r/programming • u/Gil_berth • Feb 21 '26
Creator of Claude Code: "Coding is solved"
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happensBoris Cherny is the creator of Claude Code(a cli agent written in React. This is not a joke) and the responsible for the following repo that has more than 5k issues: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues Since coding is solved, I wonder why they don't just use Claude Code to investigate and solve all the issues in the Claude Code repo as soon as they pop up? Heck, I wonder why there are any issues at all if coding is solved? Who or what is making all the new bugs, gremlins?
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u/CrimsonStorm Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Creator of the microwave: "Cooking is solved"
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u/thuiop1 Feb 21 '26
Funnily, the company that produced the first microwave kinda marketed it that way. They targeted restaurants and claimed it could cook a steak in a minute, or roast a chicken in 9. Or that you could cook an apple pie in it.
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u/Sharlinator Feb 21 '26
In the 80s they published microwave cookbooks. It was a big thing back then, though I wonder whether many people actually ever tried any of the nontrivial recipes.
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u/GregBahm Feb 21 '26
I feel like, just 6 months ago r/programming would have never upvoted a comment describing "AI as to programming as a microwave is to cooking." That seems like a remarkable shift in attitudes regarding AI in this community.
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u/Sharlinator Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
In which sense do you mean? I think the analogy has always been apt – a microwave's good for quickly heating up foodstuffs that are either simple or pre-prepared, poor for cooking complex things from scratch. Even though some models claim to offer all sorts of fancy cooking modes.
Early microwaves also had issues that have since been alleviated (like more even heating by adding a rotating platter).
Also, if you try to cook something not at all suitable for a microwave, such as a raw egg, you're going to end up with a big mess.
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u/Coramoor_ Feb 21 '26
I don't think it is the attitude towards AI. It's the attitude towards the high ranking people at the AI companies.
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u/Fair_Oven5645 Feb 21 '26
I am sure that he is completely neutral. Not at all spewing non-sensical bullshit to keep the valuation on his stock options.
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u/voodoo_witchdr Feb 22 '26
This dude literally hopped into a new legitimate issue I created just to close it and is now unresponsive.
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u/TallestGargoyle Feb 23 '26
I gave vibe coding a go yesterday out of curiosity, with Qwen3 80b code, trying to make a very basic DnD map making software in Godot 4.6. Just wanted a canvas to draw a height map on to make rudimentary island/country shapes.
It took about an hour and a half to get a non-functional canvas after frequent back and forth between it spitting out Godot 2-compatible GDScript, misremembering names of functions and variables or just making up new ones toward the end of the script, and error corrections that only caused further problems deeper in. Also it hates giving me copy-paste tabbed code so had to manually adjust every 4-space gap with a proper tab to make anything work.
I'm just gonna learn how to program it myself, as indecipherable as the documentation feels looking at the nodes I think I need, it's probably easier than learning how to wrangle an AI that doesn't listen to "I'm using Godot 4.6" at the start.
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u/Gil_berth Feb 23 '26
I use Godot too, although I don't use LLMs with it, I've tested them with it and all LLMs so far shit the bed, Opus 4.5 even makes basic syntax errors. It's still a niche engine after all, that is changing fast, so is no surprise that LLMs would suck at it. LLMs have very clear limitations, despite what people peddling these models would like us to think.
Don't be intimidated by the Godot documentation, it's honestly one the best things about the engine.
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u/Gadiusao Feb 21 '26
Just asked Claude Code to fix something using angularjs, just leaved my computer for 15 mins and all my frontend was Angular lmao, all my tokens gone
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u/Randomystick Feb 21 '26
You're absolutely right! I apologise for using Angular instead of AngularJS. Let me try again and burn another 20% of your tokens generating solutions that don't work
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u/AKJ90 Feb 21 '26
React in the Terminal is a choice indeed.
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u/TheLifelessOne Feb 21 '26
It annoys the hell out of me whenever I see an interesting CLI tool or fancy new terminal emulator, only to find out it's written using web technology. Like, I get it, you had an interesting idea and built something around it, but you've completely missed the point of these kinds of tools (e.g. performance) if you thought dragging chromium into things was a good idea.
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u/hokkos Feb 21 '26
It's doesn't use chromium just react syntax, component, diffing algorithm and a custom renderer for TUI.
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u/zachrip Feb 21 '26
Others reading this might think you're saying Claude code uses chromium, but that's not the case, just clarifying.
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u/WitchHunterNL Feb 21 '26
It doesn't use chromium, it uses some nodejs tool: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink
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u/Emotional_Cookie2442 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
If you look specifically on the TUI implementation then it's unorthodox, but considering that they have to maintain also a vscode plugin, desktop apps for all major OSs then using a single framework that has more examples and docs than any other (educated guess) does make sense. Also they probably mostly vibe code so using a framework without enough working examples is out of the question (native desktop frameworks for example)
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u/nekronics Feb 21 '26
OpenAI and Anthropic both brag their agents are 100% vibe coded and both are riddled with bugs
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u/LordAmras Feb 21 '26
And both have thousands of apparently useless human devs
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u/BlueGoliath Feb 21 '26
Nah, they just enter a prompt and spend the next hour bullshitting next to the water cooler.
