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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

Well. I was a sceptic for a long time, but a friend recently convinced me to try Claude Code and showed me around. I revived an open source project I regularly get back to, code for a bit, have to wrestle with toil and dependency updates, and loose the joy before I really get a lot done, so I stop again.

With Claude, all it took to fix all of that drudge was a single sentence. In the last two weeks, I implemented several big features, fixed long standing issues and did migrations to new major versions of library dependencies that I wouldn’t have tackled at all on my own—I do this for fun after all, and updating Zod isn’t fun. Claude just does it for me, while I focus on high-level feature descriptions.

I’m still validating and tweaking my workflow, but if I can keep up that pace and transfer it to other projects, I just got several times more effective.

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This sounds to me like a lack of resource management, as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring.

As a creator of an open-source platform myself, I find trusting a semi-random word generator in front of users unreliable.

Moreover, I believe it creates a bad habit. I've seen developers forget how to read documentation and instead trust AI, and of course, as a result AI makes mistakes that are hard to debug or provokes security issues that are easy to overlook.

I know this sounds like a luddite talking, but I'm still not convinced that AI in its current state can be reliable in any way. However, because of engineers like you, AI is learning to make better choices, and that might change in the future.

That’s a totally fair take IMHO, and I’m very much conflicted on several ends on this topic—for example, would I want my juniors to use an agent? No; not even the mid levels, probably. As you say, it’s easy to form bad habits, and you need a good intuition for architecture and complexity, otherwise you end up with broken, unmaintainable messes. but if you have that, it’s like magic.

> as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring.

Yeah this sounds interesting, and matches my experience a bit. I was trying out AI for the Christmas cuz people I know are talking about it. I asked it to implement something (refactoring for better performance) that I think should be simple, it did that and looks amazing, all tests passed too! When I look into the implementation, AI got the shape right, but the internals were more complicated than needed and were wrong. Nonetheless it got me started into fixing things, and it got fixed quite quickly.

The performance of the model in this case is not great, perhaps it is also because I am new to this and don't know how to prompt it properly. But at least it is interesting.

This sounds a lot like the classic "the way to get a good answer on the internet is to post a wrong answer first", but in reverse - the AI gives you a bad version which trolls you into digging in and giving the right answer :-)

> a semi-random word generator

Calling tools like Claude Code a "semi-random word generator" is certainly a choice, and I suspect it won't age well.

I think AI coding should not be permitted in the first two years of training in CS. One should have to learn the basics of reading quality documentation, creating quality code and documentation, learning how the different pieces of software work together, and learning how to work with others.

LLMs are great for people with some idea of what they're doing, and need "someone else" to pair program with. I agree it will cripple the architectural thinking of new learners if they never learn how to think about code on their own.

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