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skydhashyesterday at 4:13 PM2 repliesview on HN

That’s like saying enjoying composing music, but not enjoying playing music. Or creating stories, but don’t like writing. Yes they’re different activities, but linked together. The former is creativity, the latter is a medium of transmission.

Code is notation, just like music sheets, or food recipes. If your interaction with anyone else is with the end result only (the software), the. The code does not matter. But for collaboration, it does. When it’s badly written, that just increase everyone burden.

It’s like forcing everyone to learn a symphony with the record instead of the sheets. And often a badly recorded version.


Replies

vidarhyesterday at 4:46 PM

> That’s like saying enjoying composing music, but not enjoying playing music

Do you think that is impossible? There are plenty of people who enjoy composing music on things like trackers, with no intent of ever playing said music on an instrument.

I love coding, but I also like making things, and the two are in conflict: When I write code for the sake of writing code, I am meticulous and look for perfection. When I make things, I want to move as fast as possible, because it is the end-product that matters.

There is also a hidden presumption in what you've written that 1) the code will be badly written. Sometimes it is, but that is the case for people to, but often it is better than what I would produce (say, when needing to produce something in a language I'm not familiar enough with), 2) and that the collaboration will be with people manually working on the code. That is increasingly often not true.

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michael_j_xyesterday at 4:18 PM

Using your analogy, I enjoy composing music and enjoy playing music. I don't enjoy going through the notion of writing the notes on a piece of paper with the pen. I have to do it because people can't read my mind, but if they could I would avoid it. Claude code is like that. The code that gets written, feels like the code that I would have written