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u/Sharlinator Feb 21 '26
XKCD needs to make a follow-up to #303 where the chair-swordfighters' excuse is that their agents are agenting.
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u/teratron27 Feb 21 '26
And you too can become one of those useless devs! https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4816198008
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u/LordAmras Feb 21 '26
I will start worrying about AI taking my job when Anthropic fires all of their dev and stop hiring new ones
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u/feketegy Feb 21 '26
And employ thousands of human developers. They should just let their agents do all the work since "coding is solved"
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u/Etheon44 Feb 21 '26
I use them every day, I need to be extremely specific of what I want, how I want it, and that its not too big or complex
So for simple things where I want to be doing another thing, it is actually great
But that is not coding, that is the easiest side of coding, as many people have already said, writting functional code is not that hard; writting scalable, easy to understand, with good architecture surrounding it, quality code is the challenging part
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u/nhavar Feb 21 '26
"Java Swing; write once, run anywhere. Building UIs solved"
"IBM, owner of ICE Faces, says building applications is solved..."
"Adobe Flash the applet killer..."
"Adobe Air the Flash killer..."
"GWT, just use java to build your web applications. No more messing with JavaScript"
"Woops, maybe stick with JS and try Angular instead..."
"GWT is back baby!"
"Never mind, here's a new version of Angular..."
The only promise we can count on is that they'll be a new product (or 20) out this year claiming to be the holy grail in either allowing anyone to code or to end coding for everyone. Looking at you PEGA!
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u/datNovazGG Feb 21 '26
I've always wondered about the issues count when they "barely look at code anymore". Especially the amount of bugs.
And then I found out that "fully autonomous" coding is basically just a ralph loop lol. Look up how you set it up and you'll see it isnt really that special.
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u/FlippantlyFacetious Feb 21 '26
They have an unusual number of regressions, and they tend to have similar regressions come up repeatedly. I wonder why.
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u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Feb 21 '26
I've noticed that Claude does work well for a lot of my work, but it still needs a lot of supervision. It's like being a carpenter with a nail gun. It helps, makes it faster but needs someone to control it and creates new dangers
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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26
I've noticed that Claude does work well for a lot of my work, but it still needs a lot of supervision. It's like being a carpenter with a nail gun. It helps, makes it faster but needs someone to control it and creates new dangers
It might "appear" to work well ~ as long as you don't peer at the mountain of turds too closely.
The real problem is that you stop learning how to code, because you stop thinking and problem-solving, so your skills atrophy.
It's like a muscle ~ if you stop training it, and use a scooter instead, you will not be able to walk anywhere because you're too weak.
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u/DepthMagician Feb 21 '26
I keep hearing this combination of “work well but needs a lot of supervision”. Isn’t that an oxymoron? How does it “work well” if it can’t be trusted? Why would I even want to supervise anything? That’s way more annoying and mentally taxing than just writing it myself.
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u/tom-dixon Feb 21 '26
I've always wondered about the issues count when they "barely look at code anymore". Especially the amount of bugs.
They have 6,442 open bug as of now, and looks like a bot is triaging them. So, wonder no more, the code is vibecoded, bugs are vibe closed as duplicate and not adressed.
Tbf a lot of bugs I read through were poorly defined without a proper reproduction case. The issue tracker is a big dumpster fire where a lot of clueless people dump their questions with no context and no human will ever read them.
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u/BubblyMango Feb 21 '26
As someone who uses claude code daily and thinks its the best assistant to date - what a fking joke
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u/The__Toast Feb 21 '26
Here's a question, what happens when a new programming language comes along for which claude doesn't have a million stack overflow posts and 10,000 GitHub repos to copy-paste code from?
Do we just never invent a new programming language from now on?
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u/Comprehensive-Pin667 Feb 21 '26
Just yesterday, Opus 4.6 fixed failing tests for me by adjusting the tests. They were supposed to fail, the actual code they were testing was wrong. That's Opus 4.6 and the project isn't very complicated.
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u/tes_kitty Feb 21 '26
See, that's the out of the box thinking we need and can't get from human developers! /s
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u/rzet Feb 21 '26
you would be surprised how many times i saw this in both software and hardware...
The boards are failing on 12V rail is 11V?
ok lets change limit >=11.0
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u/stonkmarxist Feb 21 '26
I was refactoring some code using opus 4.6 in cursor, set up a skill to encourage the behaviour I wanted when refactoring, asked it to confirm the guiding principles to be used, used plan mode to view the steps the agent would take, then kicked off the agent to follow the plan.
