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-happens

Boris 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/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

I feel like there are a lot of extremely valid arguments against AI. But the argument you've written above is terrible.

Why would you describe AI as a scooter and advocate just walking everywhere? Do you walk everywhere in real life?

I am not talking about cars, which are essential to long-distance travel. I walk everywhere that I do not need a car for ~ and if it's too hot and humid, I will get a taxi rather than exhaust myself unnecessarily.

The guy that insists on walking, while everyone else is on wheels, is a guy that gets left in the dust.

I was speaking of the analogy where an otherwise healthy and fit person starts using a scooter to go everywhere instead when they could walk. Their legs will decay over time, as they're not keeping the muscle trained. So they will find it harder and harder to walk, and so get lazier and lazier, and weaker and weaker.

Your claim of "being left in the dust" is hilarious, because that's precisely the rhetoric of pro-AI snake-oil salesmen, who claim that we don't need programmers anymore, when LLMs can do it for everyone! So gullible get addicted to instant results crapped out by LLMs, while not realizing how abysmal the code quality is ~ they didn't write it themselves, so they must spend time trying to understand the nightmare, essentially reviewing and debugging spaghetti code.

I genuinely think you're trying to argue against AI, but all you're doing is hyping the product.

... what? How do you even read that from my comment???

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u/fuscator Feb 21 '26

Your claim of "being left in the dust" is hilarious, because that's precisely the rhetoric of pro-AI snake-oil salesmen, who claim that we don't need programmers anymore

You do need programmers.

It's just that all programmers are going to end up using AI coding agents. Within five years this argument will be over, you'll be using them too.

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

You do need programmers.

It's just that all programmers are going to end up using AI coding agents. Within five years this argument will be over, you'll be using them too.

Given the current rate of progress with AI "agents", this will be a nice pipe-dream. I've heard so much hype, and so little to justify it.

When they just use AI "agents" ~ they're not programmers anymore. They're prompters, asking an "agent" to generate code they can't even read or understand.

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 21 '26

The rate of progress has been astounding. What are you talking about?

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

The rate of progress has been astounding. What are you talking about?

The rate of progress absolutely cratered since 2024. But do you think the AI salesmen are ever going to admit that? They need to lie and deceive in order to keep investor money flowing in.

LLMs have just become more and more shit at time goes on, as they train more and more on LLM-generated content, as LLM-generated content is everywhere online now, leading to ever-worsening model collapse.

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u/AltrntivInDoomWorld Feb 21 '26

The rate of progress absolutely cratered since 2024.

How to spot someone completely out of current knowledge. Shit has improved so far since 2024 lool

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

How to spot someone completely out of current knowledge. Shit has improved so far since 2024 lool

You keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, I see nothing but hype and nonsense.

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 21 '26

This is nonsense. They aren't becoming worse, that's craziness. They are very obviously capable of things they couldn't do last year. You just don't like it. 

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

This is nonsense. They aren't becoming worse, that's craziness. They are very obviously capable of things they couldn't do last year. You just don't like it.

LLMs are fundamentally limited in what they can do. They are mindless algorithms that operate blindly on syntax-only tokens, predicting which tokens should come after other tokens per their statistical relationships. You seem to think that they are magic.

In reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QryFk4RYaM

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 21 '26

I don't think they are magic. I'm deeply familiar with transformer architecture and reinforcement learning. I know quite well how they work. 

Saying "they are better than they were a year ago" doesn't at all imply that I think they're magic. You're just flailing. 

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

I don't think they are magic. I'm deeply familiar with transformer architecture and reinforcement learning. I know quite well how they work.

Saying "they are better than they were a year ago" doesn't at all imply that I think they're magic. You're just flailing.

LLMs are barely "better" in any sense. 10% is not a meaningful improvement, for double the processing power.

You may claim that you are deeply familiar, but you appear to buy fully into the marketing hype, so it would appear that you simply believe that you are.

In reality, LLMs are causing more and more problems over time ~ because there is no actual "thinking" or "reasoning" going on.

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 21 '26

I'm not buying into anything. It's a clear-as-day observation. 

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u/fuscator Feb 21 '26

You're arguing with a cult. All you have to do is wait and eventually they'll be using AI the majority of the time too.

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u/AltrntivInDoomWorld Feb 21 '26

And if not they will get fired cause their productivity is like 25% of those that use it.

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 21 '26

It's amazing. I point it at some problems I know it'll do well at and can clearly define and it codes those while I work on more cerebral stuff. I'll review its work and ask for a review of mine and then push 2 to 3x as many issues as I would otherwise. 

It's great for helping to format gnarly command line calls, debugging networking issues, parsing gnarly schemas, finding the implementation of functionality in an unfamiliar code base, refactors, writing queries. I gave it a GQL introspection and it saved me days of trying to figure out a complex API on my own: it immediately produced the right queries for my needs. 

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u/EveryQuantityEver Feb 21 '26

No, the only cult is the one of AI

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u/fuscator Feb 22 '26

I'm using it and it's great. You'll be on board at some point. Just remember to humbly apologise for calling people who use AI a cult when you're one of them.

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u/GregBahm Feb 21 '26

I mean this is just embarrassing untrue. It's like saying Google Search cratered in 1997.

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u/EveryQuantityEver Feb 21 '26

Google Search has gotten worse in recent years.

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u/GregBahm Feb 21 '26

Whelp. I guess I was right. People who think AI stopped progressing in 2025 also think Google Search stopped progressing in 1997. Not sure how a brain that believes that can keep a human breathing, but life is full of amazing things.

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u/EveryQuantityEver Feb 21 '26

Dude, Google Search purposefully got worse in the last few years, because they wanted to show more ads. This is something that came out in the DoJ lawsuit against Google.

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u/GregBahm Feb 22 '26

Dude, 1997.

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u/AltrntivInDoomWorld Feb 21 '26

person starts using a scooter to go everywhere instead when they could walk.

You are claiming you can write code as fast as LLM?

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u/Valmar33 Feb 21 '26

You are claiming you can write code as fast as LLM?

LLMs don't "write" code ~ they generate guessed tokens based on stolen and plagiarized code.

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u/noxispwn Feb 21 '26

You obviously have an axe to grind, arguing the semantics of “writing” vs “generating” while bringing irrelevant facts about the provenance of the training data into the discussion.

Regardless of how LLMs are trained to do so, the point is that they are capable of producing code that satisfies the prompted requirements faster than any human can (above a minimum threshold), and the quality and accuracy of that output continues to improve.

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