I’m realizing how over engineered Claude’s solutions are. I have realized now just today that it’s best at just dding tiny updates to code. Not good at architecting anything new at all that has to work for longer than 5 days.
I spent like an hour yesterday bullying Claude out of using a ResizeObserver, Refs and a useEffect construct just to fix the height of a container (there was a bug where the container didn’t properly scale down in height because some weird hard-coded properties in an external component inside of it). I knew that it had to be solvable with just the right css selector, but I was lazy and didn’t want to manually go through the html and figure out which selector on which component would be the right one. And on paper “Go through this massive block of html and check which property is out of place” should be the kind of use case where LLMs actually work. The stupid thing introduced two new different catastrophic failure modes where the entire browser crashed due to excessive rerenders before it found something that even remotely worked. And then I had to spend another hour stripping out unnecessary style properties it glued on while looking for a working solution. In the end, I probably would have been much faster doing it by hand.
I threw together a slop project to test something. It put in some JSON for something that didn’t use that. I told it it was just some plain text. It took the JSON library out again. Then I added in something that does use JSON and it tried to make a basic JSON parsing library from scratch.
It’s like a very junior programmer at times, with amnesia.
It does make some menial tasks simpler, but if people think it will actually replace us then they’re in for a shock.
It does make some menial tasks simpler, but if people think it will actually replace us then they’re in for a shock.
That’s the sales pitch, we’re in a job market drought right now. Give it a year or two and all the slop will begin breaking, making a new job market boom for developers
Would be kinda cool if we could get People Who Know What They’re Doing™ to just…rebuild stuff from the ground up, untainted by slop. Haha a guy can dream.
Yea if you don’t explicitly give it direction on how to keep the code maintainable, it will gladly just spew shit into the same file until you have 10K LOC in it.
To be fair I used to make entire features like this and then get R# to move the classes into separate files at the end. Guess I don’t like to organise too early, before the code has found it’s true form?
I’m realizing how over engineered Claude’s solutions are. I have realized now just today that it’s best at just dding tiny updates to code. Not good at architecting anything new at all that has to work for longer than 5 days.
I spent like an hour yesterday bullying Claude out of using a ResizeObserver, Refs and a useEffect construct just to fix the height of a container (there was a bug where the container didn’t properly scale down in height because some weird hard-coded properties in an external component inside of it). I knew that it had to be solvable with just the right css selector, but I was lazy and didn’t want to manually go through the html and figure out which selector on which component would be the right one. And on paper “Go through this massive block of html and check which property is out of place” should be the kind of use case where LLMs actually work. The stupid thing introduced two new different catastrophic failure modes where the entire browser crashed due to excessive rerenders before it found something that even remotely worked. And then I had to spend another hour stripping out unnecessary style properties it glued on while looking for a working solution. In the end, I probably would have been much faster doing it by hand.
I threw together a slop project to test something. It put in some JSON for something that didn’t use that. I told it it was just some plain text. It took the JSON library out again. Then I added in something that does use JSON and it tried to make a basic JSON parsing library from scratch.
It’s like a very junior programmer at times, with amnesia.
It does make some menial tasks simpler, but if people think it will actually replace us then they’re in for a shock.
That’s the sales pitch, we’re in a job market drought right now. Give it a year or two and all the slop will begin breaking, making a new job market boom for developers
But honestly I don’t want to spend my time fixing vibe coded stuff.
Would be kinda cool if we could get People Who Know What They’re Doing™ to just…rebuild stuff from the ground up, untainted by slop. Haha a guy can dream.
Yea if you don’t explicitly give it direction on how to keep the code maintainable, it will gladly just spew shit into the same file until you have 10K LOC in it.
To be fair I used to make entire features like this and then get R# to move the classes into separate files at the end. Guess I don’t like to organise too early, before the code has found it’s true form?