> Try Claude Sonnet 3.5 (not Haiku!) and tell me if, while still flawed, is not helpful.
It's not as helpful as Google was ten years ago. It's more helpful than Google today, because Google search has slowly been corrupted by garbage SEO and other LLM spam, including their own suggestions.
Claude Sonnet 3.5 can write whole React applications with proper contextual clues and some minor iterations. Google has never coded for you.
I’ve written two large applications and about a dozen smaller ones using Claude as an assistant.
I’m a terrible front-end developer and almost none of that work was possible without Claude. The API and AWS deployment were sped up tremendously.
I’ve created unit tests and I’ve read through the resulting code and it’s very clean. One of my core pre-prompt requirements has always been to follow domain-driven design principles, something a novice would never understand.
I also start with design principles and a checklist that Claude is excellent at providing.
My only complaint is you only have a 3-4 hour window before you’re cutoff for a few hours.
And needing an enterprise agreement to have a walled garden for proprietary purposes.
I was not a fan in Q1. Q2 improved. Q3 was a massive leap forward.
I've never really used Claude for writing code, becuase I'm not really bottlenecked by that problem. I have used it quite a bit for asking questions about what code to write and it's almost always wrong (usually in subtle ways that would trick someone with little experience).
Maybe it was overtrained on react sources, but for me it's pretty useless.
The big annoyance for me is it just makes up APIs that don't exist. While that's useful for suggesting to me what APIs I should add to my own code, it's really pointless if I ask a question like "using libfoo how do I bar" and it tells me "call the doBar() function" which does not exist.
They can't think at all. The task must be strict macroexpansion of original input(doesn't mean that always works).
I'm suspecting LLM works for a lot of front end and app coding just because code in those fields are insanely overbloated and value proposition is almost disconnected from logic. There must be metric tons of typing in those fields, and in those areas LLMs must be useful. They certainly handle paper test questions well.
They are mostly useful for front-end/React because front-end shouldn't been code in the first place. They can do the UX but not the state management. Honestly, as someone who sucks and dread UX building (and having to frequently adjust my divs/components), they are a life saver when you are doing very conventional things. That is things you can find 100s of examples of but will take you hours to glue together.
I’m hitting my 40th year as a professional software developer and architect. I’ve written thousands of blocks of code from scratch. It gets boring.
But then in the 2000’s me (and everyone else) started building code generators, often from ERD structures, but also UML designs.
These tools were massively useful and (initially) reduced costs. The future balls of mud problems took over ten years to arrive.
But code generation has always been considered a smart and cost-effective approach to building software.
GenAI has “issues” and those have been exposed. One of my recent revelations is that Claude is best at TypeScript and python. C# (my home turf) is much lower in its skills capacity.
So in the last two months I’ve been building my apps in TypeScript instead of C# and have dramatically increased my productivity.
Claude will definitely fail if it doesn’t have the correct information. A good example is writing Bluesky apps. The docs are a mess and contradictory. But there are up to date docs on GitHub and if you include those in your project with instructions to only use those references, Claude’s hallucinations can be eliminated.
I don’t think AGI is a real possibility in my lifetime, and I do fear the future of software development when no one has actual coding experience, but for us boomers, it’s pretty darn useful.
In many cases I have no frame of reference for the expected code, like React and css. Typescript is perfectly readable, but I’m not really a script kiddie, so I’d go very slow on the React tsx files. The services are probably a slightly faster set of work, especially if I always have unit tests.
If someone was an expert React+TypeScript programmer with decent css knowledge the productivity may be a marginal improvement.
But I haven’t been a full-time programmer in ten years.
It's not as helpful as Google was ten years ago. It's more helpful than Google today, because Google search has slowly been corrupted by garbage SEO and other LLM spam, including their own suggestions.