alt Hacker NewsWhy do you care how much effort it took the engineer to make it? If there was a huge amount of tedium that they used Claude Code for, then reviewed and cleaned up so that it’s indistinguishable from whatever you’d expect from a human; what’s it to you?
Not everyone has the same motivations. I’ve done open source for fun, I’ve done it to unblock something at work, I’ve done it to fix something that annoys me.
If your project is gaining useful functionality, that seems like a win.
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> Why do you care how much effort it took the engineer to make it?
Because they're implicitly asking me to put in effort as a reviewer. Pretending that they put more effort in than they have is extremely rude, and intentionally or not, generating a large volume of code amounts to misleading your potential reviewers.
> If there was a huge amount of tedium that they used Claude Code for, then reviewed and cleaned up so that it’s indistinguishable from whatever you’d expect from a human; what’s it to you?
They never do though. These kind of imaginary good AI-based workflows are a "real communism has never been tried" thing.
> If your project is gaining useful functionality, that seems like a win.
Lines of code impose a maintenance cost, and that goes triple when the code quality is low (as is always the case for actually existing AI-generated code). The cost is probably higher than the benefit.
Because sometimes programming is an art and we want people to do it as if it was something they cared about. I play chess and this is a bit like that. Why do I play against humans? Because I want to face another person like me and see what strategies they can come up with.
Of course any chess bot is going to play better, but that's not the point