alt Hacker NewsAn industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]
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I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it.
My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solves unless you have the technical and domain knowledge to redirect and correct it frequently. Perhaps training will solve this, and it'll certainly get better, but I'm not sure how far it'll go and how fast.
My gut feeling is that software will only become more ambitious and interface with hardware and other systems in increasingly sophisticated ways. Things that seemed infeasible due to time and cost constraints will be on the table. It'll reveal new challenges, I think. I have a feeling it'll be humans with deep technical skills who are at the forefront of solving those challenges for a while yet.
Not claiming I have the skills and to be one of those people, just that it's where I'm pushing my career at the moment.
I'm stoked that people like this have the resources and newfound capabilities to create solutions like this. The reality is that previously, many people have been underserved due to the economics of software and inherent risks of trying things like this as a smaller business owner. So this is great. We can find more ways that software can be valuable, and people can do their jobs better in ways they've literally only imagined before. It's great.
I absolutely love this, because to me, this is what software development should be about, solving actual problems and providing faster calculations, improving the workflow for people.
It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT industry over the past 20 years. When I started my first job, we frequently had customers ask for bespoke solution, most of which was small one week to a few months of work. Multiple co-workers in the mid 2000s has side businesses, where they did contract development, most of which was these types of small one off solutions. Most of the software companies, in my area, that did these types of jobs are all gone now.
If AI accidentally created an environment where people can once again solve small programming problems on their own and massively improve the workflows I'm all for it. Serves the industry right for abandoning these customers.
Trades / SWE overlap is interesting as I think they are analogous to each other.
I went to college with a lot of actual engineers - mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. In those fields you are designing products and then engineering processes to output a cog of some sort (drug, car, GPU, iPhone, etc) in the thousands to millions.
In our fields as SWEs, a lot of our job it's like the trades going into a house to install HVAC, fix a burst pipe, upgrade a circuit breaker, replace a furnace, etc. No two setups are exactly alike, no requirements are exactly alike, etc.
Even in the age of LLMs I think the industry remains more artisanal than engineering. And that's not a knock on us, I think it's because what we do is essentially automate business processes.. and no two businesses are alike. I don't think LLMs replace the role, it just makes parts of our job faster. The mindset of how you automate something doesn't generally exist in the minds of people who want the automation.
For better or for worse, when everyone is a "potential software founder" nobody is because your potential customers can just use AI the same way you did.
I think there are many moats that non-experts won't attempt to cross even with AI assistance.
For example, we've built in a lot of complexity to areas like authentication. And for good reason. It's like electrical code. I'd pay good money to watch a muggle attempt to configure OIDC infrastructure. Even with the AI explaining everything to you, it's too much information to digest at once. You'd need an entire afternoon just to wrap your head around the idea of asymmetric cryptography. That's a lot of time not spent doing the thing your business is actually about.
It's a really interesting case study, but the summary seems to lean into the AI hype to an extent that borders on lying.
> His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything.
I don't see how he can give this summary with a straight face after posting the interview that CLEARLY contradicts it.
In the interview the engineer says "When Claud Code came out almost a year ago, I started dabbling with web based tools ..." and "When it first came out I had so many ideas and tried all these different things", so he had clearly already used extensively it for a year. I would also guess the engineer was somewhat technically minded from the get-go, since he claims he was "really good with excel" before starting with Claude Code, but that is beside the point.
The interviewer later asks "How much of those 8 weeks was learning Claude Code versus actually building the thing?", and the interviewee answers "Well, I started Claude Code when it first came out so the learning curve has really gone down for me now..." and then trails off to a different subject. Which further confirms that the summary in the post is false.
It really seems like the engineer has spent the year prior learning Claude Code and then spent 8 weeks on solely building this specific application.
The interviewer also claims "This would normally have taken a developer a year to build", which seems really unsubstantiated. It's of course hard to judge without all the details, but looking at the short demo in the video, 8 weeks of regular development time from a somewhat experienced developer doesn't seem too far fetched if the objective is "don't make it pretty, just make it work".
As I said, it's a really interesting case study about a paradigm shift in how software is developed, and it's clear this app would never have existed without Claude Code. So I don't really see the need for the blatant lying.
How is a mechanical engineer a “trade worker.”
Most engineers have to take at least one programming class in college.
I feel both great and awful about this. For over a decade I’ve said that nearly anyone that uses a computer could benefit from some programming understanding. A little bit can go a long way to solving problems like this. Problems that collectively slow down and block the ambitions of a huge number of people worldwide.
But instead we’ve found a way to circumvent the process. Losing the understanding of your own problem and the new ideas that come off the back of it.
I’m reminded of the story that NASA had a research project to make pens that would work in space, and Roscosmos just used pencils. I always thought NASA came off worse in that anecdote, but I wonder what they learnt while making the pen…
I do this wirh conduit. Not as far along but definitely certain tasks in trades are prime for automation.
Tbh this is nothing new; we knew technical people with Claude code would be able to program well enough that tbey would be business developers.
"Mechanical engineer uses code to improve engineering process". Okay, this has been going on forever. Other engineering disciplines and various fields using software to solve problems. Programming doesn't exist in a vacuum of theory.
People like this will create a net increase in software jobs. Once his software makes enough money so he doesn't have to sit in front of a computer, he will employ someone. It will initially be a gig fixing slop. https://www.slater.dev/2025/09/about-that-gig-fixing-vibe-co...
People in the trades have a ruthless pragmatism that SV has forgotten.
I think it's awesome that AI is enabling this. I think the the future of software engineering is in helping make this kind of thing resilient and removing the fragility that AI generated code always seems to inject
I don't get it - it's an app that uses an image model to parse a pdf file and structure the data with a csv export?
>10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes
bullshit story always leave something like this.
Waiting for the "jUsT sToChAsTiC pArRoTs" crowd.
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The guy from the story, it’s just another developer starting from a different trade, pretty normal across our history, musicians, lawyers that discovered that they were good at computers. The conclusion is flawed, not anyone can endure what this person did, sit at a terminal, going back and forward until something is finished. That’s what a SW dev does. My conclusion, many more people will discover that they are good at software, not everybody, but some of them will discover this new powers, thanks to a new lower barrier provided by LLM.