Comment by aspenmartin
1 day ago
AI boosters? Like people are planted by Sam Altman like the way they hire crowds for political events or something? Hey! Maybe I’m AI! You’re absolutely right!
In seriousness: I’m sure there are projects that are heavily powered by Claude, myself and a lot of other people I know use Claude almost exclusively to write and then leverage it as a tool when reviewing. Almost everyone I hear that has this super negative hostile attitude references some “promise” that has gone unfulfilled but it’s so silly: judge the product they are producing and maybe just maybe consider the rate of progress to _guess_ where things are heading
I never said "planted", that is your own assumption, albeit a wrong one. I do respect it though, as it is at least a product of a human mind. But you don't have to be "planted" to champion an idea, you are clearly championing it out of some kind of conviction, many seem to do. I was just giving you a bit of reality check.
If you want to show me how to "guess where things are heading" / I am actually one of the early adopters of LLMs and have been engineering software professionally for almost half my life now. Why do you think I was an early adopter? Because I was skeptical or afraid of that tech? No, I was genuinely excited. Yes you can produce mountains of code, even more so if you were already an experienced engineer, like myself for example.
Yes you can even get it to produce somewhat acceptable outputs, with a lot of effort at prompting it and fatigue that comes with it. But at the end of the day, as an experienced engineer, I am not being more productive with it, I will end up being less productive because of all the sharp edges I have to take care of, all the sloppily produced code, unnecessary bloat, hallucinated or injected libraries etc.
Maybe for folks who were not good at maths or had trouble understanding how computers work this looks like a brave new world of opportunities. Surely that app looks good to you, how bad can it be? Just so you and other such vibe-coders understand, here is a parallel.
It is actually fairly simple for a group of aviation enthusiasts to build a flying airplane. We just need to work out some basic mechanics, controls and attach engines. It can be done, I've seen a couple of documentaries too. However, those planes are shit. Why? Because me and my team of enthusiast dont have the depth of knowledge of a team of aviation engineers to inform my decisions.
What is the tolerance for certain types of movements, what kind of materials do I need to pick, what should be my maintenance windows for various parts etc. There are things experts can decide on almost intuitively, yet with great precision, based on their many years of craft and that wonderful thing called human intelligence. So my team of enthusiasts puts together an airplane. Yeah it flies. It can even be steered. It rolls, pitches and yawns. It takes off and lands. But to me it's a black-box, because I don't understand many, many factors, forces, pressures, tensors, effects etc that are affecting an airplane during it's flight and takeoff. I am probably not even aware WHAT I should be aware of. Because I dont have that deep educaiton about mechanical engineering, materials, aerodynamics etc. Neither does my team. So my plane, while impressive to me and my team, will never take off commercially, not unless a team of professionals take it over and remakes it to professional standards. It will probably never even fly in a show. And if me or someone on my team dies flying it, you guessed it - our insurance sure as hell won't cover the costs.
So what you are doing with Claude and other tools, while it may look amazing to you, is not that impressive to the rest of us, because we can see those wheels beginning to fall off even before your first take off. Of course, before I can even tell that, I'd have to actually see your airplane, it's design plans etc. So perhaps first show us some of those "projects heavily powered by Claude" and their great success, especially commercial one (otherwise its a toy project), before you talk about them.
The fact that you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
> you are clearly not an expert on the topic of software engineering should guide you here - unless you know what you are talking about, it's better to not say anything at all.
Yikes, pretty condescending. Also wrong!
IMO you are strawmanning pretty heavily here.
Believe it or not, using Claude to improve your productivity is pretty dissimilar to vibe coding a commercial airplane(?) which I would agree is probably not FAA approved.
I prefer not to toot my own horn, but to address an idea you seem to have that I don’t know math or CS(?) I have a PhD in astrophysics and a decade of industry experience in tech and other domains so I’m fairly certain I know how math and computers work but maybe not!
Bro idk why you waste your time writing all this. No one cares that you were an early adopter, all that means is that you used the rudimentary LLM implementations that were available from 2022-2024 which are now completely obselete. Whatever experience you think you have with AI tools is useless because you clearly haven't kept up with the times. AI platforms and tools have been changing quickly. Every six months the capabilities have massively improved.
Next time before you waste ten minutes typing out these self aggrandizing tirades maybe try asking the AI to just write it for you instead
I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do. I have to say you are wrong. AI is changing the game. What you’ve written here might’ve been more relevant about 9 months ago, but everything has changed.
> I’m an expert in what I do. A professional, and few people can do what I do
Are you an astronaut?
8 replies →
This is a typical no-proof "AI"-boosting response, and from an account created only 35 days ago.
8 replies →
This is such a fantastic response. And outsiders should very well be made aware what kind of plane they are stepping into. No offence to the aviation enthusiasts in your example but I will do everything in my power to avoid getting on their plane, in the same way I will do everything in my power to avoid using AI coded software that does anything important or critical...
speaking of airplanes... considering how much llm usage is being pushed top-down in many places, i wonder how long until some news drops of some catastrophic one-liner got through via llm generated code...
How would you know whether he is an expert on the topic of software engineering or not?
For all I know, he is more competent than you; he figured out how to utilize Claude Code in a productive way, which is a point for him.
I'd have to guess whether you are an expert working on software not well suited for AI, or just average with a stubborn attitude towards AI and potentially not having tried the latest generation of models and agentic harnesses.
> How would you know whether he is an expert on the topic of software engineering or not?
Because of their views on the effectiveness of AI agents for generating code.
8 replies →
Hear hear!