u/irelatetolevin

For context: I'm a software eng @ a fortune 500/FAANG tier company. We use AI. We treat all ai code with humans as the bottleneck. That is: You generate AI code, you own it. It has bugs? It's your bug.

Claude has only gotten better. 4.7 reasoning has only improved, albeit it thinks more. My question is: what the hell are y'all up to that I constantly hear things like claude broke and everything sucks?

You need to review the code. YOU need to understand what claude outputs. AI is nondeterministic, so I don't know why people are creating agentic flows for deterministic work. Need determinism? Generate an audit the code man.

What are people's workflows here that I constantly hear about degraded quality? Personally I just create plenty of skills and harnesses for information that it needs, I set off parallel tasks that are sandboxed from each other (E.g using a worktree, different folder, whatever your taste is), I review the code, I tweak it myself manually.. and that's it.

At the end of the day, I've been a software engineer for 10 years, I understand anything claude generates is something I have to own and be able to debug eventually myself if the world suddenly gets rid of AI (which we know it won't, but it's the sentiment that should be held).

I'm not coming from a place of reprimanding, truly I'm not, but I just don't see how it's gotten worse. I work on very high perf software and claude has helped a lot in saving me time on ASM analysis and algorithmic reasoning for things where throughput matters.

For context: I'm a software eng @ a fortune 500/FAANG tier company. We use AI. We treat all ai code with humans as the bottleneck. That is: You generate AI code, you own it. It has bugs? It's your bug.

Claude has only gotten better. 4.7 reasoning has only improved, albeit it thinks more. My question is: what the hell are y'all up to that I constantly hear things like claude broke and everything sucks?

You need to review the code. YOU need to understand what claude outputs. AI is nondeterministic, so I don't know why people are creating agentic flows for deterministic work. Need determinism? Generate an audit the code man.

What are people's workflows here that I constantly hear about degraded quality? Personally I just create plenty of skills and harnesses for information that it needs, I set off parallel tasks that are sandboxed from each other (E.g using a worktree, different folder, whatever your taste is), I review the code, I tweak it myself manually.. and that's it.

At the end of the day, I've been a software engineer for 10 years, I understand anything claude generates is something I have to own and be able to debug eventually myself if the world suddenly gets rid of AI (which we know it won't, but it's the sentiment that should be held).

I'm not coming from a place of reprimanding, truly I'm not, but I just don't see how it's gotten worse. I work on very high perf software and claude has helped a lot in saving me time on ASM analysis and algorithmic reasoning for things where throughput matters.

For context: I'm a software eng @ a fortune 500/FAANG tier company. We use AI. We treat all ai code with humans as the bottleneck. That is: You generate AI code, you own it. It has bugs? It's your bug.

Codex has only gotten better. 5.5 reasoning has only improved, albeit it thinks more. My question is: what the hell are y'all up to that I constantly hear things like codex broke and everything sucks?

You need to review the code. YOU need to understand what codex outputs. AI is nondeterministic, so I don't know why people are creating agentic flows for deterministic work. Need determinism? Generate an audit the code man.

What are people's workflows here that I constantly hear about degraded quality? Personally I just create plenty of skills and harnesses for information that it needs, I set off parallel tasks that are sandboxed from each other (E.g using a worktree, different folder, whatever your taste is), I review the code, I tweak it myself manually.. and that's it.

At the end of the day, I've been a software engineer for 10 years, I understand anything codex generates is something I have to own and be able to debug eventually myself if the world suddenly gets rid of AI (which we know it won't, but it's the sentiment that should be held).

I'm not coming from a place of reprimanding, truly I'm not, but I just don't see how it's gotten worse. I work on very high perf software and codex has helped a lot in saving me time on ASM analysis and algorithmic reasoning for things where throughput matters.

Hey folks. I wanted to post this here because I’ve seen a lot of flak coming from folks who don’t believe AI assisted coding can be used for production code. This is simply not true.

For some context, I’m an AI SWE with a bit over a decade of experience, half of which has been at FAANG or similar companies. The first half of my career was as a Systems Engineer, not a dev, although I’ve been programming for around 15 years now.

Anyhow, here’s how we’re starting to use AI for prod code.

You still always start with a technical design document. This is where a bulk of the work happens. The design doc starts off as a proposal doc. If you can get enough stakeholders to agree that your proposal has merit, you move on to developing out the system design itself. This includes the full architecture, integrations with other teams, etc.

Design review before launching into the development effort. This is where you have your teams design doc absolutely shredded by Senior Engineers. This is good. I think of it as front loading the pain.

If you pass review, you can now launch into the development effort. The first few weeks are spent doing more documentation on each subsystem that will be built by the individual dev teams.

Backlog development and sprint planning. This is where the devs work with the PMs and TPMs to hammer out discrete tasks that individual devs will work on and the order.