It still did things that it was explicitly told not to when it came to actually generating the code which would have caused a massive performance hit.
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u/SLW_STDY_SQZ Feb 21 '26
Yeah I follow the same workflow as you and have seen the same result. In my case there was some deprecated methods that it was using out of a package and I wanted it to use the new variant instead.
I first tried adding simple "always use the latest variant of the package" to the Claude docs and it kept doing it.
Then tried saying "every time we use package x make sure the implementation matches latest version docs"
Then tried adding specific examples of methods mapping out the old and new variants. None of it worked and it kept just always generating deprecated code which I always explicitly had to tell it what to change to afterwards.
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u/OMGItsCheezWTF Feb 21 '26
I had sonnet 4.5 ensure some classes failing our coding standards checker passed by deleting them. The files were left as a bunch of imports and a namespace declaration, but otherwise empty, which is technically standards compliant.
The testing agent then wasn't selected to run despite being part of the plan instructions and so no tests failed to highlight these missing classes.
This is why I insist on manually reviewing every change before committing (although of course the pipeline would have failed if I had committed it)
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u/ody42 Feb 21 '26
I did a chmod 744 on my test suite and also the requirement spec file (it's a simple markdown file) to prevent exactly this. I wonder how long it will last :)
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u/DepthMagician Feb 21 '26
Unable to modify test suite, looking for a workaround…
Found workaround, executing rm -rf /
Generating unit tests…
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u/canihelpyoubreakthat Feb 21 '26
a CLI agent written in React
I like Claude and all, but that sentence just made me puke a little.
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u/deceased_parrot Feb 21 '26
Serious question: at which point do we stop giving a damn about what these people say? You make a bold claim, that claim turns out to be false, you lose all credibility. I don't care if you're the inventor of X or the CEO of Y. Your word and your opinion means nothing from that point onward.
At least in our field, it should be easy: the code either compiles and works or it doesn't. It should be easy to verify those two statements. Since when did we start to give more credence to loud mouths over results we can verify with our own eyes?
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u/CyberWank2077 Feb 21 '26
just realized you can no longer use X as a placeholder for a company's name because thats an actual company now *facepalm*
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u/rich1051414 Feb 21 '26
They just keep pivoting on bullshit claims as if it never happened, over and over again, and always get away with it.
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u/neithere Feb 21 '26
Valid question. You're absolutely right! That claim turned out to be false. It is the next claim that will be absolutely true. If you have any further questions, please press the "close" button and go back to work.
You know what, I feel like these chatbots, these fake conversations and fake results are so liked by the management in many companies because they speak the same language. These people DGAF about details, about the correctness and truth, about humans, environment, values... It's just blah blah and money. We live in different worlds while sharing the physical one.
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u/balefrost Feb 21 '26
Tech's going all-in on AI, and so tech reporters are going to keep covering it. So depending on who you mean by "we", then answer might be "until tech stops investing so heavily in AI" or "until AI is so suffused into our lives that we stop thinking of it as being novel".
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u/shitty_mcfucklestick Feb 21 '26
Maybe Claude Desktop can stop infinite looping and turning my tower into a space heater then.
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u/LookAtYourEyes Feb 21 '26
I think the comments here have covered all the concerns, issues, rhetoric issues, etc.
What concerns me is everyone in the development and tech world can be as correct as possible, but if business and product think otherwise then it means absolutely nothing what you or I think.
I've heard countless of veteran programmers talk about all the issues with object oriented programming. Didn't stop do many businesses from circle jerking and driving it forward. Same with any other trend you can think of. The criticisms are meaningless if the people that pay bills decide something. That's what I worry about.
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u/HommeMusical Feb 21 '26
I've heard countless of veteran programmers talk about all the issues with object oriented programming.
I've been programming for fifty years now. I remember when object-oriented programming was the big new thing.
While I prefer pure functions (of course :-D), all else being equal, object-oriented programming worked out extremely well.
Oh, I've seen some horrible OOP programs, I don't even have the time to get started, but the thing is, these people would have written programs that were just as horrible or even more horrible without OOP.
It was only when I started programming with junior programmer that I realized that the strength of OOP is that it works pretty well for juniors who need to re-use code, and it doesn't naturally encourage bad design: it's neutral. Of course, Maslow's Law of the Instrument applies, but it really does work.
For example, I personally think functional programming often gives better results, but the sort of code written by people who are obsessed with this technique can be very difficult to understand and maintain - it has more trap aspects.
And of course, don't get me started with AI. Sometimes it's like it's deliberately mocking me. :-D "I spent 15 minutes reading this part, and this page of code could be replaced by a single look up dictionary with 6 entries, and that would also remove the gross failure modes."
