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Comment by d_watt | Hacker News Reader

The way Claude Code is going is exactly what I want out of a agentic coding tool with this "unix toolish" philosophy. I've been using Claude code since the initial public preview release, and have seen the direction over time.

The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.

If you are tooling your codebase for optimal AI usage (Rules, MCP, etc), you should target a technology that can bridge the gap to headless usage. The fact Claude Code can trivially be used as part of automation through the tools means it's now the default way I thinking about coding agents (Codex, the npm package, is the same).

Disclaimer, I focus on helping companies tool their codebases for optimal agent usage, so I might have a bias here to easily configurable tools.

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Not sure about that golden end state. Mine would be being in a room surround by screens with AI agents coding, designing, testing, etc. I would be there in the center giving guidance, direction, applying taste, etc… All conversational, wouldn’t need to touch the keyboard 99% of the time.

That's what I want and look forward one day

I can easily see this happening in 2-3 years. Some chat apps already have outstanding voice mode, such as GPT-4o. It's just a matter of integrating that voice mode, and getting the understanding and generated code to be /slightly/ better than it is today.

That future's maybe closer than that.

https://zackproser.com/blog/openai-codex-review

Is this a me thing, or a millenial thing?

I hate using voice for anything. I hate getting voice messages, I hate creating them. I get cold sweats just thinking about having to direct 10 AI Agents via voice. Just give me a keyboard and a bunch of screens, thanks.

Voicemail universally sucks. However, when you're having a synchronous conversation with actual people, do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?

IM, 100%. Otherwise only the loud people ever speak, whether or not they have anything useful to say.

Email. Async comms make sense 99% of the time at my job. Unless there's deep work to be done, or pie-in-the-sky idea fabricating. Or rubber-ducky sessions. But I won't do those with AI.

Email is Calm Technology[0] for collaborative knowledge work, where you expected to spend hours on a single task. If something needs brainstorming, or quick back and forth, you jump on a more synchronous type of conversation (IM, call, in person meeting).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology

I almost never prefer a phone call, I'd rather go all the way to video/in-person or stick with text. I also prefer to push anything important that isn't extremely small out of instant messaging and to email.

Brainstorming/whiteboarding, 1:1s or performance feedback, team socialization, working through something very difficult (e.g. pair debugging): in-person or video

Incidents, asking for quick help/pointers, small quick questions, social groups, intra-team updates: IM

Bigger design documents and their feedback, trickier questions or debugging that isn't urgent, sharing cool/interesting things, inter-team updates: Email

> do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?

It's hard for me to believe that there are psychopaths among us who prefer call on the phone, slack huddle or even organize meetings instead of just calmly writing messages on IM over coffee.

I don't know. I'm 40 but I do like pair programming so…

I’m the same. I love that writing allows you to think while typing so that you can review and revise your thoughts before letting them out in the world.

And don’t get me started on video vs text for learning purely non-physical stuff like programming…

receiving audio = slow

sending audio = fast

Yes this is known etiquette eg in China where voice memos are widely used on WeChat. Sending a voice memo is slightly rude for business as it says I the sender value my time to dash something off more even if it’s inconvenient for you the receiver who has to then stop and listen to it. Between friends is a bit different as voice has a level of personal warmth.

One advantage is speaking is generally faster than typing. Imagine instead of talking to a bunch of AI you’re talking to a room full of coworkers about the architecture to develop.

The only AI feature I want added to WhatsApp is transcribing voice messages!

I don't get why this isn't a feature for a long time yet

There is but needs to be enabled. Go to Settings > Chats > Voice message transcripts and turn the feature on

English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian only

I'd wager that probably covers only ~30% of the world population, and considering that people who speak Mandarin for example use other apps, it probably covers an even larger slice of the Whatsapp userbase.

I think it is less than 20% of world population are native speakers and will receive audio messages in those languages.

On my iPhone I can choose from hundreds of languages

For transcribing WhatsApp audio messages?

Awesome, thanks!

I'm a millennial. I refuse to use voice controls. Never used them in my life and hope I never have to. There's a block in my brain that just refuses to let me talk to a machine to give it orders.

Though I'll gladly call it various foul names when it's refusing to do what I expected it to do.

You guys all sound like you have more hands than I do. And nothing else in them.

