an
| idiot YouTube streamer actively looking to hit limits with as
| many concurrent Claude Code sessions as he could, doing nonsense
| projects.
| mccoyb wrote:
| I believe these are fundamentally two different types of abuse
| -- the OP is engaging in a significantly less harmful version
| ... the seriously harmful version is the account sharing /
| massively concurrent one which abuses whatever holes exist in
| the streaming API to allow Claude to "complete the completion
| and then stop because of limit" (which I think is there to make
| the UX better)
|
| Just letting a single instance run all the time ... is not that
| bad, seriously.
| darqis wrote:
| I think there's been enough free ad posts for this
| varispeed wrote:
| This looks like absolute nightmare. I cannot work in console like
| this.
| SuperSandro2000 wrote:
| Fuck claude! They DDoS'ed my infra until I completely banned
| them!
| prmph wrote:
| > Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions',
| even on important resources like your production server and your
| main dev machine.
|
| Wow, the danger is not so much from Claude Code itself, but that
| it might download a package that will do nasty things on your
| machine when executed.
| serf wrote:
| Being on day 4 of being ignored _entirely_ by CSRs from Anthropic
| after 5 months of paying for Max x20 has put a sufficiently bad
| taste in my mouth that it has killed all of my previous Claude
| Code cheer-leading efforts.
|
| Sure, go have fun with the new software -- but for godsake don't
| actually depend on a company that can't bother to reply to you.
| Even Amazon replies.
| elliotec wrote:
| I had a problem with signing up for max with the wrong email,
| then thinking I didn't actually do it, so I signed up with the
| one I wanted.
|
| Saw the double bill and contacted them, I had a full refund in
| a couple days and a nice personal note thanking me for being a
| max user.
|
| This was a couple months ago so it's possible they've had a
| huge influx of requests that made it difficult to respond fast
| lately but I had a good experience with their customer service.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| Feels like the word "all" is pulling a lot of weight in that
| sentence, it's not cheap and you're forever reliant on a company
| to keep providing the service (which has already changed recently
| I think, seem to remember something about harsher rate limiting
| being put in place). "All you need" typically implies that you
| don't need much (eg "The terminal is all you need"), and Claude
| Code isn't that.
|
| Otherwise good article, I'm still not sure vibe coding is for me
| and at the price, it's hard to justify trying to out, but things
| like this do make me a little more tempted to give it a shot. I
| doubt it'd ever replace writing code by hand for me, but could be
| fun for prototyping I suppose
| umvi wrote:
| Too bad Claude Code doesn't have a fixed cost plan for teams. The
| API is super expensive (I can easily spend $6-10 in a single
| sitting in tokens)
| howToTestFE wrote:
| I wonder what it will be like in 5-10 years time to look back at
| this sort of time, as we start to figure out the next way to
| code...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-11 23:00 UTC)