Snorting the AGI with Claude Code
103 comments
·June 16, 2025blahgeek
Asking it to explain rust borrow checker is one of the worst examples to demonstrate its ability to read code. There are piles of that in its training data.
rbren
I’m biased [0], but I think we should be scripting around LLM-agnostic open source agents. This technology is changing software development at its foundations—-we need to ensure we continue to control how we work.
[0] github.com/all-hands-ai/openhands
handfuloflight
But what do we do if the closed models are just better?
bluefirebrand
Steal from them shamelessly, the same way they stole from everyone else?
ProofHouse
This 10000%
jasonthorsness
The terminal really is sort of the perfect interface for an LLM; I wonder whether this approach will become favored over the custom IDE integrations.
drcode
sort of, except I think the future of llms will be to to have the llm try 5 separate attempts to create a fix in parallel, since llm time is cheaper than human time... and once you introduce this aspect into the workflow, you'll want to spin up multiple containers, and the benefits of the terminal aren't as strong anymore.
sally_glance
Who or what will review the 5 PRs (including their updates to automated tests)? If it's just yet another agent, do we need 5 of these reviews for each PR too?
In the end, you either concede control over 'details' and just trust the output or you spend the effort and validate results manually. Not saying either is bad.
smallnamespace
If you can define your problem well then you can write tests up front. An ML person would call tests a "verifier". Verifiers let you pump compute into finding solutions.
jyounker
Having command line tools to spin up multiple containers and then to collect their results seems like it would be a pretty natural fit.
peab
dagger does this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2g3vdbffOI
jtms
Tmux?
mountainriver
What??? It’s literally the worst interface
Do you not want to edit your code after it’s generated?
aaronbrethorst
Sure, in VS Code. Or Xcode. Or IntelliJ/GoLand/RubyMine.
handfuloflight
...if your IDE doesn't have a terminal then it isn't an IDE.
ldjkfkdsjnv
as the models get better, IDEs will be seen as low level
dirtbag__dad
This article is inspiring. I haven’t had the moment to get my head out of the Cursor + biz logic water until now. Very cool to think about LLMs automagically creating changelogs, testing packaging when dependencies are bumped, forcing unit tests on features.
Is anyone aware of something like this? Maybe in the GitHub actions or pre-commit world?
SamPatt
>Claude code feels more powerful than cursor, but why? One of the reasons seems it's ability to be scripted. At the end of the day, cursor is an editor, while claude code is a swiss army knife (on steroids).
Agreed, and I find that I use Claude Code on more than traditional code bases. I run it in my Obsidian vault for all kinds of things. I run it to build local custom keyboard bindings with scripts that publish screenshots to my CDN and give me a markdown link, or to build a program that talks to Ollama to summarize my terminal commands for the last day.
I remember the old days of needing to figure out if the formatting changes I wanted to make to a file were sufficient to build a script or just do them manually - now I just run Claude in the directory and have it done for me. It's useful for so many things.
Aeolun
The thing is, Claude Code only works if you have the plan. It’s impossible to use it on the API, and it makes me wonder if $100/month is truly enough. I use it all day every day now, and I must be consuming a whole lot more than my $100 is worth.
CGamesPlay
You use it "all day every day", so it makes sense that you would prefer the plan. It's perfectly economical to use it without a plan, if your usage patterns are different. Here's a tool someone else wrote that can help you decide: https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage
davidw
One thing that I am not liking about the LLM world is that it seems to be tilting several things back in favor of BigCorps.
The open source world is one where antirez, working on his own off in Sicily, could create a project like Redis and then watch it snowball as people all over got involved.
Needing a subscription to something only a large company can provide makes me unhappy.
We'll see if "can be run locally" models for more specific tasks like coding will become a thing, I guess.
TSiege
This is some nightmare fuel vendor lock-in where the codebase isn't understood by anyone and companies have to fork over more and more otherwise their business couldn't grow, adapt, etc
sorcerer-mar
> It’s impossible to use it on the API
What does this mean?
oxidant
Not OP but probably just cost.
ggsp
You can definitely use Claude Code via the API
lawrencechen
I think he means it's not economically sound to use it via API
practal
I think it is available on Claude Pro now, so just $20.
razemio
It is but very limited. I use API only, since this is the only plan, without usage limits and on demand pricing:
5x Pro usage ($100/month)
20x Pro usage ($200/month)
Source: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...
"Pro ($20/month): Average users can send approximately 45 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR send approximately 10-40 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours."
"You will have the flexibility to switch to pay-as-you-go usage with an Anthropic Console account for intensive coding sprints."
jjice
I'm very interested to hear what your uses cases are when using it in your Obsidian Vault
bionhoward
Assuming attention to detail is one of the best signs people give a fuck about craftsmanship, isn’t the fact the Anthropic legal terms are logically impossible to satisfy a bad sign for their ability to be trusted as careful stewards of ASI?