My jaw hurts after an hour long meeting. I lose my voice after 2 hours. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed finger fatigue, even after 16 hours of typing and playing guitar.

Yeah, I think I’d rather click and type than talk, all day.

Remind me: 20 years

Some of us who’ve been in this game for a while consider having healthy hands to be a nice break between episodes of RSI, PT, etc. YMMV of course but your muscle stamina won’t be the problem, it’s your tendons and eventually your joints.

Voice as an interface is a life changer if you've ever had any bit of RSI at any point.

How many of you people having problems with hand health vis a vis typing are still using home row?

I've done more typing than speaking for over 40 years now, and I've never had any carpel tunnel or joint problems with my hands (my feet on the other hand.. hoo boy!) and I've always used a standard layout flat QWERTY keyboard.. but I never bend my hands into that unnatural "home row" position.

I type >60wpm using what 40 years ago was "hunt and peck" and evolved over brute force usage into "my hands know where they keys are, I am right handed so my right hand monopolizes 2/3 of the keyboard, both hands know where every key is so either one can take over the keyboard if the other is unavailable (holding food, holding microphone for when I do do voice work, using mouse, etc)".

But as a result my hands also evolved this bespoke typing strategy which naturally avoids uncomfortable poses and uncomfortable repetition.

Probably worth trying one of the many dictation apps out there based on whisper. They can get most coding terms(lib names, tech stack names) accurately and its one of those things you have to really try for a week before dismissing fully.

1. Superwhisper - https://superwhisper.com

2. Macwhisper - https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

3. Carelesswhisper - https://carelesswhisper.app

> My jaw hurts after an hour long meeting

I’m very sorry for you if this is literally true. I would urge you to seek medical help, as this is not normal at all.

You may want to try listening to others during meetings rather than talk ceaselessly

It's practice... Consciously try using the voice input for a while and see how you feel after a few days. I ended up liking it for some things more than others. This is typed via voice with minor edits after. This relies on the new models though - the older systems just didn't work as well.

I've consciously tried doing this for the past month on Android when chatting to Claude... when I'm alone. Don't think I could ever feel comfortable doing it around people.

I think I'm marginally faster using speech to text than using a predictive text touch keyboard.

But it makes enough mistakes that it's only very slightly faster, and I have a very mild accent. I expect for anyone with a strong accent it's a non starter.

On a real keyboard where I can touch type, it's much slower to use voice. The tooling will have to improve massively before it's going to be better to work by speaking to a laptop.

I'm another millennial that doesn't like them. I type pretty fast, around 100 WPM, so outside environments where I can't type (e.g. while driving), I just never saw the appeal. Typing has a way of helping me shape my thoughts precisely that I couldn't replicate with first thinking about what I want to say, and then saying it precisely.

But I can appreciate that sitting down in front of a keyboard and going at it with low typing speed seems unnatural and frustrating for probably the majority of people. To me, in front of a keyboard is a fairly natural state. Somebody growing up 15 years before (got by without PCs in their early years) or after me (got by with a smartphone) probably doesn't find it as natural.

I would agree but i use voice heavily with AI agents and here is why: no matter how fast i can type, i can speak much faster, and while i do other tasks.

If that’s the future, that means a massive reduction in software engineers no? What you are describing would require one technical product manager, not a team of software engineers.

Yes.

> that means a massive reduction in software engineers

That's exactly what everyone is hoping for. Well, everyone except software engineers, of course

Define everyone. I know a lot of SWEs who don't take their job for granted, always strive to add value, and try to keep skilled constantly and try to be extremely helpful. Maybe in SV where the salaries are high there is some schadenfreude but I don't see that on general for what is a worldwide industry. In most places it's just a standard job.

I don't understand the pleasure of putting people out of work and the pain on people's lives and careers but I guess that's just me.

Or a massive increase in the amount of software that gets written.

If the cost of writing software goes down, demand for it will presumably go up...

I would guess it's most likely both. The world could use a lot more software but it's not an unlimited appetite and the increase in productivity of SWEs will depress wages.

Just like chainsaws depressed the wages of lumberjacks, and cars decreased the need for people to move around.

Only if there is something for that software to do.

How many places have you worked where there's no backlog in Jira and the engineers legitimately have nothing to do other than sit around waiting for work to get assigned ‽

The valuable skills will be creativity, taste, curation, prioritisation etc.

