deterministic

What an excellent read and project! This is why I read HN :)

My experience as well, working on very large-scale C++ code.

Thanks for adding such a thoughtful and level-headed comment to the discussion.

> Microsoft is a monopolist that makes some of the most hated products on earth

Really? That is quite a claim. You are talking about one of the worlds most successful software companies. What fact based research or large scale survey do you base that on?

> Anyone who thinks they can produce high quality code from an LLM is mistaken about how to judge code

Sorry, but you are 100% wrong.

I have 30+ years of professional development experience working on complex, very large-scale C++ code used by companies around the world.

I care deeply about code quality and always have. More than any other developer I've worked with in my 30+ year career. And I'm now using Claude Code to push the quality bar much higher.

But you have to learn how to use it properly. It's a tool. Quality doesn't happen automatically.

It's a big mistake, and frankly quite arrogant, to assume that because it doesn't work for you, it can't work for anyone else. Or that the rest of us must either be lying or incompetent.

I completely agree. It 100% matches my experience. The C++ code I maintain now is higher quality, more maintainable, higher performance, less buggy, and faster to modify now using Claude Code.

However it doesn't happen automatically. I spent a lot of time experimenting with Claude Code to figure out the right way to use it.

It's a tool. Learn how to use it well.

You might as well use “magic” in your comments instead of “AI” and you would make an equal amount of sense.

You are not an outlier. 40+ years of hobby and pro coding experience here and I absolutely love Claude Code. It enables me to dramatically increase code quality, performance, and features while still doing the fun parts and letting the LLM do the boring parts.

I'm surprised to hear that. LLMs make it practical to prove safety-critical C code correct without the cost that has traditionally made formal verification prohibitive. If you haven't explored that area, it's worth a look.

My experience with C and C++ has also been excellent. I work on very large, high-performance C++ systems used to run airlines and airports, and LLMs have dramatically improved both the quality and the performance of our code.

That said, LLMs are tools, and like any tool they take skill to use well. It took me months of experimenting and learning from others to get where I am now.

Not my experience at all. I’ve coded for fun for 40+ years and professionally for 30, and I absolutely love Claude Code. I write far more high-quality, high-performance code, and I learn much faster. I no longer have to agonize over which fun project to pick. I can do them all.

There is a trick, though: using these models well is a skill. It’s a tool, and you won’t get good results without experimenting, learning from others, and settling on a workflow that fits what you care about.

I completely agree. Every time I remove boost from projects the build times drop dramatically and it usually doesn't take much work to swap the boost code for something else that isn't template fetish art.

> Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building

Not my experience at all. Quite the opposite. I have seen so many "designer buildings" that looked beautiful in pictures but were a nightmare for the people working there.

This seems to happen whenever Microsoft buys a company and "assimilates" it into its culture. The same thing happened with Skype.

That said, Microsoft isn't alone. The YouTube Android app has so many basic bugs that I sometimes wonder if the developers have tried asking an AI to "find all the bugs" in their code. It might do a better job! Large blank spaces in downloads, incorrect watch states, forgotten watch states, etc.

Agree. People who have a problem with this either don't understand how the MIT license works or what the spirit of Open Source is.

I'm getting really tired of the knee-jerk "AI bad!" online reactions to anything AI related.

I most certainly am. I taught myself how to program 40+ years ago and I love using Claude Code both at work and at home for hobby projects.

It feels like going from walking to running. Love it!

I’m starting to believe we may actually need more developers in the future.

Projects that were previously too expensive to fund may now be viable with a small team using AI.

In other words, AI could make the pie of software projects much bigger. And building those projects still requires experienced developers who know how to use AI effectively.

Doesn’t GIMP have a hardware abstraction layer making this kind of port trivial? If not I recommend that the team looks at how games are made portable. Think about different versions of GTK as different hardware platforms and design the software accordingly.

I’ve been through some really bad stuff, and one thing I learned the hard way is this: don’t automatically trust your feelings or your thoughts.

Your brain can come up with completely random, untrue conclusions and make them feel 100% true. It can convince you, beyond any doubt, that something terrible is going to happen in the future. When in reality it’s just fear making predictions that never come true.

So hang in there. Use your logical brain. Ask yourself: What actual evidence do I have that what I’m thinking is true? Separate what you know from what you fear.

Then keep moving forward. Push through the fear. Let time pass. Give reality a chance to prove your predictions wrong.

Because often the thing that feels absolutely certain is nothing more than your brain telling you a completely and utterly random story. And you don’t have to believe it.

Where is the evidence for this? I use Claude every day at work but other than that my life hasn’t changed at all. Electricity, food production, security, human relations, the house I live in etc. hasn’t change.

So far LLM’s have been really bad at creating the most important things in life. Like food, shelter, security, electricity, water, medical breakthroughs, better politics, better connection etc. etc. etc.

So AI’s will have some impact on the economy but it’s debatable how much and how long it will take.

Humans still compete playing chess, sprinting etc. even though machines are vastly superior to humans. Real artists can’t not do art. They do it for the pleasure of doing it. Not to compete with other humans or machines. And there will be artists who will use AI to create mind blowing new types of art that would have been impossible before. I can’t wait to see how humans will use this powerful new tool for creativity.

> "go after profitable niches and avoid unwinnable fights"

Straight out of "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.

That's really interesting. Can you go deeper on how you achieved that? A loop comparing procedurally generated model with reference image?

> Too many people don't think for themselves enough in this post-GenAI world

This is nothing new. IMHO, 90% of people are happy to outsource their thinking to some "authority", whether it’s a priest, politician, cult leader, technocrat, news media, or their boss.

Perhaps outsourcing your thinking to an "average" LLM is actually more sane than blindly following some random "authority".

> My answer is because forcing a type hierarchy

I happily work in typed languages and nobody is forcing me to create any type hierarchies.

Merging data and behaviour into a single unit (the core idea behind OOP) is literally impossible to do in practice.

Just imagine "sending a message to an int to send a copy of itself to a HTTP server" or "send a message to an array of colors to raytrace itself" or "send a message to a file asking it to sort itself and render itself in 3D".

The problem is that everything will literally end up depending on everything. A perfect implementation of the ultimate spaghetti code.

In contrast, split the code into Data, Dumper, Reader, Writer, Verifier, Renderer, Editor etc. modules (or classes used as modules) and the code is simple to understand with zero circular dependencies. And it works for any language including non-OO languages.

In my experience: The poorer the neighbourhood the worse the trash, graffiti, broken windows etc.

It's interesting how different your experience is from mine. I would love to find out why it works so well for me but not for you.

I use Opus 5 every day, and it just works. It is very rare that I need to do any manual editing.

That is interesting. I use Opus 5 as my daily driver, and it pretty much just works.

For example, a few weeks ago I asked it to analyse my code and find duplicated code that could be extracted into reusable libraries. It found several good examples and did the refactoring. I reviewed the result, and it was 100% how I would have coded it myself.

I do almost no manual coding these days. Opus 5 just works for me.

So it is strange for me to read comments like yours saying that it doesn't work. It would be interesting to find out what makes the difference?

> Survival of fittest would be if opinions were allowed, and let the best one wi

Not at all. By definition, the only thing a survivor needs to accomplish is to survive.

And who decides which one is "the best"? You need someone to make that judgement. That was exactly my point. You may not agree with a typical moderator's judgement, but that doesn't change the fact that, within that narrow context, they are playing the role of deciding what is good.

Lean is based on Type Theory not ZFC.