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Claude Code now supports hooks

(docs.anthropic.com)
381 points ramoz | 48 comments | | HN request time: 2.104s | source | bottom
1. mkagenius ◴[] No.44431021[source]
As an aside, people say AI will eliminate coding jobs, but then who will configure these hooks? Or think about adding such a feature?

These kinds of tooling and related work will still be there unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this and announces this to all other AI entities and they also implement it properly etc.

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2. mrmincent ◴[] No.44431095[source]
To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools.

You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.

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3. ◴[] No.44431164[source]
4. forgotoldacc ◴[] No.44431379[source]
And we may get an ugly transitory period where a lot of programs go from being clearly hand made with some degree of care and some fine details that show the developer's craftsmanship, to awful prefab and brutalist software that feels inhuman, mass-produced, and nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough.

People go to museums to admire old hand-carved furniture and travel to cities to admire the architecture of centuries past made with hand-chiseled blocks. While power tools do let people make things of equal quality faster, they're instead generally used to make things of worse quality much, much faster and the field has gone from being a craft to simply being an assembly line job. As bad as software is today, we're likely to hit even deeper lows and people will miss the days where Electron apps are good compared to what's yet to come.

There's already been one step in this direction with the Cambrian extinction of 90s/early 2000s software. People still talk about how soulful Winamp/old Windows Media Player/ZSNES/etc were.

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5. energy123 ◴[] No.44431454[source]
If programmers become 10x more productive but demand only grows by 5x, what will happen?
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6. wastewastewaste ◴[] No.44431583[source]
Yea man, people say combine harvesters will eliminate agriculture jobs, but then who will operate these combine harvesters? Obviously every single manual farm laborer will just switch to being an operator of those.

God, will we never move this discussion past this worthless argument? What value would there be in any of these automatization tools, be in in agriculture or AI, if it just made every single worker switch to being an [automatization tool] operator?

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7. jonathanstrange ◴[] No.44431643[source]
> unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this

The #1 goal of every AI company is to create an AI that is capable of programming and improving itself to create the next, more powerful AI. Of course, these kind of configuration jobs will be outsourced to AI as soon as possible, too.

8. falcor84 ◴[] No.44431792[source]
Like in the story about cosmologist and the old lady, you seem to be asking "What is the AI standing on?", and the reply here is of course "You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's AIs all the way down!"

Many already let Claude Code update its own CLAUDE.md, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't (dangerously-skipping-permissions) let it edit its own hooks. And as in Jurassic Park, the question of whether we should seems to be left by the wayside.

9. nikita2206 ◴[] No.44431797[source]
You can already ask Claude Code to modify its own settings
10. falcor84 ◴[] No.44431811[source]
Obviously there will still be as many programmers, each working 2.5 days a week. </wishful-thinking>
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11. ath92 ◴[] No.44431813[source]
Barring population growth, there is essentially fixed demand for agriculture. For software we don’t know what the market will look like once everything about making it gets automated. Either we will churn out the same amount of software with fewer people, or the same amount of people will churn out larger amounts of software. Or maybe there will be even more people working on creating enormous amounts of software. I’d say the likely answer is somewhere between the first and second option, but time will tell.
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12. yoavm ◴[] No.44431895[source]
I generally agree that "we" will still be needed, but OTOH, who needs prettier if no human is ever going to read the code?
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13. torginus ◴[] No.44432024{3}[source]
I kinda feel differently - it's more like how nowadays you have access to high-quality power tools at cheap prices, and tons of tutorials on Youtube that teach you how to do woodworking, and even if you can't afford the masterwork furniture made by craftsmen, you don't have to buy the shitty mass produced stuff - sure yours won't be as good, but it will be made to your spec.

Moving on into a concrete software example, thanks to AI productivity, we replaced a lot of expensive and crappy subscription SaaS software with our homegrown stuff. Our stuff is probably 100x simpler (everyone knows the pain of making box software for a diverse set of customer needs, everything needs to be configurable, which leads to crazy convoluted code, and a lot of it). It's also much better and cheaper to run, to say nothing of the money we save by not paying the exorbitant subscription fee.

I suspect the biggest losers of the AI revolution will be the SaaS companies whose value proposition was: Yes you can use open source for this, but the extra cost of an engineer who maintains this is more than we charge.

As for bespoke software, 'slop' software using Electron, or Unity in video games exists because people believe in the convenience of using these huge lumbering monoliths that come with a ton of baggage, while they were taught the creed that coding to the metal is too hard.

