HN user
I guess I’m thinking a lot of companies seem to be getting Claude code subscriptions. It usually takes some time and effort for an org to switch away from one solution. In the meantime a lot of workflows get more and more tied to Claude in particular.
It’s not much of a moat, but it’s more than a lot of orgs have.
I think anthropic with its enterprise strategy and google with its integration in everything have a bit of a moat.
But I switched from ChatGPT to Claude 3 months ago because my account was down for like 6 hours. I haven’t used it since. It’s too easy to switch away from chatbots on a whim. There is no moat for that.
Yeah I hope the links are helpful
I posted about my project below - https://github.com/0x007BA7/codebook
But maybe you should checkout the tools it’s based on, sem - https://github.com/Ataraxy-Labs/sem and ultimately treesitter. They at least give a more structured approach to dealing with code than simple text.
Codebook - https://github.com/0x007BA7/codebook
It’s a better code reader built on top of sem (treesitter). I’m getting a lot of massive PRs at work now, and this has helped a lot with reading them. It decomposes the changes into entities and sorts based on what has the most dependencies. This tends to put the most important functions first. Plus I can click through the dependencies for each function and mark things as reviewed as I’m reading them. It’s a big improvement over the GitHub review flow for me at least.
This has always been the fun part of programming to me. I know most people hate it, but I really don’t mind being on-call (ok I hate being woken up) and fixing weird bugs that users run into. All these small edge cases that people run into because reality is odd. Of course I’m in scientific programming so that probably colors my view.
It’s always a little disappointing to me when I think I’ve run into something unique but it ends up being user error or something.
I do think people are seeing useful results, but it’s at least several orders of magnitude less than what is claimed.
My metric is: how much code that I create today do I depend on in 3 months (incl learnings and one off data pulls etc.) and its waaay less than what I generate. A lot of it is frankly noise.
More generally, I think it’s more specialized knowledge.
If you have particularly specific knowledge in pretty much any domain, combining that with AI can lead to huge gains.
Sounds terrible, but is it?
Yes
It incentivises high-impact research
It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.
If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.
It doesn’t apply to what this repo is doing. Also the 70 odd single author preprints seems to suggest the author is in some deep AI psychosis: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Logan-Nye-2
Well the √t stuff looks like nonsense or way overblown, existing tools already do similar things, there’s pretty much a single commit with no follow up commits etc etc.
Lots of bad smells in this repo.
Tech “decision makers” are feckless lemmings. If the trends tomorrow change, then their decisions will change.
At least where I am we can’t and shouldn’t know all the requirements of a project beforehand^. Every project is an iterative learning process between the users, product and engineers. The problem is if everyone uses AI to replace their thinking it breaks that process and no one learns anything.
^ I say shouldn’t because I work in research engineering. Most of the needs of our users are pretty unique. We’ve had people come in and try and specify every piece of work, -and ended up building a crud app no one wanted or used.
At least for some people I know it’s not necessarily because there’s pressure from leadership, but because it’s funny that the org spends like $15,000/mo writing HP fanfic or whatever
Claude is a phd level mathematician , I am not
I’m going to guess that this is Gell-Mann amnesia more than anything, and it’s going to get a lot of organizations into a lot of weird places.
This isn’t foolproof either and plenty of people can talk convincingly about running projects that they had little to nothing to do with.
But “your software” isn’t bringing value anymore if people don’t use it.
The things that the software does might have value, but the marginal utility of your software is effectively 0.
Unless the user just vibe-codes their own version.
Which is what I’m seeing at my job. All of these “afternoon vibe code” projects never actually get users because everyone just vibe-codes their own.
This is a good way of putting it. I ship individual features faster, but the end to end process of shipping software has remained the roughly same because the vast majority of my time is building the “theory”.
Conversely, the value of software has dropped to 1/10 of what it was before Claude code existed.
I’m being glib, but there’s a whole class of software (eg simple crud apps) that just don’t have any marginal value anymore. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 10X faster or 100X faster. 100 x $0 is still 0.
I can’t tell if we’re in identical situations or we work in the same place…
Meetings are too easy to game. I worked with a bunch of new managers from LEGACY_CORP and learned the extremes of how to BS.
As an example, if you think there might be any sort of pushback, just never stop talking. Once a manager talked for 35 straight minutes to answer a question on an unpopular decision. By the end there were no follow-ups because everyone was too confused and checked out to care.
I essentially have 3 modes:
1. Everything is specified, written and tested by me, then cleaned up by AI. This is for the core of the application.
2. AI writes the functions, then sets up stub tests for me to write. Here I’ll often rewrite the functions as they often don’t do what I want, or do too much. I just find it gets rid of a lot of boilerplate to do things this way.
3. AI does everything. This is for experiments or parts of an application that I am perfectly willing to delete. About 70% of the time I do end up deleting these parts. I don’t allow it to touch 1 or 2.
Of course this requires that the architecture is setup in a way where this is possible. But I find it pretty nice.
Case in point, just this morning I contributed a one-line change to an open source repo and the CI started failing.
I asked Claude (Opus High Effort) and pasted in all the logs. I went back and forth and it very confidently made over 20 separate changes in the repo, none of which fixed the issue. Eventually I stepped in and figured out it was a versioning issue.
I fear what would happen if I ran “10 agents for 10 days” on this simple issue.
Yeah you’re right my bad.
A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today.
I’ve been on 2 failed projects that have been entirely AI generated and it’s not that agents slow down and you can just send more agents to work on projects for longer, it’s that they becoming completely unable to make any progress whatsoever, and whatever progress they do make is wrong.
doesn't have the obvious AI frontend 'look' as it was copying from the starter.
Check out the other reply and scroll down a bit…
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to be unprofitable but definitely weird to be sending 100% of your revenue to what is essentially your main competitor
What are you talking about? We are in this position precisely because of government regulation prioritizing cars. Most of American cities are still only zoned for SFH within the city limits. It’s nearly impossible to build in any other way because of regulation. Not to mention the many many subsidies for the auto industry.
The thing that frustrates me most about libertarians is how everything they don’t want is regulation or government spending, but everything they do want is provided by the grace of god or something.