I like llms too, and I think they make me more productive..

but a chart of commits/contribs is such a lousy metric for productivity.

It's about on par with the ridiculousness of LOC implying code quality.

matheusmoreira 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know. Claude helped me implement a ton of features I had been procrastinating for months in a matter of days. I'm implementing features in my project faster than I can blog about them. It definitely manifested as a huge commit spike.

And it's not like I'm blindly commiting LLM output. I often write everything myself because I want to understand what I'm doing. Claude often comments that my version is better and cleaner. It's just that the tasks seemed so monumental I felt paralyzed and had difficulty even starting. Claude broke things down into manageable steps that were easy to do. Having a code review partner was also invaluable for a solo hobbyist like me.

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munk-a 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This right here is the big value I see in LLMs as well. I specifically suffer from analysis paralysis when starting something big and just getting skeletonized cheap code out quick as a template then refining it is much more to my strengths. I am ADHD and task breakdown is a known difficulty for that disorder so it has been hugely helpful.

That said, by the time I'm happy with it all the AI stuff outside very boilerplate ops/config stuff has been rewritten and refined. I just find it quite helpful to get over that initial hump of "I have nothing but a dream" to the stage of "I have a thing that compiles but is terrible". Once I can compile it then I can refine which where my strengths lie.

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vova_hn2 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Claude often comments that my version is better and cleaner.

Every comment I make is a "really perceptive observation" according to Claude and every question I ask is either "brilliant" or at least "good", so...

	▲	piva00 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To me it started doing this more often lately, I remember in January being quite happy it wasn't behaving with praising or sycophancy, after correcting it I'd usually get responses like "I see the issue now, I shouldn't have done X and instead do Y". Lately it's been praising me much more for correcting it, quite annoying to be honest, it's just a clanker, I want it to act like a non-human clanker instead of playing theater with me...
	▲	matheusmoreira 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I have quite a lot of skepticism about that as well. I didn't mean to imply I believed it. I was just trying to say that I wasn't lazily copy pasting the LLM output into my repository. I'm taking the time to understand what it is proposing. I'm pushing back and asking for clarifications. When I implement things, I do it myself in my own way. I experienced a huge increase in my ability to make the cool stuff I've always wanted to make even in spite of this. I can't even fathom how productive the people who have Claude Code cranking out features on multiple git worktrees in parallel must be. I wouldn't do that in my personal projects but I can totally understand doing that in a job setting.
	▲	marginalia_nu 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		In Claude's world, every user is a generational genius up there with Gauss and Euler, every new suggestion, no matter how banal, is a mind boggling Copernican turn that upends epistemology as we know it.
	▲	ziml77 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's really annoying when it does that. I wish there was an alternate mode you could toggle it to when pushing back on its output. One where it's tuned to not assume you're the authority so it can come back with a response that doesn't just immediately jump to agreeing with you.
	▲	SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I do think this is a learnable skill. I haven't quite gotten Claude to push back as much as I would prefer, but there's a specific tone to strike where the average person in your position would expect and welcome being told they're wrong.

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koolba 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My fav metric for codebase improvement (not feature improvement) is negative LOC. Nothing beats a patch that only deletes things without breaking anything or simply removing tests. Just dead code deletion.

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jedmeyers 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's about on par with the ridiculousness of LOC implying code quality.

Most effective engineers on the brownfield projects I've worked on, usually deleted more LOC than they've added, because they were always looking to simplify the code and replace it with useful (and often shorter) abstractions.

	▲	marginalia_nu 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah it's very much the opposite of how Claude Code tends to approach a problem it hasn't seen before, which tends toward constructing an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine by just inserting more and more logic until it manages to produce the desired outcome. You can coax it into simplifying its output, but it's very time consuming to get something that is of a professional standard, and doesn't introduce technical debt. Especially in brownfield settings, if you do use CC, you really should be spending something like a day refactoring the code for every 15 minutes of work it spends implementing new functionality. Otherwise the accumulation of technical debt will make the code base unworkable by both human and claude hands in a fairly short time. I think overall it can be a force for good, and a source of high quality code, but it requires a significant amount of human intervention. Claude Code operating on unsupervised Claude code fairly rapidly generates a mess not even Claude Code can decode, resulting in a sort of technical debt Kessler syndrome, where the low quality makes the edits worse, which makes the quality worse, rinse and repeat.