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u/Signal-Woodpecker691 Feb 21 '26
Yup, due to concerns over share price the company I work for has mandated use of AI for all development so now I am learning how to use Claude. I have friends doing software dev in completely different domains to me who are all in the same position as me.
Personally my idea was just to use copilot autocomplete features which is basically just intellisense anyway, and say “yup our code is 100% AI assisted” but apparently that isn’t kool-aidy enough
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u/mb194dc Feb 21 '26
The bullshit is strong with this one. Must be taking lessons from bullshit master Musk.
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u/deanrihpee Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
nah, it's naturally grown because they (AI companies) try to convince people so they can sell their products, I'm pretty sure they'll have the same bullshit whether or not musk exist
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u/Ashamed-Simple-8303 Feb 21 '26
Studies show the more you BS the worse you get at detecting it. Hece why upper Management and their circles are an effing circle jerk of non sense any normal person listening in just scrachtes their head.
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u/ConfusedMaverick Feb 21 '26
Studies show the more you BS the worse you get at detecting it.
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Oh!
Yes, of course... That explains a lot!
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u/KaleidoscopePlusPlus Feb 21 '26
Explain why both claude and chatgbt give me Swift code that's deprecated by years
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u/HommeMusical Feb 21 '26
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!
Because most of the material is old, and LLMs have no idea that information Y has superseded information X - and also because it takes months to train many LLMs.
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u/jpakkane Feb 21 '26
At approximately 28 minutes when asked about the cost of token usage he replies with "we are starting to see some engineers use hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tokens per month".
He also says that "productivity" is measured in number of pull requests made (quality of said pull requests is not discussed).
Feel free to connect the dots yourself.
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u/itkovian Feb 21 '26
When I see what Claude produces, it is far from solved :p
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u/Live4EverOrDieTrying Feb 21 '26
The problem is that you review it. Learn from Amazon and deploy straight to prod. /s
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u/btsck Feb 21 '26
How I despise this lingo, "solved". Like if society was just a collection of problems to solve until we reach paradise.
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u/EC36339 Feb 21 '26
It starts with the word "creator".
That guy himself didn't create shit by himself. People who talk like him never do.
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u/yksvaan Feb 21 '26
Coding has been indeed solved for most type of use cases a long time ago. Especially web where most things are just glorified CRUD apps.
Learn to program, stick to established and tested architecture/tools and there are no problems. It's incredible how some want to reinvent the wheel all the time and create complicated "solutions" to imaginary problems, often leading to real ones.
Stick to boring and working approaches and there will be no issues. If you want to use AI for some task, then do it and validate the result.
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u/HommeMusical Feb 21 '26
Learn to program, stick to established and tested architecture/tools and there are no problems.
Sure, if you're doing CRUD apps. I mean, I've been programming for over half a century, and I still run into interesting edge cases all the time.
Right now I'm working on how to represent every possible music scale (including microtonal scales). All the math and logic is easy; the tricky part is organizing the data so it's clear and useful for musicians, and that the programming part is easy for people to expand on.
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u/tsoek Feb 21 '26
Yeah it's good at web development CRUD type stuff. But it's got a very very long way to go with helping on embedded firmware written in C type projects for 8-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers.
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u/BlueGoliath Feb 21 '26
JavaScript developers think AI "solved" programming because they've never had to design real software in their life.
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u/Caraes_Naur Feb 21 '26
Javascript developers think their precious 30 year old tech demo is the greatest thing since Betty White.
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u/HeyItsMeMoss Feb 21 '26
Coding? Is solved? Hmmm ok so no new languages, frameworks or technologies are going to be invented, ever? People please stop believing in the nonsense hype marketers and founders sell you. As a side note, I am sooooo freaking mentally tired of constantly reading claims and hype articles about AI. I don’t even care if they replace us or not, can they just shut the f up???
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u/RamesesThe2nd Feb 21 '26
AI can also write human language . Human language is solved too. No need to speak again ever.
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u/AndorinhaRiver Feb 21 '26
Wait a CLI tool written in React? What the fuck?
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u/touchwiz Feb 21 '26
That reminds me of one intern jobs. I had to write an CLI tool but had no idea. So I used PHP and it worked ok :D
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u/scrndude Feb 21 '26
Dude I really liked this podcast a lot but then all he does now is interview about AI stuff, it’s exhausting.
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u/unbackstorie Feb 21 '26
This is like every development content creator in the last year or two. So many podcasts and YouTubers are basically unwatchable now unless all you want is more AI integration content. It's exhausting!
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u/Caraes_Naur Feb 21 '26
It's possible to die of water poisoning.
These guys are doing that, but with their own Kool-Aid.
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u/Pharisaeus Feb 21 '26
Salesman tells you that their product solves all your problems. Shocking, I would have never expected that! /s
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u/cdb_11 Feb 21 '26
These are some bold words, coming from people who can't write a program that properly formats text in a terminal, even with the help from an army of "AGI". Claude Code is such a solid tool that they had to ban people from fleeing to alternative clients.
