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Comment by chadcmulligan | Hacker News Reader

Maybe OT - I find Claude Code hit or miss, I spend a lot of time removing dumb code or asking Claude to remove it eg "why do you have a separate..." Claude: "Good catch — there's no real reason...." and so on.

Where I find it incredible - learning new things, I recently started flutter/dart dev - I just ask Claude to tell me about the bits, or explaining things to me, it's truly revolutionary imho, I'm building things in flutter after a week without reading a book or manual. It's like a talking encyclopaedia, or having an expert on tap, do many people use it like this? or am I just out of the loop, I always think of Star Trek when I'm doing it. I architected / designed a new system by asking Claude for alternatives and it gave me an option I'd never considered to a problem, it's amazing for this, after all it's read all the books and manuals in the world, it's just a matter of asking the right questions.

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Ive done a couple exploratory learning with AIs and wow could it help with learning.

Imo we may be messing up the economy with AIs. They should be engineering better workers, not being employed to make one person do the work of three poorly.

The power of AIs to smooth learning and raise expertise, rather than replace it, should be the adaptation goal. Obviously AIs as work assistants are powerful, but all the AI bullshitting CEOs overselling AIs is really damaging on the whole economic level

Particularly because the current marketing leads to the next generation abandoning roles that AI bullshitters claim are perfectly replaced.

It's like the urbanization demographic bomb on steroids.

I find myself worrying the AI bubble will pop and we'll lose this aspect of AI's without it ever being properly explored. Instead of doomscrolling now I find myself firing up claude and saying 'explain ... to me' and it proceeds to tell me all about it. I can ask it questions and it seems fairly right - at least right enough for me to proceed, it's way better at this than building code, in my experience anyway.

When people say the "bubble will pop" it's meant in analogy to the dotcom era - businesses and investers lost money, but the internet (and its opportunities) didn't vanish.

Even open-weight local models are becoming good enough for teaching yourself quite a range of stuff, especially the beginner aspects. LLMs are not going to simply disappear because of a financial reallignment. The worst thing might be not being able to access a super-duper frontier model for free?

Many people use it like this - this is playing to its strengths, rather than trying to work around its weaknesses. "What's the idiomatic X language way to do Y?" gets you a solid, useful answer in seconds.

But it's just a damn good tool, not the apocalypse/the thing that lets you finally fire everyone. So it kind of gets lost in the hype.

this is the only use case I'm super bullish on. And for this it is revolutionary. Agreed.

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