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tgtweak11/08/20241 replyview on HN

I would consider myself adept at all three, not top 1% in either but the intersection of all 3 easily.

Context I have hired hundreds of engineers and built many engineering teams from scratch to 50+, and have been doing systems administration, solutions architecture, infrastructure design, devops, cloud orchestration and data platform design for 25 years.

I'm not bluffing when I say Claude's latest sonnet model and Cline in vscode has really been 99th percentile good on everything I've thrown at it (with some direction, as needed) and has done more productive, quality work than a team of 10 engineers in the last week alone.

If you haven't tried it I can understand your pessimism.


Replies

dartos11/08/2024

I haven’t built engineering teams, but I’ve been in the server programming field for 15 years.

I have tried Claude (with aider) for programming tasks and have been impressed that it could do anything (with handholding) but haven’t been convinced that it’s something that will change how I write code forever.

It’s nice that I can describe how to graph some data in a csv and get 80% of the way there in python after a few rounds of clarification. Claude refused to use seaborn for some reason, but that’s no big deal.

Every time I’ve tried using it for work, though, I was sorely disappointed.

I recently convinced myself that it was pretty helpful in building a yjs backed text editor, but last week realized that it led me down an incorrect path with regards to the prosemirror plugin and I had to rewrite a good chunk of the code.