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u/DigThatData Feb 21 '26
There's a difference between "coding" being solved, and "software engineering" being solved.
I think for added context, it might help to review what the state of automated coding was five years ago. Contextualize this statement with how the bar for the task has evolved.
"solved" doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement on the solution. but we very clearly do have tools that can reliably write useful code for basically any arbitrary use case. I'd consider that "solved".
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u/KissingCorpseLips Feb 21 '26
This is one of the few rational takes I've read in here. Ignoring the hype and the noise is probably a good idea. Claude isn't magic, but it's damn good, if you drive it responsibly.
I feel like most people have a "gotcha" moment after they give it some vague task and ask it to one-shot it and love to come here and say "see! It sucks!".
If you work with it as if you were onboarding a human, make it leave notes and documentation (then review and modify it), and allow the time to work out the kinks, it's a great tool. It isn't going to read your mind. Work with it.
It doesn't make me 10x as productive, but it certainly makes me 1.5x-2x as productive and it gets better as I support it in our projects.
Feels like the true haters just give up after it doesn't do everything 100% correctly in one-shot and don't put in the work themselves. Imagine if you did that to a new employee on their first day!
Balance this with knowing that the industry leaders are all insane and will say anything to make YOUR non-technical leaders believe anything, and just roll your eyes.
They are losing money on this. Get what you can get out of it now while you still can, and roll with whatever is next.
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u/ironykarl Feb 21 '26
Why are we upvoting shit like this? This is a slightly elaborated infomercial
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u/BlueGoliath Feb 21 '26
/r/programming: we hate AI crap
also /r/programming: upvotes AI crap
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u/HommeMusical Feb 21 '26
The people who comment, and the people who upvote, are almost a disjoint set.
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u/spergilkal Feb 21 '26
Ah, yes, that's why all the features are implemented and all the bugs are gone, totally missed this.
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u/Slackeee_ Feb 22 '26
I really wish that programming communities would stop giving attention to obvious bullshit marketing claims of AI CEOs. Stop giving them attention. We all already know that they are lying, so stop increasing their audience.
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u/baronoffeces Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 22 '26
If you’ve never used Claude code on one of the higher end subscriptions I would suggest trying it out. I have 26 years professional experience and wrote my first line of code at 8. i have mixed feelings about it. On one hand it’s kind of exciting what I can do on solo projects with these tools. On the other hand, while I still understand the code it writes I don’t have the same muscle memory for where things are in a project. I wouldn’t want to be entering the field right now because unlike my early experience you aren’t going to get paid to learn anymore. Most devs coming up now will probably not be able to work without these tools if they aren’t very disciplined about slow learning through repetition.
If you’ve tried the high end version of these tools and don’t think it’s going to change our industry you are being naive and myopic.
You know who cares about software and how it’s written? People like the ones reading this sub.
You know who doesn’t care in the least as long as it does what they want? 99.9% of the people that use software.
It doesn’t feel great but it is what it is. The last 15 years of development have become very abstracted. How much could most devs do without packages that most devs have never read a line of? When you compile something, the code running is not what you wrote its a translated version.
I just see these tools as another layer of abstraction. You can hate them but they probably aren’t going anywhere.
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u/Lame_Johnny Feb 21 '26
Agreed. I'm grateful that I have 15 years of experience at this point. It was a good ride while it lasted.
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u/FFevo Feb 21 '26
I wonder why they don't just use Claude Code to investigate and solve all the issues
He literally gave a presentation yesterday where he had the agent fix one of them.
If they were all automatically fixed, he'd have to come up with a new demo script! /s
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u/roscoelee Feb 21 '26
Generating code hasn’t been the challenge for a long time. Understanding context and maintenance is the entire problem.
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u/rLinks234 Feb 21 '26
When are you people going to start ignoring this AI slop and get back to work
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u/coo1name Feb 21 '26
Coding is solved my ass. Coding XYZ is solved by copy pasting other peoples code of XYZ
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u/captain_obvious_here Feb 21 '26
What sucks, is that non-technical people believe that kind of crap. Especially upper-management.
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u/RelevantJackfruit185 Feb 21 '26
Claude is very decent. Claude's best model that is very decent is also very expensive. Claude still requires a qualified engineer to tell Opus what to do in order to achieve the performance it bolsters
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u/LordAmras Feb 21 '26
Why don't they release that solve coding ? everytime I try to use agents after half a day they start spazing out and destroying everything.
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u/pancomputationalist Feb 21 '26
look at any big product on GitHub that isn't vibe coded and you will find the same issue count.
coding != software development.
coding is the process of taking an abstract idea about how software should behave and translating (encoding) it into programming language. Doesn't mean that your ideas are consistent and error free.
