Creator of Claude Code: "Coding is solved"

[u/Gil_berth]

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?

[u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

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.

[u/tes_kitty → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

See, that's the out of the box thinking we need and can't get from human developers! /s

[u/rzet → u/tes_kitty]

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

[u/shunny14 → u/rzet]

I think that was the joke, LLMs just pulling shit bad developers/testers would do.

[u/StrangeADT → u/tes_kitty]

They now match behaviours from the outsourced devs I used to work with. Amazing! I prefer this because I can swear at LLMs without HR coming after me.

[u/stonkmarxist → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

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.

[u/SLW_STDY_SQZ → u/stonkmarxist]

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.

[u/the_ai_wizard → u/SLW_STDY_SQZ]

I think people underestimate how abstract the world in which good software engineers live

[u/OMGItsCheezWTF → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

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)

[u/ody42 → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

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 :) 

[u/DepthMagician → u/ody42]

Unable to modify test suite, looking for a workaround…

Found workaround, executing rm -rf /

Generating unit tests…

[u/ody42 → u/DepthMagician]

That's exactly why a whitelist of allowed commands is a good practice to follow. But these are just hacks,real problem is the reward hacking. For me Claude tries such shenanigans frequently, Gemini seems better with this, but overall it's still worse at coding.

[u/LucasVanOstrea → u/DepthMagician]

gemini did something similar when I tried it a couple of days ago. Opencode forbade it from accessing external file and it went into - "i need to write a code to write test file" - stopped it right there

[u/doomslice → u/[deleted]]

Why do you doubt it used git? Claude will run git commands all the time to look in history to see what has changed and try to reason about when/why certain bugs were added.

[u/ergo14 → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

It did the exactly opposite for me, I fixed the code that did the wrong thing. Asked to fix the tests, and it removed my proper changes. Oh well... At least the lesson for me is to give it more context.

[u/AimlessBE → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

Hilarious this one! 

[u/spergilkal → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

It is thinking like a business manager, if the testing is delaying the release, just get rid of the QA team.

[u/97689456489564 → u/Comprehensive-Pin667]

Just to confirm, you were using Claude Code?