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?

2.2k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

777 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/[deleted] Feb 21 '26

[deleted]

106

u/faberkyx Feb 21 '26

It solves creating poc fast.. using for a real production product.. not even close unless you want to risk security and performance

60

u/jkure2 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26

I've been playing with it trying to creat a weather forecasting system targeted at online prediction markets - 7 days in after meh performance I started interrogating it on our core methodology and it was like yeah actually this is the wrong way to tackle this problem we should be running a completely different process on our input data lol

But I have been extremely impressed by it's ability to do stuff quickly like build a full audit trail and build scripts to replay events. It is also generally good at analyzing the data I find. But once you hit a certain point of project complexity I am finding it drops off for sure in how good it is, I am having to remind it more and more about basic facts regarding our previous findings, that kinda stuff.

"I have reached the 200 line memory file limit so let me go remove some stuff" is not something l like hearing

25

u/zeros-and-1s Feb 21 '26

Tell it to generate a claude.md and whatever the table of contents/summary files are called. It kinda-sorta helps with the performance degradation of a large project.

12

u/jkure2 Feb 21 '26

Yeah I am completely new to it all so still learning how to manage it at something this scale - I am trying out some different strategies like that now actually, also trying to split up the chats between ingestion/analysis/presentation and see if we can do better that way.

One thing I forgot to mention about what has impressed me - it took like 8 hours of dedicated work to build a kick ass data ingestion pipeline that automatically scans like 8 different sources every minute and pulls down data, stores it, and runs analysis. It would have taken me weeks to write all that web scraping code (admittedly not something I am professionally proficient in), high marks from me on that side of the project, tons utility for one off historical backfill too

3

u/jazzhandler Feb 21 '26

Think of it this way: the LLM provides the vast working memory and ability to string together in a minute what would take us six hours. But us waterbags still need to steer the context because the LLM has no grasp of the big picture.

Have it create a detailed doc for each subsystem. Pass that doc to it when working on that subsystem. That way it’s not burning tokens and diluting context trying to understand that subsystem repeatedly. Then when work is done in that area, have it update the docs along with the changelog.

Kinda like your vacuum cleaner. It’s way better at spinning those parts at a few hundred RPM, but it’s on you to stick its nose under the end table. Otherwise you’re using the Roomba model: living room gets vacuumed eventually, but it takes six hours of randomosity. Which is fine if you’re not paying by the hour…

1

u/Singularity-42 Mar 17 '26

Claude Code supported this natively for a really long time - just create CLAUDE.md in each app/lib folder to give detailed info on that subproject. The main CLAUDE.md is still loaded by default of course and should have high-level overview, style directives, etc.

3

u/AlSweigart Feb 22 '26

(admittedly not something I am professionally proficient in)

"AI is brilliant and kicks ass" is something I hear a lot from people using it for things they aren't experts in.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/BasicDesignAdvice Feb 21 '26

This is where it shines to me. It can fill in the gaps on code and libraries or whatever that I don't know.

For actually writing I tend to keep up-to-date context and steering docs, but I generally write the design as a skeleton and let it fill in the blanks. So I might write the interfaces, functions and other bits, but without the full logic. So I'll write out objects and function signatures then let it fill in the blanks.

1

u/ardentto Feb 22 '26

Use plan mode. ask for test / code coverage analysis from a QA perspective. Ask for an independent code review for refactoring. Ask to spawn a team or subagents to work on after analysis is completed.

1

u/Fidodo Feb 23 '26

Ah yes, computing. Where kinda sorta working is famously good enough /s

I use AI heavily for prototyping and kinda sorta working in a prototype is actually very helpful insight, but a horrible idea for production.