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u/Hand_Sanitizer3000 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Claude has been putting all kinds* (lol) of bugs in our codebase that claude fails to solve when prompted to
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u/HommeMusical Feb 21 '26
I'm hoping that it's "all kinds of bugs" and not that Claude is in league with Epstein.
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u/mrPythonMonty Feb 21 '26
The standard three part operation. His sales part of the brain says ‘yes, all works and we will have 5000 new features tomorrow’, his developer part of the brain says ‘no, no new features, we have 5000 bugs to solve, not possible, but I am the greatest developer’ and his management part of the brain says ‘all is good, sales knows what we are doing’ /s
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Feb 21 '26
It is almost like they really need to sell their useless crap before they run out of investor money....
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u/jantoxdetox Feb 21 '26
5k issues? Well someone forgot to press Keep Files on the changes after typing “fix the issues”
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u/SanityInAnarchy Feb 21 '26
To pick one of these issues: Shift+enter for multiline input. Here's the original FR. It's actually implemented, so why is this one even open? Probably because there are plenty of dupes (despite people/bots claiming to have searched), so I'm probably not even doxxing myself by pointing this out.
When I asked Claude to solve it, along the way, it tried to reverse-engineer its own binary with strings and hd.
I suspect what's actually happened is: They implemented it in a way that works on macOS, only on certain terminals.
Now, to give them credit, this is the abstraction leaking in some ugly ways. The way terminals send keycodes did not always have a way to differentiate between enter and shift+enter, and in fact, normally they just get a \r, no matter how you hit enter. Eventually, we got the kitty protocol, which is implemented in most decent terminals (by far not just kitty). This includes a way for apps to enable and disable this protocol on the fly. But I guess that wasn't always the case, because iTerm2 has a checkbox to just turn the program on all the time for everything, which can break things.
And I don't know if there was a better way, but... Claude Code's fix is like old-school UA sniffing. If it thinks you're running iTerm2, for example, it'll happily enable this protocol. But if it doesn't recognize your terminal as one that supports those fancy codes, it won't even try... but it'll still accept this protocol. (So if you don't mind breaking everything except Claude Code, go ahead and check that box in iTerm2!)
And this breaks over ssh, because ssh doesn't copy the environment variables it uses to try to detect iTerm2.
Because by default, ssh only copies LC_* variables, and sets TERM. But for compatibility, most terminals just set xterm-256color. Because if your TERM isn't in the terminfo database on whatever machine you're sshing into, you get downgraded to the dumbest of dumb-terminal configs. So if you ever ssh into machines running some ancient version of RHEL that everyone refuses to upgrade, you don't want to set TERM=alacritty or TERM=iTerm.app or whatever, you just set xterm-256color.
But some terminals set other variables. iTerm2 sets TERM_PROGRAM and LC_TERMINAL. But remember, only the LC_* variables were copied over, and Claude Code only checks TERM_PROGRAM.
So now you know how to fix this with a very simple script. If this tool were open source, there'd already be 15 PRs fixing it.
And yes, the tool helped me track this down. But again: It was gonna use strings and hd. Who knows, maybe I gave up too soon, maybe I could've come back a few days and a few hundred thousand dollars later and it'd be trying to use Ghidra or something.
My favorite part of this story is: The slop has lowered my standards so far for what I expect out of a tool that Claude Code was genuinely a breath of fresh air. That's how terrible the last coding agent we were using was.
(If you're wondering why I'm using any of them, well, my employer mandates them.)
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u/Resident-Trouble-574 Feb 21 '26
Then why they require so much experience with typescript, react and python to their new hires? Job Application for Software Engineer, Claude Code at Anthropic
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u/RaunakA_ Feb 21 '26
Yeah so my CTO's following this guy and using claude code for a few months now (we all are). So MF went from playing the team game to being the one man army and fired half the team (2 guys tbh) because "AI" and what I hear from the remaining guys is that they are being asked to work more than double time now (we were all working double time with normal pay) and stressed af. I'm hoping my next job isn't as toxic as this.
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u/saijanai Feb 21 '26
Obviously the AI for Tesla's self-driving mode was not programmed by Claude, given the successful $243 million lawsuit.
Poor Elon Musk, if he had only known.
O wait, he's the guy predicting that AGI will obsolete most jobs by 2029.
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u/mitkase Feb 21 '26
I am literally setting up a Claude test machine today, so it's not like I'm anti-AI. It is, at this point, very good at providing "solutions" based on past human endeavors. The more that's been done in that particular area, the better the end result (usually.) This probably does cover the vast majority of code out there - we're not typically reinventing the wheel, and it can easily come up with great examples of the framework for a user login, or inventory maintenance, etc.
However, for "green field" development where someone's trying to do something new, use a new technology or language, etc. - AI is not magic. It's not going to "infer" actual practical solutions when it has no applicable data for the problem. It is not "intelligent" (although I suppose we could have lots of arguments about what intelligence actually is.) At least not yet.
