[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.

[rmunn]

Bingo. All my experience is on Linux, and I've never written anything for Windows. So recently when I needed to port a small C program to Windows, I told ChatGPT "Hey, port this to Windows for me". I wouldn't trust the result, I'd rewrite it myself, but it let me find out which Win32 API functions I'd be calling, and why I'd be calling them, faster than searching MSDN would have done.