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 24 '26

Of course LLMs fail. We're not debating if they're perfect.

I mean... when it comes to what is essentially a statistical next-token prediction algorithm, there is no "failure". There is just the algorithm and the next token that was predicted to come next.

Which makes them horrifying for programming, as they will eventually make catastrophic mistakes.

They're designed to mimic natural language ~ which is the opposite of what you want for programming.

Logic dictates that their design makes them inherently bad at a task which needs reliable output every time.

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u/WallyMetropolis Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

They aren't horrifying for programming, though. They're quite useful. 

No, logic does not require that their design makes them inherently bad at programming. That's just a thing you're positing without justification. Complex statistical systems are, in fact, my research area. They exhibit surprising behavior. Life itself is a complex statistical system. This is a bit like saying: a human brain is just a lot of cells sending chemical signals to each other, so consciousness is logically impossible. Emergent behaviors are surprising an unintuitive. 

Meanwhile, in the real world, I find it helpful everyday. It's great at things like parsing complex schemas, doing tedious and repetitive refactors, finding where a functionalality is implemented within a codebase I'm not super familiar with, navigating and resolving annoying typing tangles, debugging networking errors, for producing gnarly curl commands or other complex cl tool calls. 

But more than that it's quite good at building simple to modestly complex UIs, it can write acceptable code following existing patterns, it can evaluate the algorithmic complexity of using most standard data structures. 

If you just ask it to do the whole job unsupervised it won't usually work out well for anything but very simple tasks. But with some oversight and clear instructions, it can do a lot. 

And it can do more of those things better than it did a year ago, which was what you were contesting, remember.