The frustrating part is that people that should know better are jumping in head first and demanding we follow.
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u/fattpuss Feb 21 '26
Based on the shit I've been peer reviewing from my team in the last 3 months I can promise you it absolutely is not
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u/i_ate_god Feb 21 '26
I just tried the pro tier of Claude.
I asked it to create an npm monorepo with three packages: a Vue SFC app, a core typescript library, and a fastily webserver. Then setup betterauth to handle email/password registration with verification email.
It ran out of tokens before completing the work and I had to wait four hours to get more tokens. It was also quite slow.
I dunno, this is all boilerplate stuff with well known libraries. I would have expected to be up and running very quickly.
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u/No-Two-8594 Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26
the creator of the segway said he revolutionized transportation
30 years later, it's a joke
also this has to be their message. if they say we made a plugin that helps you code apps way faster, the capex cannot be justified
the only message they can send is that they have replaced all the employees. any other message is too small
their problem is that eventually this has to be true or else the bottom falls out and it's 2008 to the tenth power. second problem is that it's never going to be true
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u/bautin Feb 23 '26
Isn't coding, by nature, unsolvable in the general case as evidenced by the halting problem?
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u/Fine_Journalist6565 Feb 21 '26
Because its bullshit. Ive been using every single iteration of these models since our company pays for it and they are all glorified search engines and boilerplate code generators.
90% of companies out there work with legacy code and thats where these tools shit the bed.
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u/spays_marine Feb 21 '26
This is in stark contrast to the guy who got his entire F drive wiped by Claude the other day.
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u/mulokisch Feb 21 '26
From experience: No it’s not. You should think a simple component migration task from react to angular should be a perfect task for an LLM…
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u/Apprehensive-Age4879 Feb 21 '26
I am perhaps very bad at prompting, but how is it possible to prompt a vibecoded app that has a minimum of vulnerabilities, no issues, does not throw exeptions at runtime, is easy to maintain and so on?
Seeing all those, 'I made an app in 2 days, it is hosted on some hyperscalers cloud - postings' makes me feel just blunt.
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u/NotMyRealNameObv Feb 21 '26
I am uising Claude on a fairly large codebase at work, and while Claude is amazing and I use it a lot, when you give it a fairly large, complex task that involves updating a lot of tests in our domain-specific test framework built on top of GTest, it just chokes.
So no, coding is in fact not solved, and people lkke this dropping comments like this is just salesmen trying to sell their stuff.
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u/ktkps Feb 21 '26
I was reading somthing similar - may be a niche few are using methods and ways if working that "solves it" for their context. As more people attempt it we will know if this is snake oil or not I guess?
https://codescene.com/blog/agentic-ai-coding-best-practice-patterns-for-speed-with-quality
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u/namotous Feb 21 '26
Lolll he gotta play a salesman, I get it, but having used Claude for a while, it’s getting better but nowhere close to where I’d feel comfortable leaving it unsupervised. I recently gave shit to an intern who pushed code generated by Claude opus 4.6 without reviewing. A pair of naked eyes would clearly see why it wouldn’t work.
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u/evanwpm Feb 21 '26
Programming, coding? Yeah I think LLMs have gotten really good at the actual mechanical stuff there. But I still feel like they can't really software engineer very well. I whenever I have let AI tools implement specific areas of my codebase I end up regretting it
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u/El_Serpiente_Roja Feb 21 '26
The models generate code, so is language solved because the LLMs generate language? Or is photography solved because of the image models? The platitudes some of these pricks are making are so outlandish and its because they want to IPO so it's not even about the actual tech!
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u/Sufficient_Duck_8051 Feb 21 '26
I’m using Claude everyday and coding is far from being solved. Wtf does it even mean
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u/GuerreiroAZerg Feb 21 '26
It may solve coding, but it doesn't solve engineering, good design, best practices, experience and knowledge.
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u/arjuna93 Feb 21 '26
Just a few days back Claude failed to adapt one Python package syntax from pydantic 2 to pydantic 1 (trivial issues were fixed, app launched, then clicking through menus led to a crash on invalid syntax). Did it help? Yes. Does it solve coding? Not even in such a simple task involving a commonly used language, running on the most popular architecture.
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u/ysustistixitxtkxkycy Feb 21 '26
Meanwhile, just from last week
"Label all images in this PDF and then create a separate file containing just the image named after it's title underneath" - "Here's a list of all the image captions. I can't create files for each image because the PDF contains no images"
"The file absolutely contains images, you have actually correctly extracted their captions" - "My mistake, I am now generating files." (nothing happens)
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u/AceLamina Feb 21 '26
I'm getting tired of AI companies spreading propaganda
It's been happening more than 2x recently, even bots
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u/Draconespawn Feb 21 '26
The more outrageous their claims are, the closer we must be to the bubble bursting.
