I think the existing comments already cover it most, also, I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best. It is quite insane to me to expect someone who just started to fully build google.com and all of it's infra,security,etc.

▲ bluefirebrand 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best.

Maybe, but the world seems to be inviting this comparison by acting as though they are going to disrupt and replace the established experienced coders

The judgement and pushback is pretty warranted

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reverius42 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's a little more nuanced than this. Claude can't actually replace an experienced coder, but in two steps:

1. Claude makes every experienced coder more productive, 2. The industry decides to hire fewer experienced coders to get the same level of productivity,

We have now accomplished putting some large percentage of experienced coders out of work without actually replicating what they do.

It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software.

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Ekaros 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I have long questioned the mantra that software needs more investments or even produce positive returns when it gets it. Just look at what many of these big companies with untold resources and investments have actually produced in recent years... Maybe cost optimisation and freeing up capital for something else is the correct move.

	▲	tonyedgecombe 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I like to think of the Facebook iOS app which had 18,000 classes in it. It was so large that it couldn't be loaded into Xcode. Imagine if those programmers had Claude back then, they could have produced ten times as much code.

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bluefirebrand 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software

It's almost like they don't actually believe (or care if) it is increasing productivity and are just using it as an excuse to cut costs

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reverius42 3 days ago | parent [-]

Still doesn't make sense to me then, even ignoring AI -- why are they cutting costs while making record revenues and profits?

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coldtea 2 days ago | parent [-]

Because they're seeing the writing on the wall - the economic is going to shit.

Their "record revenues and profits" just come from squeezing their customers, already at breaking point, to the max, to just move the needle in the stock market. They know this is not sustainable at all.

	▲	reverius42 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Isn't the assumption of overall economic growth kind of load bearing for capitalism? What happens when the whole economy starts planning for contraction instead?

▲ ting0 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're right that there are a new group of coders that are coming in, which is opening its own new can of worms. However, even experienced coders are still producing slop. The difference between slop and quality seems to be how much you baby the LLM, carefully pay attention to its outputs and its behavior, and stringently test everything produced. The more auto-pilot, the worse the result. The larger the code-base, the worse the result. LLMs are death by a thousand cuts unless you take the effort to manually comb through and remove the tech debt at checkpoints.

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reverius42 3 days ago | parent [-]

My mental model of "Claude is a 19 year old intern who never gets tired but is very overconfident" never fails.

Would you hand off some of your well defined tasks to your diligent 19 year old intern? Sure! Would you check their work? Of course!

Would you hand off all of a major tech company to be entirely built by interns? Of course not!

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tonyedgecombe 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord:

I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

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andrei_says_ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Stupid but industrious and prolific. Also very confident.

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estimator7292 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sounds exactly like every 19 year old programmer. I'd describe myself at 19 in exactly the same way

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reverius42 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But still more skilled at the creation of software, from a well scoped natural language description, than perhaps 99% of humans.

	▲	andrei_says_ a day ago \| parent [-]
		My dentist is more skilled at dentistry than 99.999% of humans. Why would I want to replace her with a machine which is more skilled than 99% of non dentists but 1000 times worse by an educated experienced dentist?

▲ tharkun__ 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

    I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best

Nyes. I think what we're doing is that these new guys are coming in and using AI and trying to tell us how super awesome and powerful they are because of AI and that nothing could ever go wrong.

    It is quite insane to me to expect someone who just started to fully build google.com and all of it's infra,security,etc.

But it's not us expecting them to do it. It's them telling us they can do it coz they have AI.

Look, I've been using Claude and Codex agents for about 6 months now, full time for coding (when I code) essentially (coz I can't ask my people to use a tool I have no experience with myself, so I purposefully forced myself to use the agent and only the agents as much as I could bear, only resolving to manual changes in very very few instances. And there have been many many frustrations, believe me).

The amount of times that even Seniors have just verbatim pasted Claude analyses as truth to me, when it was apparent after the first read through of the output, that it wasn't true is amazing. How we expect juniors that have way less developed "spidey senses" to successfully navigate that is beyond me. Most people are trusting by default. They shouldn't be, but it's human nature for most of us. For some it isn't, like myself. I'm already the dude that asks too many questions of humans when they're not clear on what they assumed vs. have verified.

Like, example, I showed an analysis, full page in a slack thread recently to one of my Seniors (made by some other Senior) and tell me where they think it shows that it's BS and not true. He couldn't do it. He tried over and over and he was unable to. I read it and the second paragraph out of lots of them was BS and just not true. Easy to verify. Claude didn't have access to the actual information (because of various circumstances) but just made something up. Said the relevant code was deployed, thus XYZ was true. Listed lots of extra analysis after that, which sounded reasonable and probably was, if the premise was correct. Just it wasn't. The code had never been released at that point.

I've been doing the same kind of "spidey senses are tingling" comments and questions back to people for lots and lots of years. And others are usually not good with that sort of thing (exceptions prove the rule). Coz people do the same kind of "BS-ing" that Claude et. al. do. Claude is generally "better" about questioning his/her (yes, it works both ways) judgement actually than people, which in many cases have feelings attached to their investigations (even if they very blatantly didn't check something and just assumed it - pre AI - all by themselves).