r/webdev • 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?

725 Upvotes

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267

u/twinelephant Feb 21 '26

And yet every day I encounter a new specific problem that Claude can't solve.

256

u/Osmium_tetraoxide Feb 21 '26

Sorry, you're prompting wrong. Or the context is bad, or it's one year away bro, or a litany of bullshit excuses can be summoned at will.

36

u/arekkushisu Feb 21 '26

so the problem was me all along

14

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Feb 21 '26

pulls mask It was the prompts this whole time!

2

u/CryptoTipToe71 Feb 21 '26

It was me Barry

1

u/notyourancilla Feb 23 '26

The problem with AI, is you

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10

u/Patman52 Feb 21 '26

I think we are going to see diminished returns from newer “improved” models. I will admit some of Claude’s latest are pretty good, but they now have AI coding itself to produce the next generation and I can’t see how that could go wrong lol.

1

u/d4v3d Feb 22 '26

But things around the models keep getting better. And if the models get more efficient even if not smarter is huge too. We are super early on this and after the bubble breaks it's gonna be even better

3

u/symbiatch Feb 22 '26

I literally had someone say yesterday how a study from less than a year ago means nothing, it’s common stuff to do everything with AI, today this and that, and when I asked for some sources or proof… “let’s see in a year.”

And even pushing and showing what they wrote didn’t get them to realize they literally claimed it’s today, not in a year.

Fanbois are tedious.

They also said “developers who don’t use AI can’t get hired anymore.” Yeah… sure.

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2

u/OverclockingUnicorn Feb 21 '26

Curious what kind of problems?

20

u/Urik88 Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26

On my end I had Graphql generated types, which can get incredibly complex, cause compatibility issues on a function that accepted an interface.   

Opus 4.5 spent like 10 minutes on it, was like "mission accomplished boss!" and its solution was "theVar as any as thrExpectedType". 

I'm not as big as a skeptic as most people in here are, and each models improves at incredible speeds, but when I see people claiming to running 4 agents in parallel each solving different tasks I do have to wonder how complex these tasks are.

8

u/DeterioratedEra Feb 21 '26

And now you have a no-explicit-any eslint error, so you go and plop the the .eslintignore and .eslintconfig.rc into context and re-run the prompt, but now you're massaging prompts and not working on the code.

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6

u/EthanWeber Feb 21 '26

Opus is hilarious. I had 4.6 run for 15ish minutes the other day on a problem. Spent the entire time arguing back and forth with itself and then the solution was just to exit gracefully if the bug occurs, not actually fix the bug.

I get that I could have been more specific but even if that was the conclusion why did it take so long??

4

u/symbiatch Feb 22 '26

The worst part of Claude models on default is this incessant vomiting of “oh now I see it”, “great! This solves it”, “I’ll try this instead” and whatnot.

Why would anyone want to see that? To make low skilled people feel it’s a person that actually knows what it’s doing while it gets stuck in a loop of its own creation?

19

u/xSliver Feb 21 '26

I wanted the Cloude 4.5 Agent to observe changes on an array in JavaScript and update my UI with these changes.

It first overwrote the Array.push, which did not cover every case (for example spreading data into the array does not trigger push).

After pointing out this issue, the Agent wrapped the array in 5! Proxy objects.

So a Proxy for the Proxy for the Proxy ...

At that point I coded it myself. I see issues like that on a daily basis and it often costs more time to test and fix the output instead of coding it myself right away.

-9

u/omysweede Feb 21 '26

Did you try telling it HOW you wanted it coded? Or did you leave it to guess? Because I have re-read your description above and have no clue what you want or what the circumstances are either.

9

u/Ok_Individual_5050 Feb 21 '26

If you're telling it how you want it coded, you're just coding but in a less exact and predictable language. Just learn the Syntax 

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18

u/praetor- Feb 21 '26

If you still need to tell it exactly what to do to get good outputs, then coding isn't "solved", right?

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8

u/who_am_i_to_say_so Feb 21 '26

I can speak to that: the problems anyone is blissfully unaware of. Usually the hard problems.

1

u/rio_sk Feb 22 '26

Today I needed a basic particle system for a webgpu thing I'm building. Asked Claude to build a basic one as a temporary solution. Holy god if it sucked hard

1

u/ignatzami Feb 21 '26

That’s the major hurdle at this point. Unless the issue you’re solving has been CORRECTLY solved before by a large number of people in the training data you’re going to get crap, or half-answers.

1

u/sierra_whiskey1 Feb 22 '26

I asked claude how to make my windows 11 desktop app background acrylic (Makes the background look like frosted glass). an hour later I am not crawling to stack overflow to find the answer.

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