Using an AI is still like hiring someone to do programming work for you. It's going to cost money. Why would you waste money? We have sewing machines, but you don't make all your own clothes do you?

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rtp4me a day ago | parent [-]

If the cost of the raw materials and worker were less than the price tag at the store, sure, I would probably opt to make my own clothes. They would fit me perfectly, and I can get the right shade of blue instead of bluish.

In the case of AI, Claude costs $100 or $200/mo for really good coding tasks. This is much less expensive than hiring someone to do the same thing for me.

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conartist6 a day ago | parent [-]

That sounds like a nice hobby.

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rtp4me a day ago | parent [-]

Which part is the hobby? Clothes making or using Claude to generate real production code?

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conartist6 a day ago | parent [-]

Both. I would note that "real production code" is not necessarily a high bar. For example it does not rule out gross negligence. Most of the companies that outsource their thinking and working to Claude will die of it.

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rtp4me a day ago | parent [-]

I have a different point of view. Claude code is extremely good at creating and maintaining solid, everyday code including Ansible playbooks (used in production), creating custom dev/ops scripts for managing servers (again, used in production), creating Grafana dashboards (again, production), comparing database performance between nodes, etc. Just because a person did not hand-write this code does not make it any less production ready. In fact, Claude reviewed our current Ansible code base and already highlighted a few errors (the files written by hand). Plus, we get the benefit of having Claude write and execute test plans for each version we create. Well worth the $100/mo we pay.

And to your note that real production code is not necessarily a high bar, what is "real production code"? Does it need to be 10,000 lines of complex C/rust code spread across a vast directory structure that requires human-level thinking to be production ready? What about smaller code bases that do one thing really well?

Honestly, I think many coders here on HN dismiss the smaller, more focused projects when in reality they are equally important as the large, "real" production projects. Are these considered non-production because the code was not written by hand?

	▲	conartist6 a day ago \| parent [-]
		All it sounds like to me is that Ansible is production-ready, Grafana is production ready, the compilers and runtimes you're using are production-ready. Each of those things is a mountain of complexity compared to the molehill of writing a single script. If you're standing on top of a molehill on top of a mountain, it's not the molehill that's got your head in the clouds.