Posted by theahura 6 hours ago
> Don't start generating an auto-memory entry before asking me. Ask first, write only if I confirm — no speculative drafting.
No more crap after this.
Incidentally I don’t recall Opus 4.8 asking me once in the past few weeks. Older models did ask semi-frequently.
I found that every model will still manually check every file/function, they immediately assume that anything in context is stale.
That's sensible because often the user edits stuff while they're running.
What it does is save it from having to grep blindly about the codebase. But I think I'd get roughly the same benefit by just dumping the function headers then.
> I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself.
> […]
> We don't really write code by hand anymore.
Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have products, but no longer write their own code, complaining about the inscrutable prediction machine they have handed that job and their livelihoods to?
Like, if you have complaints about the thing, perhaps you should address them to your supplier directly. None of your readers can help, and nobody's magic folk solution to your problem is better than yours.
And there are so many of these sorts of posts. Are we not entirely cooked?
(I think I have concluded that if people writing about AI aren't writing about interesting things they have achieved with small, local LLMs — which for clarity I am fully interested in reading - then I'm done reading. This whole blogging-about-cloud-AI genre is just weird and irresponsible now)
It’s gonna be a living breathing world, you see. You’re going to be like “omg, this game even accurately captured the blog posts, woah”.
Something about this idea really resonates with certain personality types. I equate it to the Zettelkasten hype phase from several years ago. People (...like me..) got really wrapped up in the belief that the process was more important that the content. "Linking" was an "activity." Something good will happen as long as you (a) take notes on stuff and (b) link them to other notes on stuff.
You see the same thing with the session transcripts people. They're building ever more sophisticated setups of indexing and storing and cross referencing every conversation they've ever had on the (I would argue) mistaken belief that the transcripts are the valuable part, rather than the uncomfortable part where you go do something. A lot of it, I say from falling in the trap, is fancy procrastination.
(Although, I have found myself jealous on many occasions where their fancy system retrieves something they vaguely recall from a conversation they had 3 months ago. So, who knows.)
I think you may just misunderstand the point of having / writing a personal blog. I write because it's fun! Whether the reader gets any value out of reading it is almost entirely beside the point.
(Also several comments here directly post a fix to the problem stated in the blog post, so readers can and do often help)
I used to blog, as it goes, and I have supported and enabled many more, so no, not really.
I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass.
But I would say to you that if you personally don't write code now but you do have a dependency on one of two presumably unprofitable cloud AI providers, aren't you in trouble? How is this not a three-alarm fire for you?
Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiveness.
The platform risk is a valid concern but alleviated by China's theft and redistribution of open models.
We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore?
Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.
They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
Now do the same exercise for "impressiveness" and "crassness."
Here, I'll do it for you:
> Nobody cares about code quality /s
> They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like impressiveness and lack of crassness.
Sounds silly doesn't it?
Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. The materials and techniques don’t matter, just the outcome.
This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections using subpar materials and the house will fall apart after a few years, but who cares right? At least you achieved the business outcome!
This mentality is so infuriating. This is why I need to buy new shoes every year. Or why my washer/dryer motherboard craps out in 2 years instead of 10. Nobody gives a shit about quality anymore, this is why society is crumbling around us. Profit driven incentive for fast/cheap over everything else. And now I need to spend my day prompting an AI to fix AI slop code to keep the business hobbling along another day. What a fucking joke.
e.g. the bill is definitely coming true for a lot of "non-traditional construction" materials and methods in immediately post-war properties in the UK. There are many unmortgageable properties using Mundic Block in Cornwall and to some extend Devon, in the heavily bombed south east there was a lot of pre-stressed concrete with catastrophic rebar failure, not to mention Orlit construction, and all across the country a lot of RAAC. Almost all of it for good, necessary, upbeat reasons.
It feels a bit like this kind of crisis from AI generated code could hit in ten, fifteen years time; people often fail to understand how long a bit of website code can last.
GP said Claude's code "doesn't impress" them and that it's "crass."
