alt Hacker NewsBut it's so easy to try something like Claude Code. It's not like you need to get up to speed. There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI. Just start using it and you'll see why it has attracted so much hype.
*I should qualify that "using" CC in the strict sense has no learning curve, but really getting the most out of it may take some time as you see its limitations. But it's not learning tech in the traditional sense.
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I've been playing with it on weekends for the last few months. 9 out of 10 projects, it's failed.
Projects as simple as "set up a tmux/vim binding so I can write prompts in one pane and run claude in the other". Fails.
I've been coding for over 20 years.
If there is no learning curve, why doesn't it work for me? You can't say I'm not using it right, because if that was true, then all I need to do is climb the learning curve to fix that, the curve that you say doesn't exist.
I gave Claude Code with Sonnet 4.6* a try a few weeks ago. I pointed it at a hobby project with less than 1kloc of C (about 26,500 characters) across ~10 modules and asked it to summarize what the project does. It used about $0.50 worth of tokens and gave a summary that was part spot on and part hallucinated. I then asked it how to solve a simple bug with an easy solution. It identified the right place to make the fix but its entire suggested solution was a one-liner invoking a hallucinated library method.
I use LLMs pretty regularly, so I'm familiar with the kinds of tasks they work well on and where they fall flat. I'm sure I could get at least some utility from Claude Code if I had an unlimited budget, but the voracious appetite for tokens even on a trivially small project -- combined with a worse answer than a curated-context chatbot prompt -- makes its value proposition very dubious. For now, at least.
* I considered trying Opus, but the fundamental issue of it eating through tokens meant, for me, that even if it worked much better, the cost would dramatically outweigh the benefit.
I think working with the technology gives you powerful intuitions that improve your skill and lead to better outcomes, but you don't really notice that that's what's happening. Personally speaking - and I suspect this is true of most people in general - I have very poor recollections of what it was like to be really bad/new at things that I am now very skilled at.
If you have try teaching someone something from the absolute ground up, you will quickly realize that a huge number of things you now believe are "standard assumptions" or "obvious" or "intuitive" are actually the result of a lot of learning you forgot you did.
It’s only “easy to try” if you’re okay with using proprietary software and having to rely on an evil megacorporation that engages in cyber-warfare.
I think it comes down to your own personality, appetite, and also how external factors like hype might impact you (resent, annoyance, curiosity, excitement).
Then what is the point? If what I'm doing can be done by Claude, as operated by someone who "doesn't need to get up to speed", then I really need to look at another career.
I tried it. Either I don't know how to use it, or it just doesn't work.
> There is no learning curve*, that's the nature of AI.
There isn't? Then why is it that whenever devs have tried it and not achieved useful results, they're told that they just haven't learned how to use it right?