I'm old, so I remember when Skyrim came out. At the time, people were howling about how "dumbed down" the RPG had become compared to previous versions. They had simplified so many systems. Seemed to work out for them overall.
I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in that.
And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the quality of the final output.
I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
That is a very insightful point. It highlights the irony of complaining about "loss of control" immediately after voluntarily inviting an autonomous agent into the codebase.
Those specific logs are essentially a prop anyways. Removing them makes it harder to LARP as an active participant; it forces the realization that "we" are now just passive observers.
They have a dedicated product called Co-work for non-technical people. Claude Code is a *coding* tool (it's in the name) and anthropic has made decisions to thoroughly annoy a lot of the users.
> I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
If it sounds strange your theory might be wrong.
Telepsychology is one of the lowest forms of response.
Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time. Dark Messiah Might and Magic did everything except music and exploration/scale better, and I mean a LOT better. It's from 2006.
> Skyrim is one of the most over-rated games of all time.
Those are fightin’ words as someone who has dumped more hours than I can count into Skyrim but…
I had never heard of this game, but it has a lot going for it (source engine) and I watched a little of the gameplay you linked and I’m intrigued. I’m probably gonna pick this up for the steam deck.
A friend recommended the Might and Magic games to me a long time ago and I bought them off GoG, but wasn’t a fan of the gameplay and just couldn’t get hooked. This looks very different from what I remember (probably because this is a very different game from the earlier ones).
> We all know that the industry has taken a step back in terms of code quality by at least a decade. Hardly anyone tests anymore.
I see pseudo-scientific claims from both sides of this debate but this is a bit too far for me personally. "We all know" sounds like Eternal September [1] kind of reasoning. I've been in the industry about as long as the article author and I think he might be looking with rose-tinted glasses on the past. Every aging generation looks down at the new cohort as if they didn't go through the same growing pains.
But in defense of this polemic, and laying out my cards as an AI maximalist and massive proponent of AI coding, I've been wondering the same. I see articles all the time about people writing this and that software using these new tools and it so often is the case they never actually share what they built. I mean, I can understand if someone is heads-down cranking out amazing software using 10 Claude Code instances and raking in that cash. But not even to see one open source project that embraces this and demonstrates it is a bit suspicious.
I mean, where is: "I rewrote Redis from scratch using Claude Code and here is the repo"?
> I mean, where is: "I rewrote Redis from scratch using Claude Code and here is the repo"?
This is one of my big datapoints in the skepticism, there's all these articles about how individual developers are doing amazing things, but almost no data points about the increase of productivity as a result.
I must have written somewhere that I’m believing these claims once Linux UI becomes as polished as MacOS. Surely if LLMs are outputting this much quality code that shouldn’t take long, right?
Meanwhile I see WhatsApp sunsetting their native clients and making everything a single web-based client. I guess they must not be using LLMs to code if they can’t cope with maintaining the existing codebases, right?
I want to consider the higher-level claims in the article. In between the historical context helpfully provided by the article there is also some speculation about Merkaba, Platonic solids, Flower of Life and other sacred geometry.
There is a premise hidden in those speculations that there is some strong connection between the structure of the universe itself and the structures humans find pleasing when listening to music. And I detect a suggestion that studying the output of our most genius musicians might reveal some kind of hidden information about the universe, specifically related to some kind of "spirituality".
This was a sentiment shared, in some sense, by the deists of the enlightenment. They rejected the scriptures and instead believed that studying the physical universe might reveal the "mind of God".
If we are looking for correspondences between these things - why limit ourselves to Euclidean geometry? Modern physics leans on Riemannian geometry, symmetry, and topology. It appears the topology of the universe, under a wide array of experiments, is way more complicated than the old geometric ideas. Most physicists talk about Lie Groups, fiber bundles, etc.
If you take "as above, so below" seriously and you want to find connections between cosmology and music, I believe you have to use modern mathematical tools. I think we need to expand beyond geometry and embrace topology. Can we think of the chromatic scale tones as a Group? What operators would we need? etc.
