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The highest quality codebase

(gricha.dev)
559 points Gricha | 11 comments | 08 Dec 25 21:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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xnorswap ◴[11 Dec 25 16:02 UTC] No.46233056[source]▶
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems.

"Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

"Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest.

It suggested enthusiastically a library for <work domain> and it was all "Recommended" about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because <issue>, it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable.

There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well.

That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems.

But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

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pdntspa ◴[11 Dec 25 16:23 UTC] No.46233365[source]▶
That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code.

I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the style principles articulated in its AGENTS.md file. (As it tends to forget a lot of rules like DRY)

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FeteCommuniste ◴[11 Dec 25 16:28 UTC] No.46233448[source]▶
Maybe I'm weird but I enjoy "actually writing the code."
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pdntspa ◴[11 Dec 25 16:30 UTC] No.46233475[source]▶
Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!"

Claude writing code gets the same output if not better in about 1/10 of the time.

That's where you realize that the writing code bits are just one small part of the overall picture. One that I realize I could do without.

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1. tayo42 ◴[11 Dec 25 16:41 UTC] No.46233646[source]▶
How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?
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2. saulpw ◴[11 Dec 25 16:51 UTC] No.46233779[source]▶
Typescript on the frontend, Python on the backend, SQL for the database, bash for CI. This isn't even counting HTML/CSS or the YAML config.
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3. tomgp ◴[11 Dec 25 16:53 UTC] No.46233805[source]▶
HTML, CSS, Javascript?
4. pdntspa ◴[11 Dec 25 17:11 UTC] No.46234062[source]▶
Oh my sweet summer child...
5. merely-unlikely ◴[11 Dec 25 17:21 UTC] No.46234205[source]▶
Recently I've been experimenting with using multiple languages in some projects where certain components have a far better ecosystem in one language but the majority of the project is easier to write in a different one.

For example, I often find Python has very mature and comprehensive packages for a specific need I have, but it is a poor language for the larger project (I also just hate writing Python). So I'll often put the component behind a http server and communicate that way. Or in other cases I've used Rust for working with WASAPI and win32 which has some good crates for it, but the ecosystem is a lot less mature elsewhere.

I used to prefer reinventing the wheel in the primary project language, but I wasted so much time doing that. The tradeoff is the project structure gets a lot more complicated, but it's also a lot faster to iterate.

Plus your usual html/css/js on the frontend and something else on the backend, plus SQL.

6. tayo42 ◴[11 Dec 25 17:25 UTC] No.46234255[source]▶
I wouldn't call html, yaml or css languages.

Same for sql, do you really context switch between sql and other code that frequently?

Everyone should stop using bash, especially if you have a scripting language you can use already.

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7. pdntspa ◴[11 Dec 25 17:36 UTC] No.46234416{3}[source]▶
Dude have you even written any hardcore SQL? plpgSQL is very much a turing-complete language
8. zelphirkalt ◴[11 Dec 25 19:02 UTC] No.46235592[source]▶
3 or 4 can very easily accumulate. For example: HTML, CSS as must know, plus some JS/TS (actually that's 2 langs!) for sprinkles of interactivity, backend in any proper backend language. Oh wait, there is a fifth language, SQL, because we need to access the database. Ah and those few shell scripts we need? Someone's gotta write those too. They may not always be full programming languages, but languages they are, and one needs to know them.
9. wosat ◴[11 Dec 25 19:43 UTC] No.46236172{3}[source]▶
Sorry for being pedantic, but what does the "L" stand for in HTML, YAML, SQL? They may not be "programming languages" or, in the case of SQL, a "general purpose programming language", but they are indeed languages.
10. jessoteric ◴[11 Dec 25 20:18 UTC] No.46236589[source]▶
i find it's pretty rare to have a project that only consists of one or two languages, over a certain complexity/feature threshold
11. theshrike79 ◴[11 Dec 25 20:49 UTC] No.46236949[source]▶
Go for the backend, something javascripty for the front end. You're already at two. Depending if you count HTML, CSS or SQL as "languages", you're up to a half dozen pretty quick.