Exactly. I've spent the weekend trying my hand at making an AI assistant SaaS (I can't believe this doesn't exist yet!), and the biggest lesson I learnt is that I need to pay attention to what Claude Code does. I need to be specific in my instructions, and I need to review the output, because it will sometimes not know how to do things and it will never say "I don't know how to do that", it'll just endlessly write more and more code to try to appease you.

I think I'm faster with Claude Code overall, but that's because it's a tradeoff between "it makes me much faster at the stuff I'm not good at" and "it slows me down on the stuff I am good at". Maybe with better prompting skills, I'll be faster overall, but I'm definitely glad I don't have to write all the boilerplate yet again.

> And boy, i'd be the first one to cheer if AI could do this.

Yeah, well it would be the next major step towards human irrelevance.

Or at least, for developers.

It helps when the agent automatically uses diagnostics, logs, and tests. If it resolves two or three problems by itself, that saves you the effort of doing so.

This project is about getting around the extremely aggressive throttling Claude applies.

All you need is a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

Years ago I interviewed at Rackspace. They did a data structures and algorithms type interview. One of the main questions they had was about designing a data structure for a distributed hash table, using C or equivalent, to be used as a cache and specifically addressing cache invalidation. After outlining the basic approach I stopped and said that I have used a system like that in several projects at my current and former jobs and I would use something like Redis, memcache, or even Postgres in one instance, and do a push to cache on write system rather than a cache server pulling values from the source of truth if it suspected it had stale data. They did not like that answer. I asked why and they said it’s because I’m not designing a data structure from scratch. I asked them if the job I am applying for involved creating cache servers from scratch and they said “of course not. We use Redis.” (It might have been memcache, I honestly don’t remember which datadore they liked). Needless to say, this wasn’t a fit for either of us. While I am perfectly capable of creating toy versions of these kinds of services, I still stand by using existing battle tested software over rolling your own.

If you worry about forgetting how to code, then code. You already don’t know how to code 99% of the system you are using to post this comment (Verilog, CPU microcode, GPU equivalents, probably MMU programming, CPU-specific assembly, and so on). You can get ahead of the competition by learning some of that tech. Or not. But technically all you need is a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

It's the calculator all over again!

Jokes aside, while I'm almost sure that the ability to code can be lost and regained just like training a muscle what I'm more worried is the rug pull and squeeze that is bound to happen sometime in the next 5 to 10 years unless LLMs go the way of Free Software GNU style. If the latter happens then LLMs for coding will be like calculators and such more or less and personally I don't know how more harmful that would be compared to the boost in productivity.

That said if the former becomes reality (and I hope not!) then we're in for some huge existential crises when people realize they can barely materialize the labour part of their jobs after doing the thinky part and the meetings part.

This rhymes with the discussion we had when higher level languages became popularized. And many of us did forget how to write assembly! What might the world have looked like otherwise?

Just like how people forgot how to patch phone lines and punch cards.

The future is going to be great for us that have been resisting going all in. Unfortunately I feel a lot of work will be detangling the mess these llms make in larger repos.

I think it's more like every engineer will either become like a lead or a principal or have problems. I'm a principal. I have for years had multiple teams building things that I prototyped designed or worked with them on the specs for. There's a level of touch and letting go that you have to employ to not over burden them or you getting bogged down in details that don't matter and missing those that do.

One of the skills I've developed is spinning (back) up on problems quickly while holding the overall in my head. I find with AI I'm just doing that even more often and I now have 5 direct reports (AI) added to the 6 teams of 8 I work with through managers and roadmaps.

This is a problem for new generations that should be mindful of but then again how many people can whip some assembly? Certainly not the majority of developers and it is certainly not required for most programming tasks. We might end up in the same situation - most of the plumbing will be done by high-level coding with the help of AI agents.

I mean, it’s just like having an army of interns that works for (near) free. It’s a huge positive for productivity, and I don’t think we will forget how. I’m more concerned with how we make new senior/staff engineers from now on, since the old “do grunt work for a couple years, then do simple well defined work for a few years” is 100% not a career path that exists even now.

Just a reminder you can tell the LLM the version of an API to use.

Your code should have tests the AI can use to test the code it wrote.

And thanks to MCP, you can literally point your LLM to the documentation of your preferred tool [1].

[1]: https://context7.com/about

> People are going to forget how to code.

Which is a problem when exactly? When civilization collapses?

> People are going to forget how to code.

Pretty much me with some IDEs and their code inspections and refactoring capabilities and run profile configurations (especially in your average enterprise Java codebase). Oh well.

It will probably be like coding in assembly after the advent of the compilers. There are some people who still code in assembly, but it's rare.

As someone who cpuld have never considered Claude Code due to the cost of Max/Opus - do you notice any differences in practice with just Sonnet?

Yes I tried pushing it as far as possible over the course of a couple days to invent, build and prioritize the direction of a new programming language (trying to give it as much freedom as possible and make its own decicions while steering it only to not get stuck). After around $50 in tokens it kinda got lost in the complexity it had created and just kept adding more and more useless trivialities while overlooking fundamental unsolved problems.

E.g. it wanted to build a data query language with temporal operations but completely forgot to keep historical data.

It currently lacks the ability to focus on the overall goal and prioritize sub-tasks accordingly and instead spirals into random side quests real quick.

I think you might be aiming too low. Tasked with writing a "perfect and most useful program" this would surely yield something more than merely writing 42 to stdout.

Current llms get lost fairly quickly in larger projects. They still benefit from reduced scope when promoting. Context is the biggest bottleneck right now by far. You can only summarize so much before the information is too vague to make meaningful changes.

It would probably look suspiciously like Linux.

There is ClaudePlaysPokemon which has been failing to beat the game for weeks (months?) now.

edit:

https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon

Doesn’t Taskmaster require an API key? It doesn’t work with a subscription.

You can technically hack the API key from the subscription, but that’s probably brittle.

Or is there some other meta I’m missing?

You need some time to chain tasks. Endless tasks, can't be in random order and there is usually a link between tasks/context.

Because subscription plans are subsidized by people who don't use it that much. Like gyms.

That being said it will not surprise me if subscribers actually are losing Claude money and only API is profitable.

How much people use these APIs? It seems Clause API costs $3 or $15 per 1M tokens (I suppose for different models, it seems difficult to find first-party pricing information), so people who would use these daily would then use a lot more than that?

Don't worry, this script dangerously skips permissions (by default?) You don't need to press 'y'.