LLMs can help with that, and show people that they can do bespoke from scratch (and more importantly teach people how to do that). Claude/o3/whatever can probably help you build a game in WebGL you thought you needed a game engine for.

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14. pjmlp ◴[] No.44432029[source]
Except that for most people this is not coding, is administration work, DevOps kind of stuff.

I already do lots of "coding" in SaaS products, that have very little to do with what most HNers think of proper coding.

15. pjmlp ◴[] No.44432038[source]
Only a few lucky ones will get the operator jobs, everyone else will queue at the job center.
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16. konart ◴[] No.44432083{3}[source]
>nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough.

This is true for most of the software these days (except for professional software like Photoshop and the like) without LLMs.

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17. forgotoldacc ◴[] No.44432111{4}[source]
Hence the transitory period.

We went through decades of absolutely hideous slop, and now people are yearning for the past and learning how to make things that are aesthetically appealing, like the things that used to be common.

I think we're looking at at least a decade of absolute garbage coming up because it's cheap to make, and people like things that are cheap in the short term. Then people will look back at when software was "good", and use new tools to make things that were as good as they were before.

And not limited to AI and power tools, it happened with art as well. Great art was made with oil paints, watercolors, and brushes. Then digital painting and Photoshop came around and we had a long period of absolute messes on DeviantArt and a lot of knowledge of good color usage and blending was basically lost, but art was produced much faster. Now digital artists are learning traditional methods and combining it with modern technology to make digital art that can be produced faster than traditional art, but with quality that's just as good.

2005 digital paintings have a distinct, and even in the hands of great artists, very sloppy and amateurish feel. Meanwhile 2020s digital artists easily rival the greats of decades and centuries past.

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18. floriferous ◴[] No.44432772[source]
Great metaphor, exactly how it feels to me too!
19. trainerxr50 ◴[] No.44432776{4}[source]
Exactly. As a non-software engineer, people talk about software as some fine art on here while my experience as a user is that most software basically sucks in one way or another.
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20. conception ◴[] No.44433100[source]
Feels more like photography. Everyone will “soon” have a tool that lets you take pretty great photos - surpassing professional of thirty years ago.

If you want professional work done you’ll still hire someone but that person will also use a lot of professional grade computer tooling with it.

But there definitely won’t be as many jobs as before - especially on the low skill end.

21. rolisz ◴[] No.44433341{3}[source]
I think it's going to go the opposite way: we'll get a lot more custom made software, that fits exactly what a small customer needs. The code might be utter crap, the design might not be award winning, but it will be custom made to a degree that you can't customize your average Savas.
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22. rustyboy ◴[] No.44433561{4}[source]
Amen - As a SWE and i've come to realize that no one pays for me to treat code as craftman quality so I don't. The whole agile mindset is get something out that demonstrates value and fix it things while you go. And in ten years i've also realized that my ability to sit down and make something really special the first time through is - shit. This is the first time i've been able to meet timelines while still producing a better product.
23. otterley ◴[] No.44435426[source]
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb.
24. bluefirebrand ◴[] No.44435455{4}[source]
This was the promise of "no code" / "low code" solutions in the past

It has never worked in the past, I'm not entirely convinced that it will work now

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25. yes_man ◴[] No.44436159{3}[source]
If software becomes cheaper to make it’s not like every IT company in the world is running a cartel where they agree to just cut costs and leave the output the same. Someone will come and smash the competition with more or better features and the ones who didn’t invest into development will face pressure to acquire more talent again.

There really isn’t a diminishing return on executing great ideas. Almost all software projects have an essentially endless backlog of items that could be done. So I think it will be between 2. and 3. with people who really understand how software is built being even more in demand than ever since they act as multipliers in making sure the increased output is evolvable and maintainable.