Not exactly “three laws safe” if we can’t use the thing for work without violating their competitive use prohibition
alwa
I can’t speak for their legal department, but their product, Claude Code, bears signs of lavish attention to detail. Right down to running Haiku on the context to come up with cute appropriate verbs for the “working…” indicators.
abhisheksp1993
``` claude --dangerously-skip-permissions # science mode ```
This made me chuckle
aussieguy1234
I played around with agents yesterday, now I'm hooked.
I got Claude Code (With CLine and VSCode) to do a task for a personal project. It did it about 5x faster than i'd have been able to do manually including running bash commands e.g. to install dependencies for new npm packages.
These things can do real work. If you have things in plain text format like markdown, csv spreadsheets etc, alot of what normal human employees do today could be somewhat automated.
You currently still need a human to supervise the agent and what its doing, but that won't be needed anymore in the not so distant future.
tinyhouse
This article is a bit all over the place. First, a slide deck to describe a codebase is not that useful. There's a reason why no one ever uses a slide deck for anything besides supporting an oral presentation.
Most of these things in the post aren't new capabilities. The automation of workflows is indeed valuable and cool. Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.
bravesoul2
Also I don't trust it. They touched on that I think (I only skimmed).
Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable! Of course capital likes shortcuts and hacks to get the next feature out in Q3.
imiric
> Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable!
The kind of person who prefers this setup wants to read (and write) the least amount of code on their own. So their ideal workflow is one where they get to make programs through natural language. Making codebases understandable for this group is mostly a waste of effort.
It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all. Code is becoming just an intermediary artifact useless to machines, which can instead write machine code directly.
I wish someone could put this genie back in the bottle.
DougMerritt
> It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all.
Those are two different groups of humans, as you implied yourself.
lelandbatey
There is no amount of static material that will perfectly conform to the shape and contours of every mind that consumes that static material such that they can learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it.
Having a thing that is interactive and which can answer questions is a very useful thing. A slide deck that sits around for the next person is probably not that great, I agree. But if you desperately want a slide deck, then an agent like Claude which can create it on demand is pretty good. If you want summaries of changes over time, or to know "what's the overall approach at a jargon-filled but still overview level explanation of how feature/behavior X is implemented?", an agent can generate a mediocre (but probably serviceable) answer to any of those by reading the repo. That's an amazing swiss-army knife to have in your pocket.
I really used to be a hater, and I really did not trust it, but just using the thing has left me unable to deny its utility.
bravesoul2
The problem is if no one can describe something with words without an LLM to scour though every line of code it probably means it can't make sense to humans.
Maybe that is the idea (vibe coding ftw!) but if you want something people can understand and refine it is good to make it modular and decomposable and understandable. Then use AI to help you with the words for sure but at some level there is a human that understands the structure.
groby_b
> Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable!
<laughs in legacy code>
And fundamentally, that isn't a function of "capital". All code bases are shaped by the implicit assumptions of their writers. If there's a fundamental mismatch or gap between reader and writer assumptions, it won't be readable.
LLMs are a way to make (some of) these implict assumptions more legible. They're not a panacea, but the idea of "just make it more understandable" is not viable. It's on par with "you don't need debuggers, just don't write bugs"
Uehreka
> Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.
Judging from the tone of the article, they’re using the term AGI in a jokey way and not taking themselves too seriously, which is refreshing.
I mean like, it wouldn’t be refreshing if the article didn’t also have useful information, but I do actually think a slide deck could be a useful way to understand a codebase. It’s exactly the kind of nice-to-have that I’d never want a junior wasting time on, but if it costs like $5 and gets me something minorly useful, that’s pretty cool.
Part of the mind-expanding transition to using LLMs involves recognizing that there are some things we used to dislike because of how much effort they took relative to their worth. But if you don’t need to do the thing yourself or burn through a team member’s time/sanity doing it, it can make you start to go “yeah fuck it, trawl the codebase and try to write a markdown document describing all of the features and requirements in a tabular format. Maybe it’ll go better than I expect, and if it doesn’t then on to something else.”
konexis007
.
jilles
How does this compare with Apples or Orange?
brcmthrowaway
How does this compare with Code::Blocks?
null
Not trying to be rude here, but that `last_week.md` is horrible to me. I can't imagine having to read that let alone listen to the computer say it to me. It's so much blah blah and fluff that reads like a bad PR piece. I'd much rather scan through commits of the last week.
I've found this generally with AI summaries...usually their writing style is terrible, and I feel like I cannot really trust them to get the facts right, and reading the original text is often faster and better.