Humans’ general inability to entirely divorce social instincts, responses, and mores while using human language to communicate, especially with something that pantomimes it back, is one of the reasons current chat interfaces are fundamentally flawed. This is working against innate behavior… not something that can be easily switched off. I’ll bet most of the people that can really do it have a hard time intuitively navigating real social interactions.

It also makes it an incredible tool for manipulation.

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amarant 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you've accurately identified one of the most important skills of a software engineer in these new AI enabled times. Or at least one of the most important skills that wasn't important previously for this profession. The part where it's not easily switched off is a important part of what justifies my salary: I have learned this skill.

It took some effort, and I agree that there very likely are those who will not learn to selectively disengage this innate behaviour. That's why you should pay me a ton of cash each month instead of using Claude directly ;)

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peteforde 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My kneejerk reaction to reading this is to say something sarcastic and witty to refute it, but since I resemble this sentiment and haven't seen this line of thinking before... I have to concede that you've produced a novel argument in this otherwise mostly tireless and repetitive battle over whether we're imagining that Opus is good or not. Kudos.

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AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I’ll bet most of the people that can really do it have a hard time intuitively navigating real social interactions

Bingo. Hi that’s me.

I’ve been trying to teach people how to use LLMs effectively not just dump shit in them but actually talk to them like you would expect a computer to understand and it totally breaks peoples brains

I’m quite successful in helping people get somewhere usable that they weren’t…but to get to the point of fluency with computing systems, and I would argue this is prior to LLMs as well, where you can actually get what you want more reliably out of a computing interaction than you can with a human interaction, is an entirely different way of thinking

That mode of thinking is just generally not accessible to the vast majority of humans. Not because there’s something wrong with them

but it takes somebody who can hold both extremely large scale problems and very very granular specific implementation problems in your head all at once and that is a rare skill.

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fn-mote 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> it takes somebody who can hold both extremely large scale problems and very very granular specific implementation problems in your head all at once

This describes the entire software engineering profession to me.

We have come up with all sorts of devices to make this go more smoothly, or to enable us to focus on specific sub-parts as long as possible.

That said, at some point (both in design and integration), you need vision and attention to detail to make progress. The skill seems learnable to me, but watching others struggle sometimes makes me wonder.

	▲	AndrewKemendo 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Almost nobody has a fully formed idea going into any project or product That’s the first thing that people need to understand is that this idea of some platonic product or project or tool kit or framework or library or whatever just doesn’t exist and it’s never going to exist Do you have a specific discreet finite problem that you need to solve so you solve that and if you do it in a certain way you can solve other problems with that same solution sometimes you don’t need it to do anything more than you’re one thing and so that’s all you built but maybe you want to do more than just one thing and so you build it so that has the capability to do it So yes fully concur it’s the synthesis of attention to detail and large scale it’s all of the above

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Npovview 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you use skills like superpowers and spec-kit in your teachings ?

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AndrewKemendo 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

No, I don’t know what those are. (Looked them up and I don’t teach every possible handler, but I teach people how to do structured inputs etc..)

I teach TDD philosophy as well as conways law, parnas hiding etc…without using those terms

So things like problem decomposition into tractable chunks minimum viable product, prototyping, how do you iterate, write the smallest possible test… you know things like this which are just taking incremental work and then iterating on it

It’s basically everything I’ve learned about building stuff since 1997

**Interestingly I thought prompt engineering was going to be a fad but it’s turned into a whole ass new discipline which makes less sense as more robust toolchains come into play and models handle the context interpretation better

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SpicyLemonZest 25 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Not the original commenter, but I feel pretty strongly that frameworks for software review loops are at best training wheels for people who haven't yet developed the right understanding. I don't use any sort of complex skills framework, I just tell the AI what I want while leaving reasonable Claude-sized gaps to fill in, and my results are usually better and often faster than people who get lost in framework management. Perhaps they're more useful for pure greenfield development, but for most software developers who are working on existing systems I have not seen a strong use case for them.

There's one guy I know who constantly has problems with Claude going off-script, and every time I dig in, it's clear that the poor thing is so overloaded with instructions and skill lists that it can't figure out what he actually wants it to do.

	▲	janstice 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The frameworks-and-tools make for good blog fodder too, as they are quite applicable across a range of areas, so many readers will find something that resonates with them, and claude-code-is-pretty-good-these-days is a less blogworthy topic.