All those skills can be applied to engineering as well. What makes Fabrice Bellard great? Its not just technical skill I think.

I think some of the most successful people will be a subset of engineers but also Steve Jobs types and artists

Most companies don't care about developers of their level, rather they offshore to the lowest bid.

Except that AI agents are the new offshoring. The new hotshot developer will be someone who understands what clients want deeply, knows the domain, has sufficient engineering skill to understand the system that needs to be built and is able to guide swarms of coding agents efficiently.

Having all this in one person is super valuable because you lose a lot of speed and fidelity in information exchange between brains. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could hit like 30-50 kloc/day within a few years. I can hit 5-10kloc/day doing this stuff depending on a lot of factors, and that's driving ~2 agents at a time mostly. Imagine driving 20.

I know how it feels, because I have been in enough projects driving offshoring teams.

Here is an unwanted advice, it is not going to be the new hotshot developer, rather hotshot technical and solution architects.

The dream of CASE tools is finally here, pump the requirements into the software factory (aks instruction files), and the replicator handles the rest.

You can't just be a solution architect, you have to be a systems architect, which is sort of the culmination of the developer skillset. I don't write code anymore really, but I know the purpose of everything my agents are doing and when they're making mistakes. I also have to know the domain, and be able to interact with clients, but without the technical chops I wouldn't be able to deliver on the level that I do.

How hard do you really think the job of “technical product manager” is? I'm not asking in a childish "management doesn't do anything" sort of way, but want to frame the question "if software engineers needed to retrain to be technical product managers, how many would sink, and how many would swim?

Basically the Star Trek model of computing.

All that’s really needed for this to work is a team of writers and plot conveniences.

And a general acceptance that every week something will go horribly wrong.

It seems unlikely that any one individual would be able to output a sufficient amount of context for that to not go off the rails really quickly (or just be extremely inefficient as most agents sit idle waiting for verification of their work)

That sounds like torture for me lol

In this "end state" what would the AI mind machine even have to code?

No. The "golden" end state of coding agents is free and open source coding agents running on my machine (or in whatever machine I want). Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal? For every `ls`, `ps`, `kill`? No sense, right? Well, same for LLMs.

I'm not saying "ban propietary LLMs", I'm saying: hackers (the ones that used to read sites like this) should have as their main tools free and open source ones.

> Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal?

Yes, because hardware and electricity aren't free.

I literally DO pay for every command. I just don't get an itemized bill so there's no transparency about it. Instead, I made some lump-sum hardware payment which is amortized over the total usage I get out of it, plus some marginal increase in my monthly electric bill when I use it.

Sure but the same thing would apply to the original comment, only that it's a locally hosted LLM that you're buying electricity for. That's different than paying rent for the privilege of using those commands and being at the mercy of the providers who choose to modify or EOL those commands as they see fit.

I agree with the sentiment, but isn’t Claude Code (the CLI) FOSS already? (Not sure it’s coupled to Claude the model API either, but if it is I imagine it’s not too hard to fix.)

Claude Code is closed source and Anthropic does take downs of decompilations.

Anthropic also announced something along those lines today as well, in beta: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action...

How did you find this? It doesn't pop up on any news sections on their site. I want to be on top of these kinds of things too!

In the age of hallucinations and AI summaries, actually getting news from the source is a revolutionary concept.

Fwiw, it was in their newsletter they sent out yesterday (it's how I learned about it).

> Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.

I was doing this with Cursor and MCPs. Got about a full day of this before I was rate limited and dropped to the slowest, dumbest model. I’ve done it with Claude too and quickly exhaust my rate limits. And the PRs are only “good to go” about 25% of the time, and it’s often faster to just do it right than find out where the AI screwed up.

> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on.

I see your point but in the other hand how depressing to be left only with the most soul crushing part of software entering - the Jira ticket.

I personally find figuring out what the product should be is the fun part. There still a need for architecting a plan, but the actual act of writing code isn't what gives me personal joy, it's the building of something new.

I understand the craft of code itself is what some people love though!

Thing is, LLMs are already better than people at the "architecting a plan" and "figuring out what the product should be" in details that go beyond high-level vibes. They do that even better than raw coding.

