[sockgrant]

I agree some people go to work to work, and claude is find / good for them, but I feel that characterization of us who are loving claude is disingenuous. I’m a creative, while I loved coding and honed my craft, it was creating that always had me hooked. Claude is creating on steroids. Not to mention, it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now.

It’s not the same as writing code, but it’s fun.

If your coworkers can’t outpace your code output they’re either not using opus4.6 or they aren’t really trying.

It’s pretty easy to slam 20 PRs a day with some of them being complex changes. The hardest part is testing the diffs, but people are figuring that out too.

[ccosky]

I have a suite of Claude skills all about craftsmanship. Refactoring, renaming, deconstructing god classes, detecting deleted code, etc. I've never written better, more readable, more maintainable code in my life than I have with Claude. All of that is trivial and hardly takes any time at all to accomplish.

Before moving to agentic AI, I thought I'd miss the craftsmanship aspect. Not at all. I get great satisfaction out of having AI write readable, maintainable code with me in the driver's seat.

[dinkumthinkum]

But, would you feel that same satisfaction out on the street?

[g-b-r]

> it can help you massively improve your code cleanliness. All of the little nice-to-have features, the cleanups, the high unit test coverage, nagging bug fixes, etc., they’re all trivial to do now.

It can help if you write poor code without it, probably

High unit test coverage only means something if you carefully check those tests, and if everything was tested

[sockgrant]

The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness is if you write poor code?

Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what code coverage is?

not gonna engage the trolling

[g-b-r]

> The only way Claude can help improve your code cleanliness is if you write poor code?

No? You assert that it writes better code than the average software developer?

> Code coverage means nothing if you didn't carefully check every test? "and if everything was tested" do you know what code coverage is?

Do you know?

Code coverage only tells what amount of the code gets *touched* by the tests.

To achieve code coverage it's enough to CALL the code, it doesn't tell you anything about the correctness of the tests: they could all end with a return true, and a code coverage tool would be perfectly happy.

So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite that the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or simply much less useful than you assume it to be, more realistically).

With "if everything was tested" I meant that you also need to check if the agent wrote all the tests that are needed, besides verifying that the ones it wrote are correct.

[wiseowise]

> You assert that it writes better code than the average software developer?

Absolutely. It contains a lot, if not majority, of all the code available at our hands right now and can reason, whatever it means for LLMs to reason anyway, about it. It absolutely demolishes average software developer and it’s not even close.

> To achieve code coverage it's enough to CALL the code, it doesn't tell you anything about the correctness of the tests: they could all end with a return true, and a code coverage tool would be perfectly happy.

> So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite that the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or simply much less useful than you assume it to be, more realistically).

That’s like saying that if you don’t check every line your coworker writes it becomes worthless.

[g-b-r]

You seem to have a pretty big misunderstanding of LLMs.

> > So, yes, if you don't carefully check the test suite that the agent writes, it might well be worthless (or simply much less useful than you assume it to be, more realistically).

> That’s like saying that if you don’t check every line your coworker writes it becomes worthless

A coworker is (supposedly) a *competent person*, placing some trust on that is not stupid.

You'd usually want to have a review of everything everyone does, but even if you don't do it, a reasonably competent and honest developer is never going to be as misleading as LLMs can be.

Furthermore, in traditional development, even without code reviews you will look at the test suite every once and then (or rather, always, when you touch the code that it tests).