It's interesting to try to get into the head of a guy like Coltrane and his mathematical approach, but perhaps we could be pushing new boundaries based on new understanding.
According to the spec, yes a grammar checker would be subject to disclosure:
> ai-modified Indicates AI was used to assist with or modify content primarily created by humans. The source material was not AI-generated. Examples include AI-based grammar checking, style suggestions, or generating highlights or summaries of human-written text.
I'm still calibrating myself on the size of task that I can get Claude Code to do before I have to intervene.
I call this problem the "goldilocks" problem. The task has to be large enough that it outweighs the time necessary to write out a sufficiently detailed specification AND to review and fix the output. It has to be small enough that Claude doesn't get overwhelmed.
The issue with this is, writing a "sufficiently detailed specification" is task dependent. Sometimes a single sentence is enough, other times a paragraph or two, sometimes a couple of pages is necessary. And the "review and fix" phase again is totally dependent and completely unknown. I can usually estimate the spec time but the review and fix phase is a dice roll dependent on the output of the agent.
And the "overwhelming" metric is again not clear. Sometimes Claude Code can crush significant tasks in one shot. Other times it can get stuck or lost. I haven't fully developed an intuition for this yet, how to differentiate these.
What I can say, this is an entirely new skill. It isn't like architecting large systems for human development. It isn't like programming. It is its own thing.
This is why I'm still dubious about the overall productivity increase we'll see from AI once all the dust settles.
I think it's undeniable that in narrow well controlled use cases the AI does give you a bump. Once you move beyond that though the time you have to spend on cleanup starts to seriously eat into any efficiency gains.
And if you're in a domain you know very little about, I think any use case beyond helping you learn a little quicker is a net negative.
Absolutely. And what I find fascinating that this experience is highly personal. I read probably 876 different “How I code with LLMs” and I can honestly say not a single thing I read and tried (and I tried A LOT) “worked” for me…
not sure this is really true/fair, I think what LLM/agentic code enthusiasts will say is that they have found their way to be effective with it while naysayers will fight the "this is sh*t" battle until they are eventually out of the workforce.
So, why do you only opt for that side of the argument? Why not indulge in the side of the naysayers will be able to keep a job after the bubble bursts because they still know how to code by hand? And that exact sentiment is what I was alluding to.
There is maybe some truth to the LLM vibe coding and there maybe is some truth to the “old guard” saying “this is shit”, because this might be shit for very good reasons.
I’ve been doing this sht for 30 years and one thing I can tell you I learned - when you see something as “groundbreaking” (controversial?) as llms and see many people telling you how much more productive they are with it there are almost always two camps:
- those fighting HARD to tell you at the top of their lungs “oh this is sht, I tried it and it is baaaad
- those going “hmmm let me see how I can learn etc to get to the point where I am also a lot more productive, if ____ and ____ can learn it so can I…”
I seem to have forgotten the golden rule to never speak out against LLMs, yet you be subjected to instant downvotes. I don't mind the downvotes, but bring some counterpoints to the discussion and make it worth the platform.
one of the likely reasons you are getting downvoted is that you made a snarky remark. (unsolicited) word of advice - you should always listen to the enthusiasts (if you are not one of them), they have figured something out before you did (nothing wrong with that, many people are much smarter than you and I)...
>I haven't fully developed an intuition for this yet, how to differentiate these.
The big issue is that, even though there is a logical side to it, part is adapting to a close system that can change under your feet. New model, new prompt, there goes your practice.
My experience is: AI written prompts are overly long and overly specific. I prefer to write the instructions myself and then direct the LLM to ask clarifying questions or provide an implementation plan. Depending on the size of change I go 1-3 rounds of clarifications until Claude indicates it is ready and provides a plan that I can review.
I do this in a task_descrtiption.md file and I include the clarifications in its own section (the files follow a task.template.md format).
> What I can say, this is an entirely new skill. It isn't like architecting large systems for human development. It isn't like programming. It is its own thing.
It's management!
I find myself asking very similar questions to you: how much detail is too much? How likely is this to succeed without my assistance? If it does succeed, will I need to refactor? Am I wasting my time delegating or should I just do it?