26. danielbln ◴[] No.44436257{3}[source]
Save people, not jobs. Alas, the powers that be prevent that.
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27. voiper1 ◴[] No.44436262{4}[source]
But "utter crap" isn't just an aesthetic issue - that can mean all kinds of bugs and malfunctions!
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28. danielbln ◴[] No.44436351{5}[source]
Don't talk about AI with those digital artists though, they will slaughter you for it. The discourse on GenAI in the digital art world (and gaming world, for that matter) has reached an absolutely deranged fever pitch that far outpaces the original valid points about copyright, compensation and intent that were there before. Now it's just screeching.
29. isoprophlex ◴[] No.44436514{5}[source]
And infinite job security for those who know how to turn on a debugger
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30. ◴[] No.44436547{4}[source]
31. himeexcelanta ◴[] No.44436582{5}[source]
Agreed. Trying to live in a high level of abstraction without understanding the components of the system will cause the project to fail after a certain point.
32. pjmlp ◴[] No.44436709{4}[source]
As seen in many countries, people without jobs don't have much of to live from, unless they are lucky ones living at the beach profiting from shares, driven by endless exponential growth demands.
33. txs ◴[] No.44436803{6}[source]
Or people will just throw the product away and buy a replacement because it’s cheaper than fixing it, much like we no longer mend clothes
34. bluefirebrand ◴[] No.44436919{3}[source]
And surely each programmer will still earn just as much income but only work half as much
35. pseudosavant ◴[] No.44436967{4}[source]
I think the kind of people, who in the past constructed extremely useful (if brittle) solutions with Excel, will be creating all sorts of AI bespoke and very useful tools.

It won't bother them at all what the code looks like under the hood. Not that the code will look worse that what an "average" developer produces. Claude and ChatGPT both write better code than most of the existing code I usually look at.

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36. Quarrelsome ◴[] No.44437085[source]
in my experience software demand never slows, its just priced out. Remember a decade ago we were developing a lot slower due to hardware constraints and other things, now we develop much faster but the features we develop are more complex and there are more of them.

I'm not convinced there is a limiter on software demand as it seems to grow alongside development speed. We all have huge backlogs in any non-trivial system.

37. paulddraper ◴[] No.44438130[source]
> people say AI will eliminate coding jobs

Yes.

> then who will configure these hooks?

It will also create jobs.

> unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this and announces this to all other AI entities and they also implement it properly

Also yes.

---

People think that technology is some sort of binary less jobs/more jobs thing.

Technology eliminates some jobs and creates others.

38. Zopieux ◴[] No.44438964{5}[source]
Beautifully formatted, exquisitely incorrect code that provides the simulacra of a feature on the happy path and subtly fails in all other scenarios with hard to detect, impossible to debug errors. Can't wait (it's already there to be honest).
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39. pseudosavant ◴[] No.44439108{6}[source]
Better than poorly formatted code, making basic mistakes like SQL query string concatenation, from someone who didn't bother to write any tests. You just have to treat it like code you got from someone else. It would be hard for AI to produce more magical errors that are harder to debug than what humans write. LLMs are one of the best debugging tools out there too.
40. oldsecondhand ◴[] No.44439844[source]
How can you do quality assurance on code no one can understand?
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41. mstipetic ◴[] No.44440590{4}[source]
Yeah and then you’ll get hundreds of slightly different protocols formats and standards and nothing will talk to each other anymore without bespoke integration
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42. steve_adams_86 ◴[] No.44441013[source]
I like this metaphor because power tools didn’t lead to more sophisticated craftspeople despite the increase in efficiency and potential. I think it will be the same with code. More outputs, not necessarily more refined or better in any way, but not innately bad either.
43. steve_adams_86 ◴[] No.44441033{5}[source]
Your experience is a perfect reflection of reality. Most software is not well done.

In trades I found people were very opinionated about the Right Way to do things, but we tended to cut corners constantly there as well. People who work in a craft seem to like the idea of doing things right more than they actually do things right in practice. We end up with gaps in our flooring, ugly solder joints in our plumbing, creaking decks, cracked concrete, and a cookie disclaimer that returns every time you refresh the page.

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44. 1dom ◴[] No.44441474{6}[source]
> In trades I found people were very opinionated about the Right Way to do things,

My experience of moving from tech to doing a lot of home renovations and dealing with hundreds of trades people is that it was just like tech. 90% of people in 90% of environments are just trying to make it work so they can collect their pay-cheque and go home.

High quality output in any domain is a result of stumbling across the 10% of genuinely passionate people, and creating the 10% environment for them to want to be passionate in. If you don't luck out with that, everything will still work, it'll just be a bit rough round the edges.

45. lambdaba ◴[] No.44441571[source]
No one can tell what the exact multipliers are, but history has shown us that what happens is everyone gets richer.
46. SkepticalWhale ◴[] No.44448490[source]
Great analogy.

Although I still wonder how long we're in this phase and how ubiquitous it will be, because didn't power tools coincide with improved automation in factories eliminating manufacturing jobs?

47. Lord_Zero ◴[] No.44451091{3}[source]
You just have AI do the QA.
48. rolisz ◴[] No.44452376{5}[source]
LLMs can do that integration :)