Anthropic's Claude Code's full source code leaked. Claude is seen by many to be the best coding LLM on the market with Anthropic proudly stating that Claude Code itself is mostly written by the LLM.

Now this sounds good as long as nobody can see the code which is quite the trash fire. Detecting "code sentiment" via regular expressions, variable and functions names containing prompt parts trying to influence the bot, a completely intransparent mess of a control flow that makes actual maintenance and debugging functionally impossible and the prompts ... of the prompts. All the begging and pleading to the chatbot not to do this or not to do that or please to do this.

It is fascinating but it is as far away from actual engineering as drunkenly pissing your name in the snow. Dunno what you call the people prompting software at Anthropic but "engineer" is not it.

Now it is fun to look at the currently hyped product striped bare and showing its pathetic quality but that is the future of software if we let those companies continue to undermine every good practice software engineering has tried establishing.

The software we have to use will be bad, insecure, unmaintainable, expensive with nobody having the skills or resources to build something better. As I wrote a few months ago: LLM based software production is equivalent to saying that fast fashion should be the only way to produce clothing. A tragic degeneration of the quality of the artefacts we rely on build for maximum profit on the backs of people in countries from the global majority.

@tante ... the scaffolding around a natural language engine isn't going to look like oldstyle heuristic code. That's what all those highly paid "prompt engineers" have been doing.

Although it clearly eases the pain for people to come together and ritually denounce AI and all that sail in it, the fact is coding AIs work very well and aren't going anywhere even when the "add clippy to everything" bubble bursts.

Just bear in mind it's widely used, but quietly on masto due to all the pitchforks.

@hopeless @tante yes, as I read this, I found myself questioning whether the author has ever even used coding agents before. They are very competent, and I am working on a project for the fediverse using a variety of them. I have a programming/engineering background though, so I can design the architecture for them to implement and just use them as basically a super charged search engine/code monkey. I do also plan on full code reviews and outside collaboration so we can sanity check the results, but from what I have seen so far, the results it can achieve with thoughtful guidance is really amazing.

@korendian @tante

Some people are experiencing AI as a very unpleasant thing... they want it to just go away. If Anthropic's code leaked and it was super awesome, it would in no way improve their opinion. The topic of the next meeting of Anti AI Anonymous would simply be something else negative.

If you tell them it's good for coding assist (as it is) it's like telling them Cthulhu is good at coding assist. It's important to keep them in touch with reality. But it's not going to solve it.