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Comment by yard2010 | Hacker News Reader

yard2010·

Honest question - does using claude code and steering it to type the code I want counts as hand-built? Like doing actual PRs, nit picking, basically treating it as a jr/product/typist while I'm the one making ALL the decisions? Reading every line and approving manually if it's a code that I would write?

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No it does not count as hand built. In the same way that a human pressing buttons, such that an automated production line makes a watch, and then at the end a human goes and looks at it and says "yup that's a watch" isn't a hand-made watch.

Nice opinion but it's clearly a spectrum and not binary. Is assembling machine-made components by hand to make a watch hand-made?

I don't call my Ikea furniture hand-built.

In the age of LLMs we can assume that any code was generated by an LLM unless noted otherwise, so I think it is fair to not point out the use of LLMs. However, words like hand built should be reserved for the instances where the code was actually written unassisted. Reading all the code means nothing, there is no such thing as code that was written as if you had written it, unless you have written it.

You're not making all the decisions in that case. You're making approvals and steering but the agent is making decisions and is framing what is even available to you to approve. When you build something by hand, you make decisions as you go in a way that the agent is now replacing.

Directly equivalent to having outsourced it to a shop of remote consultants where you remained as onshore lead. And in all those past cases we would have said "No."

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