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Comment by pico303 | Hacker News Reader

The example in the article of letting Claude deploy the app worries me. It has me thinking of that line, “AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about.” If the author was clueless of how to deploy the app, how do they know the app was deployed safely or securely?

Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you didn’t know C++ very well. It turned out Claude knew even less about this library than I did, generating tons of code that was completely incorrect. I eventually solve my problem through research and trial and error, and it was nothing like what Claude recommended. It certainly didn’t leave me feeling confident enough to let the LLM have the level of control over my computer or project that the author is allowing it in the article.

I’m not looking forward to a future spending all my time cleaning up the messes LLM’s create.

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>"AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about."

Maybe this is a case well represented by the bell curve meme? "AI is great; can do everything" (but you've no domain knowledge so cannot guide it and everything means autonomous creation, so when eventually reaches a roadblock will have no idea what to do), "AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about" (then seemingly doesn't work and is even counterproductive), "AI is great; can do everything" (you've domain knowledge and can guide it and everything means application and assistance).

Essentially rather hope for the LLM to create all by itself as seems to be the current case for many, you should be able utilize your knowledge and have it assist you to both generate an initial code and converge it to where you want.

I agree you need to know what you’re doing. But Claude Code is definitely better than I am at some things- probably the most important of which is starting some mundane task that I would otherwise procrastinate indefinitely.

It’s very good at Typescript, search, and research, but still does stupid stuff and requires review and steering.

I don’t get into the same flow while using it, either, but I think that might be a matter of time. I find it allows me to spend more of my time thinking at a higher level. I could see myself learning to really enjoy that. Code review is exhausting, though, and has always been my least favorite aspect of the job. It seems my future is going to be code-review-heavy, and that is probably the biggest drawback.

“Better than me” != “good”

I know approximately nothing about approximately everything. Claude seems pretty good at those things. But in every case I’ve used Claude Code for something I do know about it’s been unsatisfactory as a solo operator. It’s not useless, but it is basically useless for anything serious unless you’re very actively guiding it.

I think it has a lot of potential value and will become more useful over time, but it’ll be most useful when we can confidently understand the limitations.

I know a lot about Typescript and its ecosystem. I’ve taught it to students, and worked on it at companies whose names you’d recognize. Claude Code is better than I am at some things that I know deeply, in some cases. It does stupid things on occasion (like use global mutable state), but it is still more useful than not. So, I guess it depends on how you define “better”, but I’ve learned things I didn’t know, and it allows me to do projects and experiments that I’d otherwise be too lazy to do.

You forgot to mention that you're a cat on the internet.

yeah- this is a fair concern and I should have been clearer. I wouldnt do this on anything with real data or production traffic. that hetzner instance was a side project with nothing sensitive on it. the point was more about claudes ability to reason through infrastructure problems not that everyone should hand over ssh keys. you're right to be cautious

> But then I mentioned I had credits on Fly.io, was eligible for Vercel's free tier, had a Cloudflare account, and a Neon database.

I miss the days where deploying an app was just uploading some files. Maybe we need AI to understand this artificial complexity we introduced ourselves?

Right there with you. I’m working on fixing an app deployment this weekend myself and dreading picking my way through GitHub actions, ansible scripts, container configs, and deployment APIs to figure how why the thing stopped deploying. Thank goodness it’s just deploying to VMs and not Kube, or I’d probably lose a week.

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