Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49863287

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

Now I am in the claims process with the large insurance co., using Claude to basically run my side of the claim — reading the policy, organizing and filing the ALE receipt scans, reading and notifying me of messages from the agents, calling out when they are delaying too much or not fulfilling their promises, challenging their decisions on what to cover based on the policy, keeping a log of all of our correspondences, logging work estimates and invoices, I cant imagine doing all this tedious work myself—w/o Claude I’d probably just rollover fatigued.

Does my adjuster like this? On the one hand, I’m giving her incredibly tidy and documented receipts and logs, which I am sure is saving her time.

On the other hand, Claude is calling out her BS and delays, which have been atrocious—so much so that Claude is now adamant that she has gone too far and that I should be filing a complaint with the state insurance bureau.

There’s your problem. And static typing won’t save you either.

The skill is not that, it’s the ability to compose and evolve systems such that you don’t have to hold so much state in your head.

(Btw that property can hold for a million LOC codebase.)

It’s not an arrogant take; it’s arrogant to think you know static typing is a requirement for developing software well.

All Clojure (lisps) do is remove the stupidity of syntax.

Even if syntax is the minor thing, why wear a stupid, uncomfortable shirt while running when you could wear one so comfortable you scarcely feel it?

https://clojure.org/about/dynamic

Until you get better at not making mistakes that the training wheels of a static type system “protect” you from, lean into the REPL as a means to build up small correct expressions into larger ones.

Ime successful creative execution looks like micro-iterations where each output informs the next creative move.

I can build something incredibly fast from essentially caveman grunt instructions through an LLM harness, iterating as I go.

Optimizing for feeding a huge plan to an agent sounds to me like a net waste of time. And looking over the shoulder of industry peers trying to do this, I don’t see their outputs or throughput some remarkable improvement over what I can produce with minimal fanfare usage.

You’re almost there. Just stop thinking about the sequence of instructions. Focus on the information half (the values) that you need to produce.

Terra Toys is 50 years old, its space shows it. Hand-written recommendations and prices. The employees demonstrate and play with the toys, welcome you genuinely as you enter. The toys seem curated for actual fun not schtick. I went in last week and it was popping. It’s an experience.

Does Main Street need to focus on experience to survive? If so, how does it monetize experience if selling items isn’t the first focus now?

Is this true at all anymore, except for SEO optimized sites/content?

For apps, it’s all layout, isn’t it — and HTML, JS, CSS have all evolved heavily to support UI-first, haven’t they?

Then less motivation to jump out to external LLM to even get comments on your content which can temptingly lead to editing/generation.

You can try to explain this OP’s concept to a stakeholder in a 1000 different sensible ways and you’ll get blinking deer-in-headlight eyes back at you.

This skill is hard-earned and, so, rare.

Therefore, many hierarchies are built on sufficient mediocrity top to bottom.

Which works because bottom line doesn’t often matter in software dev anyway.

And even when it does matter it’s multiplicatively rare to have a hierarchy or even the market that it tries to serve who can build, comprehend, handle high power::complexity systems, products, tools.

Writing code in many cases is faster to me than writing English (that is how PLs are designed, btw!) LLM/agentic is very “neat” but still a toy to the professional, I would say. I doubt reports like this one. For those of us building real world products with shelf-lives (Is Andrej representative of this archetype?), I just don’t see the value-add touted out there. I’d love to be proven wrong. But writing code (in code, not English), to me and many others, is still faster than reading/proving it.

I think there’s a combination of fetishizing and Stockholm syndroming going on in these enthusiastic self-reports. PMW.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788904

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I don’t think people “internet” for trust, but for dopamine.

> We are now at the point where AI models are … good enough at coding that some of the strongest engineers I’ve ever met are now handing over almost all their coding to AI.

Really?

All I’ve seen on HN the past few days are how slop prevails.

When I lean into agentic flows myself I’m at once amazed at how quickly it can prototype stuff but also how deficient and how much of a toy it all still seems.

What am I missing?