FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
62% Positive
Analyzed from 2665 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#claude#code#codebase#more#codex#https#com#don#large#lot
Discussion (73 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I tried defining CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md), skills, plugins, but I'm not getting the effectiveness others claim to be. LSP plugin for example, CC doesn't to use LSP's symbol renaming and edits file one by one slowly, or it does not invoke the skill when I explicitly ask to remember to invoke when prompt contains a specific clue.
Am I using it wrong? Is there a robust example I can copy the harness?
Meanwhile we are still waiting for these statements to come true:
https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3648851352018565
https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1nemhxb/futurism...
https://medium.com/@coders.stop/dario-amodei-said-90-of-code...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0j1HqEEDThc
Accountability, anyone?
"AI will take over almost all the work of software engineers (SWEs) end - to - end in just 6 - 12 months!"
What you describe is >50% of the job of SWEs, even when they write all code by hand.
Are you saying that "for many start-ups", this isn't done by SWE's but by some other career type or are you implying that it's just the code written (and first review) is replaced by AI?
const sqlStatement = (!params.mostRecentOnly) ? {giant SQL statement} : {identical giant SQL statement + 'LIMIT 1' at the end}
AI never met a problem that can't be solved with more code. Need some data in a slightly different structure? Don't try to modify an existing endpoint, just build a new one! Need to access a field that's buried in a JSON object in the database? Just create a new column, but don't bother removing the field from the JSON object. The more sources of truth, the merrier! When it comes time to update, just write more code to update the field everywhere it lives!
Factor out the extra sources of truth you say? Good luck scanning the most verbose front-end you've ever seen to make sure nothing is looking at the source you want to remove. In the beginning of big projects, you have to be absolutely ruthless about keeping complexity down so it doesn't get out of control later. AI is terrible at keeping complexity down.
My goal is to halve the lines of code from what the vendor turned over to us. One baby step at a time.
which startups? I'm genuinely curious
Companies will definitely expect devs to ship more with the same headcount, oftentimes either won’t hire juniors to train them up or will straight up do layoffs, sometimes the AI just being a convenient scapegoat. We kind of can’t ignore that either, sure a lot of those companies will be shooting themselves in the foot, but livelihoods will be impacted a bunch.
A post like this should be providing people with some reassurance about Claude's ability to understand code at a large scale. It's mostly fluff.
op is at `https://claude.com/blog/...`, you should be reading `https://code.claude.com/docs/` instead
in essence: rtfm bro
My criticism is fair. This is not an engineering blog post, it's purely marketing.
try this instead: https://anthropic.com/engineering
> Agentic search avoids those failure modes. There's no embedding pipeline or centralized index to maintain as thousands of engineers commit new code. Each developer's instance works from the live codebase.
The frame of "the way a software engineer would" and the conclusion seem at odds. I'd love to be schooled otherwise?
I use autocomplete/LSPs all the time and they're useful. That's an index? Why wouldn't Claude be able to use one? Also a "software engineer" remembers the codebase - that's definitely a RAG. I have a lot of muscle memory to find the file I need through an auto-completed CMD+P.
It doesn't need to particularly be real-time across thousands of engineers -- just the branch I'm on.
It's rare that I'd be navigating a codebase from first-principles traversal. It would usually be a new codebase and in those cases it's definitely not what I'd call an optimal experience.
> Claude Code is running in production across multi-million-line monorepos, decades-old legacy systems, distributed architectures spanning dozens of repositories (…)
So it is optimized for the general case, using robust tooling that works everywhere, especially when large & messy.
That being said, your remark is right and for well organised smaller repo’s there’s better tooing it can and should use. But I think it does, at least Codex does is my case so I guess Claude does it to. For example Codex use ‘go doc’ first before doing greps.
Anthropic's target should be a codebase designed for agentic comprehension from the first commit. Here the codebase adapts to the agent. You can enforce conventions, structured metadata, semantic indexing, explicit dependency graphs. Whatever makes the agent's job trivial rather than heroic.
Although if you've ever used Claude's search tool, you'll be unsurprised that the team knows nothing about indexing.