In fact, that's the main reason I like developing quick prototypes and small projects with LLMs. I use them less to write code for me, and more to cut through the bullshit "research" phase of figuring out what code to write, which libraries to pick, what steps and auxiliary work I'm missing in my concept, etc.

They’re great if word count is your measure. But it’s hard for LLMs to know the whole current SOTA and come up with something innovative and insightful. The same as 99% of human proposals. Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution

LLMs definitely know more of the current SOTA in everything than anyone alive, and that doesn't even count in the generous amount of searching capability granted to them by vendors. They may fail to utilize results fully due to limited reasoning ability, but they more than make up for it in volume.

> Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution

It's more like 0.01%, and it's not the target anyway. The world doesn't run on breakthroughs and great execution, it runs on the 99.99% of the so-so work and incremental refinement.

Say what you will, but this would have the wonderful side effect of forcing people who write JIRA tickets to actually think through and clearly express what it is they want built.

In that timeline, it wouldn't matter anymore since the people complaining about the poor JIRA tickets would be gone.

Yeah, that’ll be the product-oriented engineers / engineer-oriented product folks.

We will drop the narrow-minded deadweight that can only collect naive requirements, and the coding side that can only implement unambiguous tickets.

AKA Junior engineers

Anyone working on offshoring projects already knows how fun this happens to be.

The moment I am able to outsource work for Jira tickets to a level that AI actually delivers a reasonable pull request, many corporate managers will seriously wonder why keep the offshoring team around.

Offshoring team?

No, any team.

That will be the next step.

Including the management team?

Okay, okay, you got me :D

Yes. You are seriously overestimating the power most management has. If ownership could build a company without them, they would in a heartbeat.

Management only appears to have power because ownership wants workers to point their ire to them instead of at the real power.

I guess their customers will be AI, too, at some point? Where does this lead?

It seems like the Holy Grail here has become: "A business is one person, the CEO, sitting at his desk doing deals and directing virtual and physical agents to do accounting, run factories, manage R&D, run marketing campaigns, everything." That's it. A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer, and a big AI/robotics bill = every business. No pesky employees to pay. That's the ultimate end game here, that's what these guys want. Is that what we want?

Keep going, the end end goal is that even the customers are AI. And the company doesn't sell anything or do anything, it just trades NFTs and stocks and digital goods. And the money isn't real, it's all crypto. This is the ideal, to create nothing, to sell nothing to no one, and for somehow that to mean you created "value" to society and therefore should be rewarded in material terms. And greatly at that, the people setting all this up expect to be at the tippy top of the social ladder for this "contribution".

This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion. It's exactly what you expect from some reinforcement learning algorithm that only knows how to climb a gradient to maximize a singular reward. The concept of commerce has become the proverbial rat in the skinner box. It has figured out how to mainline the heroin drip if it just holds down the shock button and rewires its brain to get off on the pain. Sure it's an artificial high and hurts like hell to achieve it, but what else is there to live for? We made the line going up mean everything, so that's all that matters now. Doesn't matter if we don't want it, they want it. So that's what it's going to be.

"This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion"

This.

I am amazed that people usually are blind to this trajectory.

Surely at that point the CEO would be AI as well.

The owner (human) would say "build a company, make me a billion dollars" and that would be the only valuable input needed from him/her. Everything else would be derived & executed by the AI swarm, while owner plays video games (or generally enjoy the product of other people's AI-labor) 100% of the time.

I'd argue GPT4 (2022) was already AGI. It could output anything you (or Tim Cook, or any other smart guy) could possibly output given the relevant context. The reason it doesn't right now is we are not passing in all your life's context. If we achieve this, a human CEO has no edge over an AI CEO.

People are figuring this problem out very quickly, therefore the explosion of agentic capabilities happening right now even though the base model fundamentally does the same stuff as GPT4.

When it can come up with something new, then I might be with you.

> A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer...

Of all the professions that are at the risk of being downsized, I think lawyers are up there. We used to consult our lawyers so frequently about things big and small. We have now completely removed the small stuff from that equation. And most of our stuff is small. There is very little of the big stuff and I think LLMs aren't too far from taking care of that as well.

Yup I have said for the past year to anyone that'll listen, that the concept of hourly (white collar) work will go away.

And there's no better example of hourly work than lawyers.

Personally, I've always disliked the model of billing by the hour because it incentivizes the wrong things, but it is easier to get clients to justify these costs (because they're used to thinking in that framework).