Do you think a valid "long term strategy" is to create code that impresses GP and is not crass, but doesn't achieve the business outcomes it's meant to?
Inversely, do you think one can achieve business outcomes if "quality" is so abysmal that the code doesn't work or is unmaintainable?
Is it possible to write perfectly good, maintainable, performant, legible code that "doesn't impress" GP, or feels "crass" to them? Well gee, probably! Because "impressiveness" and "crassness" are literally meaningless.
I will accept "of fully subjective value". But not "literally meaningless".
It's insane to me that you're implying we could build houses with pre-fabricated materials or pneumatic nail guns and still somehow "have houses?" No sticks/jute cord and special symbols, then no house.
What you saw in this thread was someone arguing against the dimensions of "impressiveness" and "crassness" as valid things to care about when it comes to code.
It's your mistake to assume that those are related to any meaningful concept of actual quality.
I clearly said elsewhere that I think they are predictive of problems with the person who writes it, and I fear I can generalise that to LLM tooling that generates it.
Are you not, by developing this way, making yourself more interchangeable, less indispensable, than ever before?
I am not convinced it isn't vulnerable to the same problems but the whole tenor of the community around open source/open weights models just doesn't have the same YOLO madness to it.
Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.
Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"
Or are you saying the industry is (because it is)
I reject your correction: I present the options as nouns, not modifiers to the work. Maybe I should say "Cheap, Fast, or Good" as a compromise.
Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand.
As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.
Right now I am lucky that I have the time to recover and learn.
And I don't think I'm unique. I see enough posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48777257 pop up that I'm reasonably confident all the hype around LLMs saving so much time and increasing productivity so much is, well, just that: hype.
Sure, if you can't code at all and want to build something, an LLM is going to be great for you, even if you can't evaluate the code quality or determine if there are bugs just by looking at the code. But I've been coding professionally for 25 years, and as a hobby since I was like 8 years old. I like to code! It's a passion of mine. If the LLM isn't doing it faster or better (and most of the time it isn't), why wouldn't I write code myself?
I'll have the LLM write boilerplate stuff or do tedious refactoring, because I just don't feel like it (even if it does take longer). But for the real work? Of course I do most of it myself.
One area where the LLM shines for me is finding the root causes of bugs. It can generally do that much faster than I do. Often orders of magnitude faster (like minutes instead of hours or days). But when it comes to write the fix for the bug? It's usually faster and better if I do it myself.
More generally I am interested in burnout-avoidance tools; things that help me start, finish, things that write tests I guess, certainly code scaffolding.
But I am fully unconvinced that my burnout will be improved by ending up owning the responsibility for wobbly or inscrutable AI-generated code with potential landmines in it; that will keep me up at night just the same.
This is pretty funny because it's about the depth of understanding of every 'AI expert' on Linkedin. People who praise the context window as basically magic have no idea how any of this works.
"Spicy Autocomplete", I've heard it called.
I have opinions people apparently don't like, for no subscriber money.
Toggle it off and never think about it again.
I refuse to believe this is true. The ability for an agent to find information from before a compaction is incredibly useful. At compaction time it's impossible to know what exactly may be still needed.
Million context models also are still not effective for the entire context size.
Not that this isolated article is super damning or anything, but the accumulated set of all these reports has left me only empathetic, I think, of these other devs. Like, I just want to tell them, "it can be ok, it doesn't need to be like this.."
I think Opus might be on similar level for most of what I'm doing, but I haven't used it much recently, so I can't remember the difference. So I guess I'll find out on the 7th when they pull the plug again! (Free-ish trial of Fable ending.)
That being said, I tried using other frontier models to help with a Pong clone the other day and they were introducing new bugs at approximately the same rate as they were fixing it. On Pong!! I found that amusing because I couldn't think of a simpler game, so it didn't inspire confidence.
Fable's doing just fine on an online multiplayer game though. I have no idea how that works. (Maybe it would fail Pong too?? I haven't tested that!)