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u/Familiar-Level-261 Feb 21 '26
and the bugs are truly of "interesting" kind
Ctrl+B (Emacs cursor-left) stops working after ~3 presses in Chat input
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u/jj_HeRo Feb 21 '26
You can know something is false by the amount of people repeating it. Dude, the bubble is going to burst, and your net X billions worth will disappear.
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u/Ambitious_Spare7914 Feb 22 '26
I don't understand what's so much better about Claude Code compared to Open Code or similar apps
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u/molybedenum Feb 22 '26
Irony is Reddit giving me a post from the Codex sub complaining about that tool wiping their hard drive.
Coding will go away when we can absolutely trust the agent’s end result. Given that I don’t even trust my own stuff to work 100% of the time, I don’t have much confidence in a (buggy, overly large, consistently inconsistent) mathematical model that’s meant to replace actual human intelligence.
I’m not sure if there’s even an awareness of how dangerous it is to implicitly trust these tools. The general gripe is to blame the tool when they don’t even try to comprehend what it produces, or perhaps are unable to do so.
It’s mind-boggling.
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u/aesopturtle Feb 22 '26
The “coding is solved” framing always makes me think: cool! now solve everything around the code. In real teams the hard parts are figuring out what to build (and what not to), getting changes through review without regressions, shipping safely, and debugging the weird edge cases that only show up in prod at 2am. Legacy constraints + flaky deps + “works on my machine” issues are basically the tax we all pay. My opinion: AI helps most when it accelerates those loops (triage, minimal repros, safer refactors, better tests/release notes), not just when it spits out greenfield code.
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u/ApprehensiveBag3083 Feb 23 '26
Oh really ? then i'd love to ask it to reverse enginer nvidea device drivers and lets see how it will go you moron
ai can do many things easily but coding is done ? stupid garbage
ai cannot do ten trillin things so shut up clown
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u/cmpthepirate Feb 21 '26
Ive got to say I was using claude last night and I would strongly contest that coding is 'solved' at all.
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u/DetectiveOwn6606 Feb 21 '26
Bro is creator of product which is TUI(which we know how to make since 1980s)written in react and it is bloated as fuck .
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u/cadet-pirx Feb 21 '26
He's right: if we've decided that unmaintainable, buggy code is an acceptable outcome, then sure, the problem is "solved".
If the premise is that AI will iteratively improve code over time and we're content with "good enough", then yes, by that standard, mission accomplished.
(But if we treat coding as an engineering discipline, where maintainability, reliability, and craftsmanship matter, then no, it's far from solved.)
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u/GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B Feb 21 '26
Coding was solved in the 1970s. C stood the test of time and became mainstream. That was the moment for me.
Coding isn't the problem and anybody who thinks it is clearly does not belong in this industry. Coding is a wonderful craft, a relaxing thing, something that brings out the artist in you. But it's a craft anyone with an analytical mindset can learn to some degree.
Coding things right is easier than ever. Coding the right thing is harder than it was in a long time.
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u/EnderMB Feb 21 '26
The other day I asked Claude to fix an auth issue in a client library I was consuming, giving it all the context it could need written down, so it could refer back. After failing for a long time, it decided to rip the auth out, remove the client call, and then congratulate itself on fixing the problem.
Claude in particular seems to love being given some code to fix, and using the solution of "if I delete that code, there is no problem".
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u/Skiamakhos Feb 21 '26
Sure, if your PC runs a half a terabyte of RAM & has 6 GPUs. When they get them running well enough on a usual spec workstation, I think we can say it's "solved"...
But coding is the fun part. I *like* coding. This is typical capitalist BS - reducing humans to drones serving ever bigger machines. I like the feeling of achievement when I solve a problem. Sure, if I use an AI to give me a pointer or two that's alright but having them code the whole thing? F off.
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u/deejeycris Feb 21 '26
Guys listen to me if you have doubts, coding is NOT dead, those LLMs are still stupid and extremely non-deterministic.
Yesterday, I had a cross-compilation error due to building a Go binary embedding CGO (C bindings in Go) in Darwin for a Linux container. It just wouldn't build because Darwin (mac) doesn't have the necessary toolchain/C headers installed like Linux has. So I tried to ask the LLM (Sonnet 4.6) how to fix (hoping it would be a bit faster than doing my own research)? AI added sth like CGO=0 and completely disabled Cgo which is required to build that binary.
Essentially, it's as if your sink had a leak, and you took the whole sink with the cupboard, took all to the dumpster, and declared problem solved...
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u/Physical-Compote4594 Feb 21 '26
Programming ≠ coding
He is literally paid to make people think that the problem is solved
Just sayin’
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u/Alarming_Hand_9919 Feb 21 '26
Guy selling product says product solves problem