I'd rather take on the risk and find ways to do more efficient work. It's actually FUN to do things that way. And nowadays, this is where AI can benefit in that framework the most.

But I know I'm probably in the minority.

If this happens, everyone is his personal CEO from that moment on.

Yes, I want it. It would 100* our GDP, and make people significantly more independent.

Mix it with open source unbiased AI, living on a land large enough to feed you and your family, and cheap energy, and utopia is here.

Why would they pay you six figures to outsource to AI when they could pay offshore a fraction of that to do the same?

Because of human factors, no complains, can do overtime as much as electricity is on, no unions, and everything else that a good CEO to the whims of exponential growth for their shareholder likes to do so much.

So far, automation has only ever increased the need for software development. Jevons Paradox plus the recursive nature of software means that there's always more stuff to do.

The real threats to our profession are things like climate change, extreme wealth concentration, political instability, cultural regression and so on. It's the stuff that software stands on that one should worry about, not the stuff that it builds towards.

Maybe I’m not think big picture enough… but have you ever tried using generative AI (i.e., a transformer) to create a circuit schematic? They fail miserably. Worse than Chat GPT-2 at generating text.

The current SOTA models can do some impressive things, in certain domains. But running a business is way more than generating JavaScript.

The way I see it, only some jobs will be impacted by generative AI in the near term. Not replaced, augmented.

Can't you have that already?

Put the Aider CLI into a GitHub action that's triggered by an issue creation and you're good to go.

Aider is definitely in the same camp. Last time I checked, they weren't optimizing for the full "agent infinitely looping until completion" usecase, and didn't have MCP support.

But it's 100% the same class of tool and the awesome part of the unixy model is hopefully agents can be substituted in for each other in your pipeline for whichever one is better for the usecase, just like models are interoperable.

I tried aider today with a Gemini API key and billing account. It’s not close to the experience I have with Claude Code on Saturday which was able to implement a full feature.

The main difference is I interact with Claude Code only through conversation. Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools, the model and Aider. For example, constantly having to add files and parse the less than ideal console output compared to how Claude code handles user feedback.

"Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools"

I personally see that as a plus, because other tools are lacking on the tool side. Aider seems to have solid "traditional" engineering behind its tooling.

"constantly having to add files"

That's fair. However, Aider automatically adds files that trigger it via comments and it asks to add the files that are mentioned in the conversation.

"parse the less than ideal console output"

That's fair too. Still, the models aren't there yet, so I value tools that don't hide the potential crap that thee models produce 20-30% of the time.

The vision of submitting a feature request and receiving a ready-to-review PR is equally compelling and horrifying from the standpoint of strategy management.

Like Anthropic and most big tech companies, they don't want to show off the best until they need to. They used to stockpile some cool features, and they have time to think about their strategy. But now I feel like they are in a rush to show off everything and I'm worried whether the management has time to think about the big picture.

You should use some of those agents yourself to fix some glaring issues at your landing page.

Setting aside predictions about the future and what is best for humanity and all that for a moment this is just such a bummer on a personal level. My whole job would become the worst parts of my job.

(please pardon the self-promotion) This is exactly what my product https://cheepcode.com does (connects to your Linear/Jira/etc and submits PRs to GitHub) - I agree that’s the golden state, and that’s why I’m rushing to get out of private beta as fast as I can* :) It’s a bootstrapped operation right now which limits my speed a bit but this is the vision I’ve been working towards for the past few months.

*I have a few more safety/scalability changes to make but expecting public launch in a few weeks!

> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.

Isn’t that effectively the promise of the most recently released OpenAI codex?

From the reviews I’ve been able to find so far though, quality of output is ehh.

Thats the promise. The reality is that it's just a subpar version of Claude Code which doesn't support MCP.

It totally is!

I bias a bit to wanting the agent to be a pluggable component into a flow I own, rather than a platform in a box.

It'll be interesting to see where the different value props/use cases of a Delvin/v0 vs a Codex Cloud vs Claude Code/Codex CLI vs Cursor land.

golden age consultant paycheck

played around with connecting https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master via mcp to create a prd which basically replaces the ticket grooming process and then executing it with claude code creating a branch named like the ticket and pushing after having created the unit tests and constant linting.

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