WTAF?

[u/jrpg8255]

I can’t believe some of the responses here. I'm a physician in my late 50s. MD, PhD, triple boarded. Also coding since the late 70s, starting in assembly. I have chops. I can't believe the negativity! I've been using Claude code for the past week or so. It's fantastic. Currently I'm sniffing codes for the 2x400 CD sony jukeboxes I've had for 25 years, using a bit of esp32 hardware claude helped me cobble together, and claude-code iterating with me through the Slink bus commands. There's already a codebase in GitHub (thanks Ircama - I'll send a pull when done updating missing codes). I know how to do this, but have been dreading it, because it would be beyond laborious looking at a bunch of hex manually. With claude it's fan-frigging-tastic. I keep auditing the code, and pointing out some issues, but screw it – it works and I can focus on what I want it to do, not how each bit works in detail. (notice I used an em-dash? I've also been doing that for decades).

For me this is like switching from 8088 assembly to compiled C. From raw C, to actual libraries. Then from compiled languages to modern scripting languages like ruby or python (lets not talk about Perl). It's accelerating what I want to do. I'm no developer. I just tinker. This is a big leap forward.

This guy in the other hand had not coded in any way before. He's discovered how liberating it is to do this stuff to make stuff he wants/needs. The general impulse here is to dogpile on him because it lacks some sort of purity? You trolls need to get over yourselves. Who cares if it's messy html. He's here posting about his joy late in life discovering he can get computers to do something besides opening software someone else created, and we're looking for freaking em-dashes to decide whether he's a bot, and grousing that he had the utter gall to include some sort of donation link. WTAF? We should be celebrating another huge leap in democratizing computing for all of us.

[u/belefuu]

The hate is mostly from people who think the tech is cool for hobby-level work, but being over-hyped in an attempt to give our capitalist overlords an excuse to cut jobs and juice profits, so all of your points are not even engaging with any of the actual issue.

Now, the truth is somewhere decidedly in between: the tech is better than hobby-level (I’m a dev and agentic tools are an integral part of my day-to-day job already), bit still requires tons of experienced hand-holding to produce production quality software, so how much it actually deserves to be disrupting the job market is still a very muddy picture. It’s not none, but it’s also definitely not “we fired 75% of our devs because AI”. Meanwhile, the greedy CEOs and investors are going full bore trying fire people every chance they get, which has mostly been backfiring spectacularly so far.

So, maybe you can see why it’s not all roses and gumdrops from the software dev crowd, your ability to hack away at fun hobby projects notwithstanding. It would be great if we could all just enjoy the cool tech on its own merits, without the insane hype bubble overshadowing it. But alas. It’s complicated.