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odeonotoday at 4:21 PM6 repliesview on HN

This. Once you're building something that genuinely hasn't been built before, LLMs cannot be trusted with any architectural decisions. I'm building a product based around various physics simulations, so it's purely first principles, but without active research, thinking, and challenging, it produces computational code literally hundreds of orders of magnitude slower WHILE implementing absurd fallbacks and shortcuts that effectively result in a useless calculation.

This is the case perhaps 95% of the time.

Oversight is very important, and architectural thinking cannot yet be outsourced, only execution.


Replies

throw-the-toweltoday at 7:24 PM

How many of us here are building something genuinely new, though?

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anon7725today at 7:56 PM

And to close the loop - there is no architectural thinking without experience in execution. The highly productive people who are all-in on agentic coding today are powered by their previous experience doing implementation. As time goes on their powers will wane unless they make a point to keep them sharp by doing enough hands-on implementation.

It’s the same as a “non-coding architect” role (remember those). Most of them are absolutely full of shit architecture astronauts.

physicsguytoday at 5:27 PM

I have had similar when trying it too. I couldn't even drive Claude Opus 4.7 to get PETsc to compile properly (with all the optional dependencies)

lowbloodsugartoday at 7:24 PM

Sure. But where do you think AI will be in a year? Or do you think that AI is just an advanced Markov chain? Like “AI will never be able to write code. Ok AI will never be able to debug code. ok ai will never be able to write design docs. Ok AI will never be able to architecture. Ok ai will never be able to do distributed systems architecture. Ok ai will never be able to design new products completely from scratch. Ok AI will never be able to run a company. Ok AI will never be able to run a city. Ok AI will never be able to run a government. Ok ai will never be able to run the world economy…” It’s Robin Williams Gaddadi sketch “Ok you cross this line you die!” [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/GCOOOyuTBzA?si=YnCWH9LJqb_yYolG

ex-aws-dudetoday at 6:13 PM

I find that too, Claude Code is constantly trying to break the architecture patterns and do hacky stuff

Like its only focused on solving the local problem as easy as possible

MagicMoonlighttoday at 4:54 PM

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