This nicely describes where we're at with LLM's as I see it: they are 'fancy' enough to be able to write code yet at the same time they can't be trusted to do stuff which can be solved with a simple hook.

I feel that currently improvement mostly comes from slapping what to me feels like workarounds on top of something that very well may be a local maximum.

I wonder how hard it is to create an alternate user account and have Claude run as that user instead?

It is indeed. I don't use Claude Code. I use Cline which is a VS Code extension (cline.bot).

This is a pretty killer feature that I would expect to find in all the coding agents soon.

If you do not know the software design, claude code will fail. If you know the software design, you can guide it toward success.

Its definitely not there yet. You have to babysit it alot. Its not autonomous.

The utility i find is that it helps _me_ do the real engineering work, the planning and solution architechting, and then can bang out code once it has rock solid instructions (in natural language but honestly one level above psuedocode) and then i have to review it with absolutely zero faith in its ability to do things. Then it can work well.

But its not where these guys are claiming it is

Interesting how long ago did you do this? How long did you spend on it?

I was skeptical about Claude code and then I spent a week really learning how to use it. Within the week I had built a backend with FastAPI that supported user creation, password reset, email confirmation, a front end, and support for ouath into a few systems.

It definitely took me some time to learn how to make it work, but I’m astounded at how much work I got done and for so little typing.

"I wanted something that I think it was not done before"

But you do know, that this is what LLMs ain't good at.

So your conclusion is somewhat off, because there are plenty of programming work of things that were done before and require just tweaking.

I mean, I am also not hooked yet and just occasionally use chatGPT/claude for concrete stuff, but I do find it useful and I do see, where it can get really useful for me (once it really knows my codebase and the libaries used and does not jump between incompatible API versions)

If you can’t build something without Claude you will probably fail to build it with Claude.

You can already do this in .Claude/settings.json

To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools.

You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.

Yea man, people say combine harvesters will eliminate agriculture jobs, but then who will operate these combine harvesters? Obviously every single manual farm laborer will just switch to being an operator of those.

God, will we never move this discussion past this worthless argument? What value would there be in any of these automatization tools, be in in agriculture or AI, if it just made every single worker switch to being an [automatization tool] operator?

Like in the story about cosmologist and the old lady, you seem to be asking "What is the AI standing on?", and the reply here is of course "You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's AIs all the way down!"

Many already let Claude Code update its own CLAUDE.md, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't (dangerously-skipping-permissions) let it edit its own hooks. And as in Jurassic Park, the question of whether we should seems to be left by the wayside.

Except that for most people this is not coding, is administration work, DevOps kind of stuff.

I already do lots of "coding" in SaaS products, that have very little to do with what most HNers think of proper coding.

If programmers become 10x more productive but demand only grows by 5x, what will happen?

You can already ask Claude Code to modify its own settings

I generally agree that "we" will still be needed, but OTOH, who needs prettier if no human is ever going to read the code?

> unless AI evolves to the point that it even thinks of this

The #1 goal of every AI company is to create an AI that is capable of programming and improving itself to create the next, more powerful AI. Of course, these kind of configuration jobs will be outsourced to AI as soon as possible, too.

Husky and lint-staged worked for me. Pre Commit Hooks did not work for me.

Why is it that regular git hooks do not work with claude code?

Does it? Claude Code is the product that works the least well for me, mainly because of its tendency to go off and do tons of stuff. I've found LLMs are at their best when they produce few enough lines of code that I can review and iterate, not when they go off and invent the world.

For that reason, I mainly use Aider and Cursor (the latter mostly in the "give me five lines" comment mode).

Not to take away anything here, but hooks are present in other similar products. Atleast one example here - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/com...

As an ex-Cursor user myself, is there any reason that you’re still using it? Genuinely curious.

With this you could add support yourself!

Add a PostToolUse [0] hook that automatically creates a git commit whenever changes are made. Then you can either git checkout the commit you want to rollback to... Or you could assign those git commits an index and make a little MCP server that allows you to /rollback:goto 3 or /rollback:back 2 or whichever syntax you want to support.

In fact if you put that paragraph into Claude I wouldn't be surprised if it made it for you.

[0] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/hooks#posttoo...

An abstraction via a script should work, right? They document that it pipes the JSON data to your command's stdin,

  ```lint-monorepo.sh

  # read that data
  json_input=$(cat)

  # do some parsing here with jq, get the file path (file_path)

  if [$file_path" == "$dir1"*]
    run lint_for_dir1
  ```

Whatever you run in the hook can check whatever conditions you want.

This can be implemented at the line level if the linter is Git aware

We have to do this, otherwise China wins the "AI" race!

This also:

1) Assign coding task via prompt 2) Hook: Write test for prompt proves 3) Write code 4) Hook: Test code 5) Code passes -> Commit 6) Else go to 3.

you can just tell it do that or in your claude.md. don't need hooks

For the `-j` issue specifically, exporting `MAKEFLAGS=-j8` should work.

You can’t use it across three repos like a workspace in Xcode?

That’s great. Regardless of the naysayers about AI hype in tech, it was a major development for general society even if this is all it ends up being.

Yup, slowing down the AI is a really hard thing to do. I've mostly accomplished it, but I use extensive auto prompting and a large memory bank. All of it is designed explicitly to slow down the AI. I've taught it how to do what I call "Baby Steps", which is defined as: "The smallest possible change that still effectively moves the technology forward." Some of my prompting is explicit about human review and approval of every change including manual testing of the application in question BEFORE the model moves on to the next step.

The key phrase is "Do not overengineer."

I say stuff like:

This code must be minimal.

Meet only the stated requirements.

Do not overengineer.

Create a numbered index of requirements.

Verify after you write the code that all requirements are met and no more.

Anthropic's terms typically restrict training competing AI models with their outputs, not building standard applications or websites that simply use their API as a tool.

Would you argue that Cursor (valued at $10B) is breaking Anthropic's terms by making an IDE that competes with their Canvas feature?

Oh come on, your CRUD app is not competing with an LLMaaS

You’re only competing with them if you’re doing something they consider competitive. OpenAI is competitive, you are not