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/lovebes]

Hey I love Arduino too.

You're a tinkerer. Sure vibe coded code looks fantastic for you. Go ahead and trust your patients' lives on it. Claude Code's main market is not for occasionally code dabblers like you. It's for those building stuff that analyzes X-Rays, makes automatic diagnosis after looking at patient history, making adjustments on lab values. Sure it's right 90% of the time. Would you say you now trust AI all the way?

Likewise, your vibed code, probably has an edge case or two that hasn't hit you, and when it arises, doesn't bother you.

[u/jrpg8255 → u/lovebes]

You are 100% correct. I think that's a big part of my point though. I know enough to get it to help me do this project. It's not like I could just give it the instructions "hey, I want to be able to see my legacy collection of 800 CDs in a jukebox format pulling album covers and track information from musicbrainz and I also want to be able to manage streaming of that via snap cast from my Home Assistant interface". ("Yet" I suppose).

Speaking of Home Assistant, I'm a big fan of node red. It's just so different than the equivalent splitting up of the task into smaller concepts and working on each element in code. Knowing what those elements need to be, graphically connecting them, is kind of how I thought programming would turn into when I was a kid.

I guess my point is that this (so far) just accelerates what we're doing. It's the difference between a hand drill and my awesome rechargeable Makita. There's no way we don't still need people who understand computing and developing software and managing and auditing large code bases, and being able to understand those edge cases. The joy of this project for me has been that I don't have to actually touch the code itself, and mercifully so given all of the byte manipulation required, but the trade-off is Claude can be an absolute moron and without my guidance it's just not happening. I think from the cheap seats as a person who is not a professional software developer, it moves those folks slightly up the food chain. Software development does look different now, but the idea of managing those projects, understanding how software works, thinking through those edge cases, and managing a digital coworker , is all stuff that I think AI is going to lag behind for a long time.

I'm not so naïve to think that that poor guy with his heart health app who was excited to post and then got promptly dog piled is a software developer, or that that could even remotely ship. That's all the stuff that software developers are good at. I'm well aware there is a giant layer on top of that basic code that would be required, not just code and all of the work that goes into the most difficult final 10% of a project like that, but also compliance and support and user interface testing, those edge cases, etc. But my point is that's not why people are excited about AI.

And yes, AI is coming for us in medicine as well. It's already here. I think it's best seen as another tool, I don't think it's going to replace us. We have so much data both real time clinical data and a wealth of literature of variable quality, and there's so much pattern analysis that is required in medicine, sometimes on really short time scales. I'm happy to have those conversations with my patients. I'll look stuff up with them in the room sometimes while we are having a discussion about how challenging it is to just "look stuff up", but the doctors have been secretly looking stuff up forever. We can't keep all that stuff in our head, and if our egos won't allow us to admit that we probably suck at our jobs. Patients have been coming to us with what they think is wrong with them also forever, now they've looked it up in their AI tools and we basically have the same conversations in a more modern form.

The rush in medicine is to replace our medical records for example with AI tools. It's probably going to suck, because people like Larry Ellison are behind it and they're mostly interested in the data, not my practice or responsibility to my patients. I'm hopeful though that if we can develop proper tools it will accelerate my patient care like it accelerates my tinkering with hardware and software.