Ah yes…the old “you’re holding it wrong”. The problem is these goddamn things don’t learn, so you put in the effort to police it…and you have to keep doing that until the end of time. Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.
It's just a tool, not an intelligence or a person.
You use it to make your job easier. If it doesn't make your job easier, you don't use it.
Anybody trying to sell you on a bill of goods that this is somehow "automating away engineers" and "replacing expensive software developers" is either stupid or lying (or both).
I find it incredibly useful, but it's garbage-in, garbage-out just like anything else with computers. If your code base is well commented and documented and laid out in a consistent pattern, it will tend to follow that pattern, especially if it follows standards. And it does better in languages (like Rust) that have strict type systems and coding standards.
Even better if you have rigorous tests for it to check its own work against.
Yes, sometimes you are actually indeed holding it wrong. Sometimes a product has to be used in a certain way to get good results. You're not going to blame the shampoo when someone uses only a tiny drop of it, and the hair remains dirty.
This is still early days with LLMs and coding assistants. You do have to hold them in the right way sometimes. If you're not willing to do that, or think that provides less value than doing it another way... great, good for you, do it the way you think is best for you.
I've been a coding assistant skeptic for a long time. I just started playing with Claude Code a month or so ago. I was frustrated for a bit until I learned how to hold it the right way. It is a long, long way from being a substitute for a real human programmer, but it's helpful to me. I certainly prefer it to pair programming with a human (I hate pair programming), so this provides value.
If you don't care to figure out for yourself if it can provide you value, that's your choice. But this technology is going to get better, and you might later find yourself wishing you'd looked into it earlier. Just like any new tool that starts out rough but eventually turns out to be very useful.
They don't learn by themselves, but you can add instructions as they make mistakes that are effectively them learning. You have to write code review feedback for juniors, so that s not an appreciable difference.
> Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.
And that person is going to quit and you have to start all over again. They also cost at least 100x the price.
I've been telling people, this is Uber in 2014, you're getting a benefit and it's being paid for with venture capital money, it's about as good as it's going to get.
Your claude.md (or equivalent) is the best way to teach them. At the end of any non-trivial coding session, I'll ask for it to propose edits/additions to that file based on both the functional changes and the process we followed to get there.
That's not the end of the story, though. LLMs don't learn, but you can provide them with a "handbook" that they read in every time you start a new conversation with them. While it might take a human months or years to learn what's in that handbook, the LLM digests it in seconds. Yes, you have to keep feeding it the handbook every time you start from a clean slate, and it might have taken you months to get that handbook into the complete state it's in. But maybe that's not so bad.
The good thing about this process its it means such a handbook functions as documentation for humans too, if properly written.
Claude is actually quite good at reading project documentation and code comments and acting on them. So it's also useful for encouraging project authors to write such documentation.
I'm now old enough that I need such breadcrumbs around the code to get context anyways. I won't remember why I did things without them.
Not so. Adding to context files helps enormously. Having touchstone files (ARCHITECTURE.md) you can reference helps enormously. The trick is to steer, and create the guardrails.
Honestly, it feels like DevOps had a kid with Product.
> Honestly, it feels like DevOps had a kid with Product.
You've just described a match made in hell. DevOps - let's overcomplicate things (I'm looking at you K8s) and Product - they create pretty screenshots and flows but not actually think about the product as a system (or set of systems.)
