This claim from Ayer -- how do we make the leap from these experiences existing to being evidence of a life after consciousness?

> On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness

What good would it truly be if a 3K line function is split into 8 modules? It’ll be neater and more comprehensible to a human reader. More debuggable, definitely.

But given the business problem the have: winner takes all of a massive market, first mover wins, — the right move is to throw the usual rulebook about quality software out the window, and double down on the bets of the company, that AI will make human code engineering less and less necessary very quickly.

It turned out incredibly well despite the “bad” engineering — which in this case, I really count as good engineering.

The bad quality of the Claude Code program has resulted in increased costs for the customers (very high memory consumption, slow execution, higher and sometimes much higher token count than necessary), and even for Anthropic, but nobody was aware of this, because there was no previous experience to compare with.

This kind of sloppy vibe coding works only when there is no competition. When the competition comes with something much more efficient, e.g. pi-dev, the inefficient application will be eliminated.

Anthropic attempts to protect their badly written program by forbidding its customers to use other coding harnesses, but this will not be able to protect them from competition for long.

If you are the first on a new market without competitors, then indeed time-to-market matters more than anything else and the sloppiest vibe-coded application is the best if it can be delivered immediately.

However, one must plan to replace that with a better and more efficient application ASAP, because the advantage of being the first is only temporary.

The amount of regex matching people found os staggering

If you choose slowly, you are depriving your users of the value from your app for a long time. It’s not as clear a choice as you think

I have already said that sometimes time-to-market is the most important, so that should be the priority, but the advantage of delivering immediately the application is only temporary, so you must improve quickly your first possibly vibe-coded implementation, otherwise better alternatives will be delivered by others.

Claude Code is an obvious example of this, because it has practically opened a new market, but because it has remained a mess now there are better alternatives.

What is wrong is not generating instantly a proof-of-concept application that barely works and using it in the beginning, but continuing to build upon that even after you had enough time to rewrite it.

I will note that this strategy only really makes sense because Anthropic controls the compute. If open-source harnesses could also use Claude max plans, then they’d have to focus much more on stability and quality, or just build an open-source harness themselves, or probably better yet, get out of the harness-building business altogether. So they’re gambling on staying ahead of open-source models, which seems like it’s been a good bet so far, but we’ll see.

It’s not like a separate company made the terminal app versus the model. If we think that the desktop app is bad, but the model is good then that’s still an endorsement of the software process.

If we think the model doesn’t matter at all, then that’s an even bigger endorsement. Is the model has no content worth talking about over the nearest competitors or an open source alternative, then the remainder is marketing and polish.

I just don’t understand how people can look at a company that is capacity constrained in this market and think that they’re doing things poorly.

In reality the coding market, which is really the biggest success story for frontier AI (because code it is uniquely suited for LLMs and RL) is rapidly headed for, if not already arrived at, commodification, with each release from any of the US big 3 heralded as best yet, and the Chinese models like DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, GLM maybe no more than 6 months behind.

As far as code quality and level of bugs, certainly Claude Code has been hugely successful despite that, for two reasons.

1) It's a revolutionary product, and people are willing to accept a high level of bugs because of that.

2) The product is an LLM, itself an inherently flawed and unreliable technology, but one that people have got used to. The fact that the agent/harness, as well as the LLM itself, is unreliable and regresses from release to release doesn't much change the vibe

The quality of code produced by Claude Code, at least the way it has been used to write itself, would be a complete non-starter for any business where reliability is important. Maybe best suited for things like consumer web apps where the cost of product failure, or version regression, is just an annoyed customer rather than a lawsuit.

You get to know before others how the future will play out

"winner takes all of a massive market, first mover wins"

...this is the kind of AI spam that sounds convincing until you think about it.

It's not at all clear the foundation model or coding agent markets are winner takes all. Far more likely to be a handful of successful players based on the market so far.

First mover wins? OpenAI was first to market and looks in trouble.

There's something convincing about this kind of cliche that lets it slip past you until you start inspecting each claim.