Software development. Finally, we can now get hands on keyboard and start crushing task tickets. This is where AI has been a force multiplier. We use Test Driven Development, so I have the AI coding agent write the tests first for the feature I’m going to build. Only then do I start using the agent to build out the feature.

Code submission review. We have a two dev approval process before code can get merged into man. AI is also showing great promise in assisting with the review.

Test in staging. If staging is good to go, we push to prod.

Overall, we’re seeing a ~30% increase in speed from the feature proposal to when it hits prod. This is huge for us.

TL;DR: Always start with a solid design doc and architecture. Build from there in chunks. Always write tests first.

Hey folks. I wanted to post this here because I’ve seen a lot of flak coming from folks who don’t believe AI assisted coding can be used for production code. This is simply not true.

For some context, I’m an AI SWE with a bit over a decade of experience, half of which has been at FAANG or similar companies. The first half of my career was as a Systems Engineer, not a dev, although I’ve been programming for around 15 years now.

Anyhow, here’s how we’re starting to use AI for prod code.

You still always start with a technical design document. This is where a bulk of the work happens. The design doc starts off as a proposal doc. If you can get enough stakeholders to agree that your proposal has merit, you move on to developing out the system design itself. This includes the full architecture, integrations with other teams, etc.

Design review before launching into the development effort. This is where you have your teams design doc absolutely shredded by Senior Engineers. This is good. I think of it as front loading the pain.

If you pass review, you can now launch into the development effort. The first few weeks are spent doing more documentation on each subsystem that will be built by the individual dev teams.

Backlog development and sprint planning. This is where the devs work with the PMs and TPMs to hammer out discrete tasks that individual devs will work on and the order.

Software development. Finally, we can now get hands on keyboard and start crushing task tickets. This is where AI has been a force multiplier. We use Test Driven Development, so I have the AI coding agent write the tests first for the feature I’m going to build. Only then do I start using the agent to build out the feature.

Code submission review. We have a two dev approval process before code can get merged into man. AI is also showing great promise in assisting with the review.

Test in staging. If staging is good to go, we push to prod.

Overall, we’re seeing a ~30% increase in speed from the feature proposal to when it hits prod. This is huge for us.

TL;DR: Always start with a solid design doc and architecture. Build from there in chunks. Always write tests first.

I've never seen anyone vibe code irl but maybe thats just because I work with 60 year old devs 😂

my son graduated today

it was awesome, smiles and tears of joy from us all. it was a jubilant atmosphere.

but something seemed off. it almost seemed as if all the graduates had some sort of ai inside joke between them

my son and others were wearing shirts that said I wouldnt be here without claude (my son does computer science), people constantly BRAGGING about never having done a single piece of work and one guy went so far as to print the claude logo on his mortarboard!!!

I was in disbelief. I have used copilot few times but had never understood the scale of which the younger generation rely on it! when my wife (his mom) was hugging him she told him how proud she was of him graduating, thats where he looked her in the eyes with a grin and said "no mom, I CLAUDUATED" and then a few minutes later said that he had graduated with a "magna cum cum claude"

That is why I am here, I wanted to ask whether this is a national/global phenomenon or whether I should bring this up to my son as him and his friends are the only ones doing this?

my son graduated today

it was awesome, smiles and tears of joy from us all. it was a jubilant atmosphere.

but something seemed off. it almost seemed as if all the graduates had some sort of ai inside joke between them

my son and others were wearing shirts that said I wouldnt be here without claude (my son does computer science), people constantly BRAGGING about never having done a single piece of work and one guy went so far as to print the claude logo on his mortarboard!!!

I was in disbelief. I have used copilot few times but had never understood the scale of which the younger generation rely on it! when my wife (his mom) was hugging him she told him how proud she was of him graduating, thats where he looked her in the eyes with a grin and said "no mom, I CLAUDUATED" and then a few minutes later said that he had graduated with a "magna cum cum claude"

That is why I am here, I wanted to ask whether this is a national/global phenomenon or whether I should bring this up to my son as him and his friends are the only ones doing this?

I have been speaking to my developer friends and answers vary WILDLY

A few of them say that they can survive on the free tiers, most say that they spend between $20-$150 but I have had some absolutely insane answer. One guy told me that him and his only other technical teammate at his company blew through $65k last month!!!

So, how much are you burning through?

I have been speaking to my developer friends and answers vary WILDLY

A few of them say that they can survive on the free tiers, most say that they spend between $20-$150 but I have had some absolutely insane answer. One guy told me that him and his only other technical teammate at his company blew through $65k last month!!!

So, how much are you burning through?

My developer friends (who were obsessed with Claude Code a month ago) are now all jumping ship to Codex, which has left me wondering:

Is Codex better than Claude Code?

I keep on hearing that it is cheaper, has lower usage limits and is overall better but is this really true?