I was not an athlete growing up. Didn't do much in organized sports. But all three of my kids play a team sport. It does wonders for them. I really helped them get out of the pandemic. But having them outside several hours a week, working with peers and other adults, practicing new skills. Really cool to see and I think it really helped their mental health (and by extension, my own).
Yes! I do think playing team sports (for kids and adults) is incredible for mental health. Exercise, learning new skills and socialization all rolled into one fun package. I honestly think that's why Crossfit has become popular. It's essentially an after school sport for adults.
I love that I don’t have to look thru SO looking for a problem that’s kind of like the one I’m having. I have a problem solved based on my exact code taking my entire code base into account. And if I want a biting sarcastic review of my many faults as a software developer, I can ask for that too.
I have, in the last month, resorted to searching StackOverflow for something that works when Claude perpetually got it wrong three times in a row. It felt nostalgic that the answer was there in plain sight, and it just kept trying other things. So searching StackOverflow isn't quite dead yet.
Of course I still have times when Claude fumbles the fix. But the number of times it gets it exactly right far outnumber the times it can't get right. Compare that to the number of SO issues I've had to go through to get near a solution is night and day.
I'm in no way saying you should work the way I do or that Claude would solve all your problems if you only just believe. I am saying it's been super helpful at squashing bugs for me in my circumstances with my code bases.
I went the same way. At first I was splitting off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford, then I realized I just can't keep up with it all, running few agents around one issue in one directory is fast enough. Way faster than before and I can still follow what's happening.
> off work trees and running all the agents that I could afford,
I still think that we, programmers, having to pay money in order to write code is a travesti. And I'm not talking about paying the license for the odd text editor or even for an operating system, I'm talking about day-to-day operations. I'm surprised that there isn't a bigger push-back against this idea.
What is strange about paying for tools that improve productivity? Unless you consider your own time worthless you should always be open to spending more to gain more.
No stock backed company will be paying developers more regardless of much more productive these tools make us. You'll be lucky if they pay for the proper Claude Max plan themselves considering most wouldn't even spring for IntelliJ.
I wasn't thinking about this from the perspective of an IC in a company, more from the perspective of self employment or side projects. But its not any different for a larger business: An IC should not pay for their own tools, but an engineering manager who won't is a fool.
Your own time is worthless if you’re not spending it doing something that makes more money. You don’t make more money increasing your productivity for work when you’re expected to work the same number of hours.
I've spent a fair amount of time contracting -- this issue is even more relevant here. While I wasn't spending very much on AI tools, what I did spent was worth every penny... for the company I was supporting :).
Fortunately, there was enough work to be done so productivity increases didn't decrease my billable hours. Even if it did, I still would have done it. If it helps me help others, then it's good for my reputation. Thats hard to put a price on, but absolutely worth what I paid in this case.
Dw, there's quite a lot of push back against AI in some of the communities I hang around in. It's just rarely seldom visible here on HN.
It's usually not about the price, but more about the fact that a few megacorps and countries "own" the ability to work this way. This leads to some very real risks that I'm pretty sure will materialize at some point in time, including but not limited to:
- Geopolitical pressure - if some ass-hat of a president hypothetically were to decide "nuh uh - we don't like Spain, they're not being nice to us!", they could forbid AI companies to deliver their services to that specific country.
- Price hikes - if you can deliver "$100 worth of value" per hour, but "$1000 worth of value" per hour with the help of AI, then provider companies could still charge up to $899 per hour of usage and it'd still make "business sense" for you to use them since you're still creating more value with them than without them.
- Reduction in quality - I believe people who were senior developers _before_ starting to use AI assisted coding are still usually capable of producing high quality output. However every single person I know who "started coding" with tools like Claude Code produce horrible horrible software, esp. from a security p.o.v. Most of them just build "internal tools" for themselves, and I highly encourage that. However others have pursued developing and selling more ambitious software...just to get bitten by the fact that it's much more to software development than getting semi-correct output from an AI agent.
- A massive workload on some open source projects. We've all heard about projects closing down their bug bounty programs, declining AI generated PRs etc.
- The loss of the joy - some people enjoy it, some people don't.
We're definitely still in the early days of AI assisted / AI driven coding, and no one really knows how it'll develop...but don't mistake the bubble that is HN for universal positivity and acclaim of AI in the coding space :).
China did users a solid and Qwen is a thing, so the scenario where Anthropic/OpenAI/Google collude and segment the market to ratchet prices in unison just isn’t possible. Amodei talking about value based pricing is a dream unless they buy legislation to outlaw competitors. Altman might have beat them to that punch with this admin, though. Most of us are operating on 10-40% margins. Usually on the low end when there aren’t legal barriers. The 80-99% margins or rent extraction rights SaaS people expect is just out of touch. The revenue the big 3 already pull in now has a lot more to do with branding and fear-mongering than product quality.
It's silly, who wouldn't answer yes to the question "would you like to finish your task faster?". The real trick is to produce more but by putting less effort than before.
If you finish faster, you'll be given another task. You're not freeing yourself sooner or spending less effort, you're working the same number of hours for the same pay. Your reward is not joining the ranks of those laid off.
I salaried employees who are paid by time, and are paying their own Anthropic bills.
Initially there is perhaps a mitigating advantage of briefly impressing ourselves or others with output, but that will quickly fade into the new normal.
Net result: employee paying significant money to produce more, but capturing none of that value.
If you can, run several agents. They document their process. Trade offs considered, reasoning. Etc. it’s not a full log of the session but a reasonable history of how the code came to be. Commit it with the code. Namespace it however you want.
I do in similar way, connect claude code to litellm router that dispatches model requests to different providers: bedrock, openai, gemini, openrouter and ollama for opensource models. I have special slash command and script that collect information about session, project and observed problems to evaluation dataset. I can re-evaluate prompts and find models that do a job in particular agent faster/cheaper, or use automated prompt optimization to eliminate problems.
They are great, but they are expensive. I can run those against the cheaper ollama cloud models for things that are basically requirements gathering and review of a plan. The Product Designer Agent and the Product Manager basically argue for a few rounds and give an artifact that the coding agents pick up.
It could all easily be anthropic models and would work well, but running this swarm eats up all my anthropic tokens and these other models are good enough for the roles I've given them.
The Alexa's with video screen will start to show ads no matter now many times you set it to no ads. There are settings for No Ads, and after a few days, that setting is reset to allow ads. I had one so I could quickly see my Blink camera, but I threw it away because it kept showing ads.
