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by vladms3 hours ago |
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upvoteby jv222221 hours ago|
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I used Claude to document, in great detail, a 500k-line codebase in about an hour of well-directed prompts. Just fully explained it, how it all worked, how to get started working on it locally, the nuance of the old code, pathways, deployments using salt-stack to AWS, etc.

I don't think the moat of "future developers won't understand the codebase" exists anymore.

This works well for devs who write their codebase using React, etc., and also the ones rolling their own JavaScript (of which I personally prefer).

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upvoteby vladms41 minutes ago|
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To make a parallel to actual human language: you can understand well a foreign language and not be able to speak it at the same level.

I found myself in that situation with both foreign languages and with programming languages / frameworks - understanding is much easier than creating something good. You can of course revert to a poorer vocabulary / simpler constructions (in both cases), but an "expert" speaker/writer will get a better result. For many cases the delta can be ignored, for some cases it matters.

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upvoteby bossyTeacher57 minutes ago|
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> I used Claude to document, in great detail, a 500k-line codebase in about an hour of well-directed prompts

Yes, but have you fully verified that the documentation generated matches the code? This is like me saying I used Claude to generate a year long workout plan. And that is lovely. But the generated thing needs to match what you wanted it for. And for that, you need verification. For all you know, half of your document is not only nonsense but it is not obvious that it's nonsense until you run the relevant code and see the mismatch.

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upvoteby jv2222244 minutes ago|
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Yes, since I spent over 10 years writing it in the first place it was easy to verify!
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upvoteby sodapopcan3 hours ago|
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The problem with this is that it means you have to read guides which it seems no one wants to do. It drives me nuts.

But ya, I hate when people say they don't like "magic." It's not magic, it's programming.

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upvoteby coldtea2 hours ago|
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Most however are surely capable of understanding a simple metaphor, in which "magic" in the context of coding means "behavior occuring implicitly/as a black box".

Yes, it's not magic as in Merlin or Penn and Teller. But it is magic in the aforementioned sense, which is also what people complain about.

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upvoteby monkpit1 hours ago|
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Magic refers to specific techniques used in programming, an people generally dislike these techniques once they have formed any opinion.
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upvoteby WJW2 hours ago|
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Oh no! Reading!

Sorry for the snark but why is this such a problem?

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upvoteby fragmede1 hours ago|
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Because people won't do it.
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upvoteby goatlover18 minutes ago|
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It's funny how Lisp has been criticized for its ability to create a lot of macros and DSLs, then Java & JavaScript came along and there was an explosion of frameworks and transpiled languages in JVM, Node or the Browser.
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