[retrac]

I have had some truly spectacular results that still kind of stagger me in the last few months using Claude in my hobby projects -- but even though Claude insists on trying to slip its name into the git history as credit it's not Claude -- it's me. Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background. A suggested axiom: there is nothing I can build with Claude that I could not build myself with my current level of CS knowledge, assuming I had infinite focus and time. In my hands it can go as far I could anyway, and no further. (But it is faster!) My experience bears that out so far.

[cadamsdotcom]

> hobby projects

Unfortunately despite being impressive for solo stuff, such results don’t scale to software you’d give to others.

[stackghost]

> Someone who has studied CS and software engineering for decades will craft different prompts from someone without that background.

This, to me, is the biggest differentiator. In terms of results, there's a huge yawning chasm between the person who says "Claude make me a $thing" versus the person who puts in the effort to lay down the overall architecture, gives some thoughts to libraries and dependencies, performance trade-offs etc, and only then begins prompting.

Knowing how to implement Djikstra or a linked list by heart is no longer important. Actual software engineering skills are more important than ever.

[xyzzy_plugh]

> Knowing how to implement Djikstra or a linked list by heart is no longer important.

This was never important. The important part was always knowing when to use them.

[stackghost]

>The important part was always knowing when to use them.

Two things can be true simultaneously. I think there was a time when deep familiarity with implementing algorithms was important.

[system2]

The gap is closing; a shitty wannabe programmer will eventually learn the structures one way or another. Agentic coding just got many new people involved, and these new people create noise.