It's almost identical to when I delegate a task to a junior... only the feedback cycle of "did I guess correctly here" is a lot faster... and unlike a junior, the AI will never get better from the experience.
I think ghostty is a popular enough project that it attracts a lot of attention, and that means it certainly attracts a larger than normal amount of interlopers. There are all kinds of bothersome people in this world, but some of the most bothersome you will find are well meaning people who are trying to be helpful.
I would guess that many (if not most) of the people attempting to contribute AI generated code are legitimately trying to help.
People who are genuinely trying to be helpful can often become deeply offended if you reject their help, especially if you admonish them. They will feel like the reprimand is unwarranted, considering the public shaming to be an injury to their reputation and pride. This is most especially the case when they feel they have followed the rules.
For this reason, if one is to accept help, the rules must be clearly laid out from the beginning. If the ghostty team wants to call out "slop", then it must make it clear that contributing "slop" may result in a reprimand. Then the bothersome want-to-be helpful contributors cannot claim injury.
One thing I've noticed with all the LLMs that I use (Gemini, GPT, Claude) is a ubiquitous: "You aren't just doing <X> you are doing <Y>"
What I think is very curious about this is that all of the LLMs do this frequently, it isn't just a quirk of one. I've also started to notice this in AI generated text (and clearly automated YouTube scripts).
It's one of those things that once you see it, you can't un-see it.
I agree with you and I have seen this take a few times now in articles on HN, which amounts to the classic: "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" Simpson's joke.
I read these articles and I feel like I am taking crazy pills sometimes. The person, enticed by the hype, makes a transparently half-hearted effort for just long enough to confirm their blatantly obvious bias. They then act like the now have ultimate authority on the subject to proclaim their pre-conceived notions were definitely true beyond any doubt.
Not all problems yield well to LLM coding agents. Not all people will be able or willing to use them effectively.
But I guess "I gave it a try and it is not for me" is a much less interesting article compared to "I gave it a try and I have proved it is as terrible as you fear".
I asked it to create a story that described the modes of the major scale with a cartoon treble clef as the main character.
It created a 10 page story that stuck to the topic and was overall coherent. The main character changed color and style on every page, so no consistency there. The overall page layouts and animation style were reasonably consistent.
The metaphor it used was the character climbing a mountain and encountering other characters that represented each mode. Each supporting character was reasonably unique, although note motif was present on 3 or 4. The mountain also changed significantly and the character was frequently back at the bottom. However, in the end, he does reach the summit.
I can't say I am overly impressed but it does mostly do what they claim.
I tried this to and had the same experience on half the books I tried to create. A lot of products I've tried have this issue and I think it will get better. I've been using and will stick to KidsAIStory as it allows me to use the same characters across the books. Also my child would be sad that they can't read their favorite series when google kills off another product.
One analogy I have been thinking about lately is GPUs. You might say "The amount of time it takes me to fill memory with the data I want, copy from RAM to the GPU, let the GPU do it's thing, then copy it back to RAM, I might as well have just done the task on the CPU!"
I hope when I state it that way you start to realize the error in your thinking process. You don't send trivial tasks to the GPU because the overhead is too high.
You have to experiment and gain experience with agent coding. Just imagine that there are tasks where the overhead of explaining what to do and reviewing the output are dwarfed by the actual implementation. You have to calibrate yourself so you can recognize those tasks and offload them to the agent.
I understand the article writers frustration. He liked a thing about a product he uses and they changed the product. He is feeling angry and he is expressing that anger and others are sharing in that.
And I'm part of another group of people. I would notice the files being searched without too much interest. Since I pay a monthly rate, I don't care about optimizing tokens. I only care about the quality of the final output.
I think the larger issue is that programmers are feeling like we are losing control. At first we're like, I'll let it auto-complete but no more. Then it was, I'll let it scaffold a project but not more. Each step we are ceding ground. It is strange to watch someone finally break on "They removed the names of the files the agent was operating on". Of all of the lost points of control this one seems so trivial. But every camels back has a breaking point and we can't judge the straw that does it.
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