I don't know that it's a lie. The code that I can get Claude Sonnet to produce is pretty much what I would and that's two iterations behind. We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.

There are a lot of mediocre programmers aren't there, I wouldn't be surprised if on average Claude is doing better than what exists. It's not a "lie", anyways, just a point of view.

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hollowturtle a day ago | parent | next [-]

> We've vibecoded scripts recently that genuinely are better than what I would have written and I don't think I'm terrible.

I'm ok with vibecoding scripts, I love programming the machine and making the end user happy and not dealing with bash! I don't judge scripts quality as long as they are tools in the workflow, I dont care about that, unless they will somehow be part of the production. The name Script implies that, there isn't any architecture and Claude Opus sucks at architecture

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strken a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

...are you sure that Claude Sonnet writes code that you'd write?

For me, it writes code that mostly works, which is great. It insists on adding some of the least readable comments I've seen. It also likes to pad out the code to about double or triple what I would write.

It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor. Even Fable and Opus struggle with this.

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zahlman 15 hours ago | parent [-]

> It doesn't seem to have that little voice that says "hey, this approach sucks" so it needs the harness or the prompter to tell it to go back and refactor.

Well, yes. For humans, the "this approach sucks" voice is still very separable from the thought process that just figures out the syntax and algorithms etc. The important thing is whether the overall system has this feedback and that it's having the desired effect. Better harnesses are progress in the same way that more capable models are.

And yeah, there's a wide range in the standards that programmers hold, in practice. Plus they don't at all agree on what's "better" than which.

	▲	strken 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Regarding the "this approach sucks" voice, there's an important difference between humans and AI which I've noticed and which I didn't explain well. The general human approach to programming at most companies I worked at prior to 2024 was to head off in vaguely the right direction and refine the approach as we went. There might be a design and a plan, but at some point we just winged it and fixed our work after the fact. This seems to be the worst way of getting an AI to do anything. They do better if they can one-shot an implementation from a clear spec then only need to fix bugs. Better models can handle a less clear spec but they still can't really iterate in a major way. To have an AI model build a bigger thing, you one-shot increasingly detailed specs and decompose them into smaller ones.

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wannabe44 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You two are talking past each other. At a lower level LLMs can write better code than humans. At the architectural level they make a mess.

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ryandvm a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This. I hate that Claude Code is taking the fun part of my job, but the reality is that Claude Code Opus 5 can one-shot a script in 15 seconds that would have taken me 45 minutes to write.

I don't begrudge the business for making the prudent choice of making me use AI, I just sort of lament that what I spent years enjoying and getting good at was so utterly derivative that it was perfect for the LLMs. It would be insulting if it weren't just a fact.

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agentultra a day ago | parent [-]

Every time you don’t write the script you lose a little of the ability to do so.

Just like if you don’t read you will lose the ability to.

These skills are not innate to us and can be forgotten over time.

I wonder if it will get to the point where people don’t even know what to ask for. Or how to judge if what the machine produces could have been better. Or if it does what they think it does.

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jaza 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, sadly, coding is a skill that can and (before long) will be forgotten by all but a niche dedicated few. It will go the way of assembly language, smith-ing, weaving, bread-baking, meat- / fish-gutting, hunting, remembering phone numbers, driving manual (and, before long, driving in human mode), hand-writing, horse-riding, wood-chopping... you get the picture. The price of progress!

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bagacrap 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Joke's on you, I never knew how to write bash.

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blackqueeriroh a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Just like if you don’t read you will lose the ability to.

This is wholly untrue.

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agentultra a day ago | parent [-]

Not wholly. It’s under study. I don’t mean in the sense that you can’t read words anymore. I mean in the sense that comprehension and attention go down.

	▲	faeyanpiraat 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Okay but notice that “Losing the ability to” as-is is not even in the ballpark of “comprehension and attention go down”, we are not mind readers..