[liszper]

With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more productive. Coding with AI is a slightly different skill from coding, similar how managing software engineers is different from writing software.

[abtinf]

liszper:

> most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today

Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.

[bubblyworld]

Lol, what is up with everyone assuming there's no learning curve to these things? If you applied this argument to literally any other tool you would be laughed at, for good reason.

[liszper]

Yes, exactly. Learning new things is hard. Personally it took me about 200 hours to get started, and since then ~2500 hours to get familiar with the advanced techniques, and now I'm very happy with the results, managing extremely large codebases with LLM in production.

For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.

[pjc50]

Funnily enough the same kind of approach you get from Lisp advocates and the more annoying faction of Linux advocacy (which isn't as prevalent these days, it seems)

[joquarky]

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ryandrake]

I'm starting to kind of dig C.C. but you're right, it definitely feels like a very confident, very ambitious high schooler level developer with infinite energy. You really have to give it very small tasks and be constantly steering its direction. At the end of the day, I'm not sure I'm really saving that much time coaching Claude to do the job right vs. just writing the code myself, but it's definitely a neat trick.

The difference from an actual junior developer, of course, is that the human junior developer learns from his mistakes and gets better, but Claude seems to be stuck at the level of expertise of its model, and you have to wait for the model to improve before Claude improves.

[jonstewart]

The thing I am calling BS on is that there's much productivity gain in giving it very small tasks and constantly steering its direction. For 80% of code, I'm faster than it if that's what I have to do. For debugging? For telling it to integrate a new tool? Port my legacy build system to something better? It's great at that, removes some important barriers to entry.

[jonstewart]

I think it has more to do with the kind of software I write and their requirements then it has to do with spending more time with this current tool. For some things it's great, but it's been a net productivity loss for me on my core coding responsibilities.

[zmmmmm]

ah, they are holding it wrong.

I am always so skeptical of this style of response. Because if it takes hundreds of hours to learn to use something, how can it really be the silver bullet everyone was claiming earlier? Surely they were all in the midst of the 100 hours. And what else could we do if we spent 100 hours learning something? It's a lot of time, a huge investment, all on faith that things will get better.

[jmatthews]

How many hours do you have mastering git or your IDE or your library of choice for UX?

[TheRoque]

Then, it's the job of someone else to use these tools, not developers

[liszper]

I agree with your point. I think this is the reason why most developers still don't get it, because AI coding ultimately requires a "higher level" methodology.