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Comment by jascha_eng | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of non developer claude code users these days. The hype about vibe coding lets everyone think they can now be an engineer. Problem is if anthropic caters to that crowd the devs that are using it to do somewhat serious engineering tasks and don't believe in the "run an army of parallel agents and pray" methodology are being alienated.

Maybe Claude Code web or desktop could be targeted to these new vibe coders instead? These folks often don't know how simple bash commands work so the terminal is the wrong UX anyway. Bash as a tool is just very powerful for any agentic experience.

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It’s funny because on one end of the spectrum you have non dev vibe coders for whom every log is noise

On the other end are the hardcore user orchestrating a bunch of agents, not sitting there watching one run, so they don’t care about these logs at all

In the middle are the engineers sitting there watching the agent go

Logs (and in this case, Verbose Mode) aren't for knowing what a thing is currently doing as its doing it, it's for finding out what happened when the thing didn't do what you expected or wanted.

The non dev vibe coders are probably a bigger group of users, and therefore equal more money. Change justified...

The others are also paying. Make it configurable...

If 80% of their paying customers are vibe coders then it makes sense to make IDE “easy” for them. “Hey, Claude, make a website. Don’t make mistakes.”

Or, it could serve as a textbook example how to make your real future long term customers (=fluent coders) angry… what a strategy :)

Microsoft fell into this trap in the 90s -- they believed that they could hide the DOS prompt, and make everything "easier" with wizards where you just go through a series of screens clicking "next", "next", "finish".

Yes, it was easier. But it dumbed down a generation of developers.

It took them two decades to try to come up with Powershell, but it was too late.

I think Dario & crew are getting high on their own supply and really believe the "software developers out of work by end of 2026" pronouncements.

Meanwhile all evidence is that the true value of these tools is in their ability to augment & super-charge competent software engineers, not replace them.

Meanwhile the quality of Claude Code the tool itself is a bit of a damning indictment of their philosophy.

Give me a team of experienced sharp diligent engineers with these coding tools and we can make absolutely amazing things. But newbie product manager with no software engineering fundamentals issuing prompts will make a mess.

I can see it even in my own work -- when I venture into doing frontend eng using these tools the results look good but often have reliability issues. Because my background/specialization is in systems, embedded & backend work -- I'm not good at reviewing the React etc code it makes.

Amodei has to be the most insufferable of all the AI hucksters, nowadays even Altman looks tame compared to him.

The whole company also has this meme about AI safety and some sort of fear-mongering about the models every few months. It's basically a smokescreen for normies and other midwits to make it look more mysterious and advanced than it really is. OOOOH IT'S GOING TO BREAK OUT! IT KNOWS IT'S BEING EVALUATED!

I bet there are some true believers in Anthropic too, people who think themselves too smart to believe in God so they replaced it with AI instead but all the same hopes are there, eg. Amodei preaching about AI doubling the human lifespan. In religion we usually talk about heaven.

Just 1 more data center build, man! A few more megawatts and double the context window and it's AGI!

I just want useful tools.

Exactly how I feel. I'm happy that more people are using these tools and learning (hopefully) about engineering but it shouldn't degrade the core experience for let's say "more advanced" users who don't see themselves as Vibe coders and want precise control over what's happening.

> learning (hopefully) about engineering

Not a chance.

If anything, the reverse, in that it devalues engineering. For most, LLMs are a path to an end-product without the bother or effort of understanding. No different than paid engineers were, but even better because you don't have to talk to engineers or pay them.

The sparks of genuine curiosity here are a rounding error.

If I give pupils the solution book will they learn or just copy the answers?

There is a reason why nowadays games start to help massively if the player gets stuck.

"There is a reason why nowadays games start to help massively if the player gets stuck"

You mean those "free" games, that are hard and grindy by design and the offered help comes in the shape of payed perks to solve the challenges?

No, those paid games where NPCs starts to point to clues if the player takes too long to solve a riddle or where you can skip the hard parts if you fail to often.

Anecdotally, all the non-technical people I know are adapting fine to the console. You don’t need to know how bash commands work to use it as you are just approving commands, not writing them.

Approving commands you don't understand doesn't seem ideal

People are handing over their entire system to openclaw, so that's about where we are.

Because we haven't heard about the disaster stories yet, give it some time and see how people will talk about it as if it were a virus.

> The hype about vibe coding lets everyone think they can now be an engineer.

Programmers are just jealous that they are no longer the only ones that get to play pretend.

I don't know anything about you personally, but most "software engineers" are anything but.

I am curious to know why you believe that?

I've worked as a software engineer with different types of engineers (electrical, mechanical and automation).

Their testing is often more strict but that is a natural consequence of their products being significantly harder to fix in the field than a software product is.

Other than that, my experience is that our way of working on projects across disciplines is very similar.

There are many camps. Some programmers embrace the prompt, some use parts of it, some reject it on principle (a dying breed?), some think that non-developers are finally getting a go at it, some gloat that tech barons are making software engineers (apply optional quotes) obsolete.

It’s all too varied to put people into one or two camps.

And even if there are lots of vibe coders who don’t like/need the information then make it a toggle for those who want/need it

Run an army of parallel agents is orders of magnitude more profit per human, so they will tend to steer you towards that.

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