alt Hacker NewsI listened to a conversation between two superstar developers in their 50's, who have been coding for more than most readers here have been alive, about their experience with Claude Code.
I wanted to tear my ears out.
What is crystal clear to me now is using LLMs to develop is a learned and practiced skill. If you expect to just drop in and be productive on day one, forget it. The smartest guy I know _who has a PhD in AI_, is hopeless at using it.
Practice practice practice. It's a tool, it takes practice. Learn on hobby projects before using it at work.
The problem is that it’s being marketed like it’s magic and will make people obsolete… not as a tool with a high learning curve.
I don’t blame people for being upset when it can’t do what all the hype says it will do.
The way people talk about the latest Claude Code is the same way people were talking 2-3 years ago about whatever the latest model was then. Every release gets marketed as if it’s a new level of magic, yet we’re still here having the same debates about merit, because reality doesn’t match the marketing and hype.
It has gotten better, I tried something with early ChatGPT that failed horribly (a basic snake game written in C), and just tried the exact same thing again last week and it worked—it wasn’t good, but it technically worked. But if it took 3 years to get good enough to pass my basic test, why was I being fed those lies 3 years ago? The AI companies are like the boy who cried wolf. At this point, it’s on them to prove they can do what they say, not up to me to put in extraordinary efforts to try and get value out of their product.
Last week I sat through a talk from one of our SVPs who said development is cheap and easy now, then he went on about the buy vs build debate for 20 minutes. It’s like he read a couple articles and drank the kool-aid. I also saw someone talking about ephemeral programs… seeing a future where if you want to listen to some MP3s, you’ll just type in a prompt to generate a bespoke music player. This would require AI to reliably one-shot apps like Winamp or iTunes in a few words from a layperson with no programming background. These are the ideas the hype machine is putting in people’s minds that seem detached from reality.
I don’t think the, “you’re holding it wrong”, type responses are a good defense. It’s more that it’s being marketed wrong, because all these companies need to maintain the hype to keep raising money. When people use the AI the way the hype tells them it should work… it doesn’t work.