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Comment by cyral | Hacker News Reader

I've been playing around with it this week and its coding ability is insane (for a LLM). I've given it some pretty sloppy descriptions about things I want to do and it's managed to figure out exactly how to do it on the first or second try, I'm talking things like building animations in React that cannot be described with text very well. Big pain point is copy and pasting things back and forth to have it edit them. If it was integrated and could see my local files, that would be killer. I know there are various companies working on that, but the jetbrains AI integration for example is garbage compared to the results I get by manually asking claude.

I wasn't worried about how this would affect our industry a few months ago, but this has me reconsidering. It's like a junior engineer that can do most tasks in seconds for a couple of cents.

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What worries me is you need that time in the dirt to get a feel for coding as a craft. And at least for me that aspect of knowing the craft helps get my thinking in tune with problem solving in a very productive way.

Coding can be similar to playing an instrument, if you have mastery, it can help you be more expressive with the ideas you already have and lead you to new ones.

Whereas if we take away the craft of coding I think you end up with the type of code academic labs produce: something that purely starts on a “drawing board”, is given to the grad student/intern/LLM to make work, and while it will prove the concept it won’t scale into long term, as the intern doesn’t know when to spend an extra 30 minutes in a function so that it may be more flexible down the road.

> What worries me is you need that time in the dirt to get a feel for coding as a craft.

I see this sentiment a lot regarding gen AI. An I get it, we need to learn our tools. But this seems like it's saying the only way to learn problem solving is the way you learned it. That's just not true. Everyone learns problem solving differently and the emerging field of gen AI will figure out it's own way. It's a different way of thinking. I see my niece using ChatGPT to make projects I wouldn't have even imagined taking up at her age. Her games work. Who am I to say she isn't learning problem solving? In hindi we say "pratyaksh ko praman ki kya avashyakta" (what's right in front of you doesn't require proof).

I’d say it’s far more useful than a junior engineer. A junior might know one or two areas well, but Claude 3.5 knows literally every steep learning curve across all engineering professions. Claude may not yet be able to orchestrate a large project, but it can advise on structuring using knowledge drawn from best practices across every conceivable discipline. We may not get “AGI”; we might get something far more useful instead.

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