alt Hacker NewsWasn't Claude supposed to do all the coding by now? Did we have a change of mind or did we run out of tokens?
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Claude isn’t even good enough for Anthropic to release native desktop applications for each OS. As someone said in a comment in a different post here, it seems like these tools are good at web and web related (like Electron) development.
Anthropic intentionally missed the opportunity to show that its models can develop really good native applications.
OpenAI’s latest desktop applications seem to be worse than before too.
Two things:
1) By the time I’ve determined, and expressed to my satisfaction, exactly what I want, I’ve already done the hard work of coding that thing. The rest is fairly mechanical by comparison.
2) It’s a universal truth (which I know someone’s gonna argue with :D ) that reading and working with other peoples’ code is much less fun than reading and working with your own. This applies even if the other people are robots.
3) When checking and troubleshooting code, the bulk of the time is spent understanding it in the first place. If you wrote the code yourself this already implicitly happened and is ‘free’.
Put those four[1] things together and at least for me personally, AI-assisted coding isn’t a better experience than just doing it myself. It’s still great for bootstrapping yourself into a new unfamiliar language/environment though.
[1] Yeah it’s an off-by-one joke. ;)
The utility of this stuff is largely going away. It’s more just hobbyists now or old timers like me who actually “learned” programming.
There are HS interns at my company who admire me because I lived through a time without AI and I actually had to learn that stuff. I’m not kidding.
Was this known in 1998?
I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you?
The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less).
This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.