How a company, whose primary product is text-based chat, doesn't allow users to easily perform text search on said chat is beyond comprehension.
I still say if this happens to you with AI tooling, that's both a failure on you and your org for giving a developer prod credentials that could nuke production resources. I don't think I've worked in a place that gave me this level of blind access.
Indeed it’s a good practice to use roles where supported (AWS has them) and explicitly switch when needed
Then next I've used AI agents like crazy, we even have linked mcp servers that let it query on the dev database. Haven't seen it try deleting everything a single time. I haven't seen any agent try to do anything destructive. Ever. Perhaps its just reflecting an outrageously bad engineer and nothing else.
So, if I've read this post correctly, that means that CC is navigating my codebase today by sending lots of it up to a model, and building an understanding. Is that correct? Did I misunderstand it?
I kinda suspected there was more local inference going on somehow -- partly because the iteration times are fairly fast.
It turns out, that for a machine, find and grep is all that's required.
the fishing: 1) install the official `skill-creator`; 2) use that with the above link to create `claude-md-improver`; 3) improve the skill by tasking claude with researching the topic of `progressive-disclosure`, in the official docs; 4) point the new skill at you CLAUDE.md file and accept the changes
A stock Unreal Engine project is several hundred gigs, consists of multiple solutions, multiple languages, and I would classify as large personally.
Without some kind of indexing it’s very awkward to work with and very slow. To work with LLMs and Unreal projects we create a local index, that index file alone is 46GB.
Without distributed compilers and caches it can take multiple hours to compile the main solution per platform (usually PC, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and sometimes mobile).
So the codebase easily fits on local storage so long as you don’t count assets (those are several TB) and extra so for source assets (10s of TB), and that’s per stream per large project.
Anyways, point is I disagree and think Unreal Engine is an example of large codebase that fits locally.
The article really does not align with the current sentiment. Everyone with a choice has mostly moved on to codex (ofc in this world all it takes is a model update/harness update to turn things around).
CC is great at a lot of things, but repeatedly misses out reading on crucial parts of the code base, hallucinates on the work that was done and a bunch of other issues.
They want you feel like you’re missing out. They want you to switch. Being boring is far more productive. Pin your versions. Stick to stable releases and avoid the nightlies.
Significant noise created from 4.6 to 4.7 Opus transition has caused some to interpret this as signal. Excluding certain genuine and real bugs, the noise about perceived quality falling dramatically was noise. Influencers doing influencing turned it into “signal”. The reality was that if you had strong planning and spec driven development it ranged from manageable to non-existent.
The vast majority of the people I know and work with have not switched off CC or their Max sub.
But I may not have paid enough to get the full real experience with codex
At work it's CC or sometime codex, personally don't see much difference at all and most normies will notice none. The cultists have their opinions.
Ha!
What bleeding? Anthropic wants as much of that "bleeding" as possible. The interaction data gathered from genuine human CC subscription usage of their models goes directly into their RL training, it's invaluable and they are more than happy to lose money on the inference to get it. That data is what xAI was recently willing to pay $10b to cursor to get.
They want you to use Claude Code. They hate other UI surfaces like OpenCode etc purely because they lose control over that data, so they're subsidizing the inference without getting what they actually want, the data (they still get some of it of course, but it's much less ergonomic for them. Those tools often abstract away the subagent calls, for example). OpenCode can collect that data themselves, so by allowing subscription there, Anthropic sees itself as subsidizing another org getting that data. Hard no.
And tools like OpenClaw are useless because they're mechanical and don't represent actual users interacting with the service - again, subsidizing but not getting the reward.
It's all very simple once you understand their motivations.
Btw the guy in charge of that stuff for Anthropic is the same guy who said GPT 2 was too dangerous to release, Jack Clark. LMAO. That model could barely string a sentence together.
You are deep in an information bubble, mostly driven by hype-train influencers with magpie attention spans.
Are there any much more detailed walkthroughs of how it works and how it decides the tools to use and the grep to use etc and what the conversations actually look like?
In the UI you see just enough to know it’s doing something but you don’t really see the jumps it’s making offscreen.
† swe with practical experience, a code wrangler if you will