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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

I'm still faster than the cheap bots.

The creative part for me includes both the implementation and the design, because the implementation also matters. The bots get in the way.

Maybe I would be faster if I paid for Claude Code. It's too expensive to evaluate.

If you like your expensive AI autocomplete, fine. But I have not seen any demonstrable and maintainable productivity gains from it, and I find understanding my whole implementation faster, more fun, and that it produces better software.

Maybe that will change, but people told me three years ago that we would be at the point today where I could not outdo the bot;

with all due respect, I am John Henry and I am still swinging my hammer. The steam pile driving machine is still too unpredictable!

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> The creative part for me includes both the implementation and the design

The implementations LLMs end up writing are predicable, because my design locks down what it needs to do. I basically know exactly what they'll end up doing, and how, but it types faster than I do, that's why I hand it off while I go on to think about the next design iteration.

I currently send every single prompt to Claude, Codex, Qwen and Gemini (looks something like this: https://i.imgur.com/YewIjGu.png), and while the all most of the time succeed, doing it like this makes it clear that they're following what I imagined they'd do during the design phase, as they all end up with more or less the same solutions.

> If you like your expensive AI autocomplete

I don't know if you mean that in jest, but what I'm doing isn't "expensive AI autocomplete". I come up with what has to be done, the design for achieving so, then hand off the work. I don't actually write much code at all, just small adjustments when needed.

> and I find understanding my whole implementation faster

Yeah, I guess that's the difference between "vibe-coding" and what I (and others) are doing, as we're not giving up any understanding or control of the architecture and design, but instead focus mostly on those two things while handing off other work.

I agree, and my flow is similar

I've made great use of AI by keeping my boundaries clear and my requirements tight, and by rigorously ensuring I understand _every_ line of code I commit

I believe software development will transition to a role closer to director/reviewer/editor, where knowledge of programming paradigms are just as important as now, but also where _communication_ skills separate the good devs from the _great_ devs

The difference between a 1x dev and a 10x dev in future will be the latter knows how to clearly and concisely describe a problem or a requirement to laymen, peers, and LLMs alike. Something I've seen many devs struggle with today (myself included)

> but also where _communication_ skills separate the good devs from the _great_ devs

I think it has been that way since forever. If you look at all the great projects, it’s rare for the guy at the helm to not be a good communicator. And at corporate job, you soend a good chunk of the year writing stuff to people. Even the code you’re writing, you think abou the next person who’s going to read it.

I think that has always been the difference. First principles.

Claude code is too expensive to evaluate?

It's 20 bucks a month

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