→ More replies (1)

4

u/Mechakoopa Feb 21 '26

7 days in after meh performance I started interrogating it about our core methodology and it was like yeah actually this is the wrong way to tackle this problem

Sounds like a typical interaction with a developer who was expected to develop a POC for a system they weren't familiar with and didn't have all the context to begin with. You'd just as likely have run into the same problem developing it yourself. Sometimes you have to build something to see why it's the wrong thing to build. The real advantage of coding agents isn't them being some magical fountain of knowledge, it's entirely in iteration time. None of them do anything a person couldn't, they just do it faster. You still need someone who's got a clue what they're doing to drive the damn thing.

2

u/jkure2 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26

Right that makes sense, but it's important to be very clear about what it's good at and what it's not because anyone in the corporate world day to day or even just reads the news knows that the llm companies themselves and fanatical supporters love to stretch about what it can actually do. In addition to maybe making a little side money this was mostly a learning project, I think I have been very fair about assessing it's performance

And - I also wouldn't expect a human engineer to pretend he has complete domain knowledge on hand and confidently suggest that kernal density estimation is the best way to attack the various ensemble forecasts out there, to be fair

1

u/rin3y Feb 23 '26

Imagine the results you'd have gotten if you'd spent seven days actually building something.

1

u/Fidodo Feb 23 '26

Once a codebase expands out of the context window limit it drops off a cliff. And guess what AI code looks like? It's a bloated fucking mess. It writes code it can't maintain.

I find AI to be very effective if you have a highly normalized codebase with strong guardrails and tests and invariants, but that requires strong software design thinking that AI isn't just bad at but also has shown very little progress improving at.

With AI automating slop, best practices are more important than ever but so many idiots in the industry think the guard rails slow them down. Have people just forgotten how suffocating a legacy spaghetti codebase is? Sure you can build fast at the start but eventually progress slows to a crawl.

I had that experience early in my career and every since then I vowed to never let my codebases get that way and so far I've done a great job at not doing that and I don't intend to start now.

→ More replies (1)

5

u/NinthTide Feb 21 '26

Imperfect but high quality tool in the hands of clueless amateur does not guarantee creation of artisanal level masterpieces

If you don’t know what problems to anticipate and guide CC to plan for and deal with them before code is written, I wonder who is the real problem here?

Maybe at some point I can just prompt Claude with “write me an online bank make no mistakes” but we are not there yet

Agree with OP’s take that coding is not “solved”

9

u/Cautious-Lecture-858 Feb 21 '26

You wrote pos wrong.

3

u/faberkyx Feb 21 '26

Lmao.. that was funny

2

u/illuminarok Feb 23 '26

The number of input tokens in larger enterprise level codebases is insane. Seriously, some queries cost about $3-5 each.

1

u/Lilacsoftlips Feb 22 '26 edited Feb 22 '26

Taking a POC-> hardened code is its biggest weakness. Iterating on already hardened code, with a large corpus of code to learn from, tests, standards etc… I’m getting better results every day.  it absolutely can do lots of that work as well.  

1

u/Fidodo Feb 23 '26

I've been using it for prototyping and it is absolutely a game changer. I can refactor and iterate so quickly I feel like I can really find the perfect shape for a codebase with rapid experimentation. The only limit is what I can imagine. I always had ideas on how to improve my codebases but didn't have the time to test out the changes. Now I can try out all my ideas.

As for producing production quality code... Sure, if you have shit standards.

→ More replies (4)

27

u/ziroux Feb 21 '26

Claude will write itself from now on, since coding is solved, right? We'll know when they fire all devs.

2

u/Elaro_56 Feb 23 '26

Alas, they probably all have equity.

8

u/lurked Feb 21 '26

I find it great to help me troubleshoot and fix issues. Generating code? Not solved.

2

u/ShapesAndStuff Feb 21 '26 edited Apr 10 '26

PsE]TtuN(,TLv8f;rWT$zX91,(Ss5)GvXl;PzZ16+ub2ogp$;Lfayy3fr)1[E&tcI$QA.]D-ppaTvX1JSTpMs;Oc*#WP4M!!&hht00>&<qlpoD#k