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A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

(www.sanity.io)
548 points kmelve | 15 comments | 02 Sep 25 19:34 UTC | HN request time: 1.574s | source | bottom
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spicyusername ◴[03 Sep 25 11:41 UTC] No.45114584[source]▶
I guess we're just going to be in the age of this conversation topic until everyone gets tired of talking about it.

Every one of these discussions boils down to the following:

- LLMs are not good at writing code on their own unless it's extremely simple or boilerplate

- LLMs can be good at helping you debug existing code

- LLMs can be good at brainstorming solutions to new problems

- The code that is written by LLMs always needs to be heavily monitored for correctness, style, and design, and then typically edited down, often to at least half its original size

- LLMs utility is high enough that it is now going to be a standard tool in the toolbox of every software engineer, but it is definitely not replacing anyone at current capability.

- New software engineers are going to suffer the most because they know how to edit the responses the least, but this was true when they wrote their own code with stack overflow.

- At senior level, sometimes using LLMs is going to save you a ton of time and sometimes it's going to waste your time. Net-net, it's probably positive, but there are definitely some horrible days where you spend too long going back and forth, when you should have just tried to solve the problem yourself.

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1. chamomeal ◴[03 Sep 25 12:42 UTC] No.45115041[source]▶
Yeah every time I see one of these articles posted on HN I know I'll see a bunch of comments like "well here's how I use claude code: I keep it on a tight leash and have short feedback loops, so that I'm still the driver, and have markdown files that explain the style I'm going for...". Which is fine lol but I'm tired of seeing the exact same conversations.

It's exhausting to hear about AI all the time but it's fun to watch history happen. In a decade we'll look back at all these convos and remember how wild of a time it was to be a programmer.

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2. red-iron-pine ◴[03 Sep 25 13:43 UTC] No.45115710[source]▶
> Which is fine lol but I'm tired of seeing the exact same conversations.

makes me think the bots are providing these conversations

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3. coldpie ◴[03 Sep 25 13:44 UTC] No.45115721[source]▶
I'm thiiiis close to writing a Firefox extension that auto-hides any HN headline with an LLM/AI-related keyword in the title, just so I can find something interesting on here again.
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4. ezekg ◴[03 Sep 25 14:07 UTC] No.45115993[source]▶
We're definitely moving full force into a dead internet [0], I think.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

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5. spaceman_2020 ◴[03 Sep 25 14:15 UTC] No.45116079{3}[source]▶
LinkedIn and Twitter are the canaries. Text based content is already so easy to produce at scale that there’s no utility in creating it manually
6. codyb ◴[03 Sep 25 14:22 UTC] No.45116156[source]▶
It comes and goes in cycles... I remember the hay days of MVC frameworks and oh my this one is MVVC! ad nauseum for... years lol.

I stopped coming here for a year or two, now I visit once a day or so and mostly just skim a couple threads.

Eventually, this entire field... just starts to feel pretty cyclical.

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7. icdtea ◴[03 Sep 25 14:57 UTC] No.45116576[source]▶
You can do this with a custom filter list in Ublock Origin, no custom extension necessary.
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8. coldpie ◴[03 Sep 25 15:12 UTC] No.45116756{3}[source]▶
I'm thinking something that would actually use HN's "Hide" feature, so other stories will populate the page after the AI ones are hidden. Is that something uBO could do?
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9. dysoco ◴[03 Sep 25 15:26 UTC] No.45116915[source]▶
I appreciate HN staying simple but a tag system like lobsters has would be pretty nice...
10. ftkftk ◴[03 Sep 25 15:54 UTC] No.45117229[source]▶
You could use an agentic AI coding tool to vibe code you one in minutes! /s
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11. coldpie ◴[03 Sep 25 15:59 UTC] No.45117288{3}[source]▶
Honestly might give that a go, yeah. Brand new, low stakes, throwaway projects are one of the few things these tools are actually genuinely pretty useful for.
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12. icdtea ◴[03 Sep 25 16:50 UTC] No.45117970{4}[source]▶
You make a good point, I don't believe so. I currently block most LLM/AI threads and some pages can get quite sparse. Would love to check that out if you get around to putting that together!
13. ftkftk ◴[03 Sep 25 17:00 UTC] No.45118080{4}[source]▶
I agree. It may not be the most environmentally sensitive approach but throwaway one time tooling is a perfect use case.
14. oblio ◴[03 Sep 25 20:11 UTC] No.45119906{3}[source]▶
Keep in mind that the cycles here are not circles, they're spirals. We <<are>> progressing, it's just very slow to notice.

A bit of proof: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

1. Do you use source control? - I haven't seen a software company without source control in... 2 decades?

2. Can you make a build in one step? - This is a bit tricky, but it super widespread. Maybe not universal, but very widespread.

3. Do you make daily builds? - Same as #2.

4. Do you have a bug database? - Same as #2.

5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? - This is a debatable topic but you could argue that modern bugs are more complex and we are fixing them.

6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? - Heh, some things you just can't win :-p

7. Do you have a spec? - Similar to #6.

8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? - This one is the biggest modern failure, but it's not one of tech.

9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? - Similar to #2.

10. Do you have testers? - We've moved to automated testing. We've lost some flair but we've gained a lot in day-to-day quality.

11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? - Really widespread now, but not universal. Less widespread than having proper build systems.

12. Do you do hallway usability testing? - Varies a lot by field, it used to vary even back in the day.

15. theshrike79 ◴[04 Sep 25 05:53 UTC] No.45123992[source]▶
It's fun to see Vibe Coders discover the basics of project management in real time without ever reading a book :)

That's what programming with LLMs is, it's just project management: You split the tasks into manageable chunks (ones that can be completed in a single context window), you need to have good onboarding documentation (CLAUDE.md or the equivalent) and good easy to access documentation (docs/ with markdown files).

Exactly what you use to manage a team of actual human programmers.