But some of the worst experiences I’ve had with coworkers were with those who made programming part of their identity. Every technical disagreement on a PR became a threat to identity or principles, and ceased being about making the right decision in that moment. Identity means: there’s us, and them, and they don’t get it.

‘Programmer’ is much better off as a description of one who does an activity. Not an identity.

I hope AI liberates us from that dumb facade of pretend innovation. In some ways, us programmers got way too full of ourselves and filled our lives with pretend work porting apps from one thing to the next thing with no actual change in end-user value

Elegant, well-written and technically sound projects will continue to exist, but I’ve seen too many “well crafted” implementations of such technically vexing features as “fetching data and returning it” that were so overengineered that it should have been considered theft of company money.

This judgement has merit. However, over the years I got to perceive that over-engineering tendency to be the manifestation of exploratory spirit in one's craft. This is how the Unix got to be created at Bell Labs. To their managers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on programs like the "ed" editor, thus they cared about "value being provided to the user (or the business)". What was later officially named Unix was not pitched as an operating system, but instead framed mostly just a needed way to organize the growing set of utilities, among other things (i.e. as a footnote). What are the over-engineered bits (and the related gained experience) in a given project may become useful for something else. People (tend to) do this kind of stuff. But should they be blamed, considering the enticing promise of growth and development of new technologies, practiced by employers themselves, as part of recruitment game?

I feel like it's important to align team/org goals once in a while -- there's nothing wrong with a refactor or a port, but what's the ROI, etc etc. Yes I agree this framework is better but what do we gain, do we really need it etc

It can mean a category flag someone waves, an identifier we ask others to respect, a group we choose to belong to, a way of understanding what it is we like about ourselves, or something we quietly aspire to.

it suddenly struck me that there has never, AFAIK, a single-word noun for a C++ programmer. not sure what, if anything, this implies.

NullPointerException is the Java world. In C++, dereferencing a null pointer is rather undefined behaviour.

To clarify/nuance. Even if there was no economic nor social incentive for me to program; I'd still tinker with it, AI coding agent enhanced or not.

At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.

Yeah, screw those people. I count myself as lucky that I've only worked with 1 person who was seriously CRITICAL of the way other's worked... beyond just code quality. However, I always enjoyed a good discussion about the various differences in how people worked, as long as they could accept there's no "right" way. That's what the article brought up for me, and I wonder how much that happens these days.

One of my fondest memories was sitting around with a few other devs after work, and one had started learning Go pretty soon after its public release... and he would show us some new, cool thing he was playing around with. Of course those kind of organic things stopped with remote work, and I wonder how much THAT has played into the loss of identity?

In every pursuit there are secretly 3 different communities. Those who love doing the thing, those who love tinkering with the gear, those who love talking about it.

HackerNews and the internet in general are dominated by people who like to nerd out about the gear of programming (IDEs, text editors, languages, agent setups, …) and the people who like to talk about programming. The people doing most of the work are off on the side too busy doing the thing to be noticed.

Yes. Verb not noun.

There’s simply no advantage to crediting work to someone who’d left the team.

We love to blame those who are misfortunate. It’s called just world syndrome. It’s deeply uncomfortable to realize that this kind of thing is the norm, and justice is the exception. I’ve been extremely fortunate in my career, but not due to any special savviness of my own.

At my workplace now, there’s a senior staff engineer taking credit for work that was done by someone 3 levels below him. And the senior staff engineer still thinks he is not getting enough credit for his work. The senior staff engineer’s manager has been crediting him for the work the less senior engineer had done, since the less senior engineer is no longer at that team, in forums where the less senior engineer has no access to.

The less senior engineer is plenty likeable. As is the senior staff engineer. But the less senior engineer had left that team, and the senior staff engineer and his manager are unscrupulous, and do what they’d like to their advantage.

This is called “just world syndrome.”

Just write a press release and let the tech press publish it. Don't host it yourself. The legalistic language belongs in a filing, not a user-facing blog.

I'm suspecting that once these models hit 'good enough' for ~90% of users and use cases, the providers started optimizing for cost instead of quality, but still benchmark and advertise for quality.