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The way Claude Code is going is exactly what I want out of a agentic coding tool with this "unix toolish" philosophy. I've been using Claude code since the init
by d_watt 1y ago
The way Claude Code is going is exactly what I want out of a agentic coding tool with this "unix toolish" philosophy. I've been using Claude code since the initial public preview release, and have seen the direction over time.
The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
If you are tooling your codebase for optimal AI usage (Rules, MCP, etc), you should target a technology that can bridge the gap to headless usage. The fact Claude Code can trivially be used as part of automation through the tools means it's now the default way I thinking about coding agents (Codex, the npm package, is the same).
Disclaimer, I focus on helping companies tool their codebases for optimal agent usage, so I might have a bias here to easily configurable tools.
- andrewstuart 1y ago> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. I see your point but in the other hand how depressing to be left only with the most soul crushing part of software entering - the Jira ticket.
- d_watt 1y agoI personally find figuring out what the product should be is the fun part. There still a need for architecting a plan, but the actual act of writing code isn't what gives me personal joy, it's the building of something new. I understand the craft of code itself is what some people love though!
- TeMPOraL 1y agoThing is, LLMs are already better than people at the "architecting a plan" and "figuring out what the product should be" in details that go beyond high-level vibes. They do that even better than raw coding. In fact, that's the main reason I like developing quick prototypes and small projects with LLMs. I use them less to write code for me, and more to cut through the bullshit "research" phase of figuring out what code to write, which libraries to pick, what steps and auxiliary work I'm missing in my concept, etc.
- dcsan 1y agoThey’re great if word count is your measure. But it’s hard for LLMs to know the whole current SOTA and come up with something innovative and insightful. The same as 99% of human proposals. Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution
- TeMPOraL 1y agoLLMs definitely know more of the current SOTA in everything than anyone alive, and that doesn't even count in the generous amount of searching capability granted to them by vendors. They may fail to utilize results fully due to limited reasoning ability, but they more than make up for it in volume. > Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution It's more like 0.01%, and it's not the target anyway. The world doesn't run on breakthroughs and great execution, it runs on the 99.99% of the so-so work and incremental refinement.
- btbuildem 1y agoSay what you will, but this would have the wonderful side effect of forcing people who write JIRA tickets to actually think through and clearly express what it is they want built.
- pjmlp 1y agoAnyone working on offshoring projects already knows how fun this happens to be.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoIn that timeline, it wouldn't matter anymore since the people complaining about the poor JIRA tickets would be gone.
- losteric 1y agoYeah, that’ll be the product-oriented engineers / engineer-oriented product folks. We will drop the narrow-minded deadweight that can only collect naive requirements, and the coding side that can only implement unambiguous tickets.
- cruano 1y agoAKA Junior engineers
- jdmoreira 1y agoNot sure about that golden end state. Mine would be being in a room surround by screens with AI agents coding, designing, testing, etc. I would be there in the center giving guidance, direction, applying taste, etc… All conversational, wouldn’t need to touch the keyboard 99% of the time. That's what I want and look forward one day
- chamomeal 1y agoThat sounds like torture for me lol
- geertj 1y agoI can easily see this happening in 2-3 years. Some chat apps already have outstanding voice mode, such as GPT-4o. It's just a matter of integrating that voice mode, and getting the understanding and generated code to be /slightly/ better than it is today.
- fragmede 1y agoThat future's maybe closer than that. https://zackproser.com/blog/openai-codex-review https://zackproser.com/blog/openai-codex-review
- Roritharr 1y agoIs this a me thing, or a millenial thing? I hate using voice for anything. I hate getting voice messages, I hate creating them. I get cold sweats just thinking about having to direct 10 AI Agents via voice. Just give me a keyboard and a bunch of screens, thanks.
- Wowfunhappy 1y agoVoicemail universally sucks. However, when you're having a synchronous conversation with actual people, do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?
- 1y ago
- virgildotcodes 1y ago> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI. Isn’t that effectively the promise of the most recently released OpenAI codex? From the reviews I’ve been able to find so far though, quality of output is ehh.
- ramesh31 1y agoThats the promise. The reality is that it's just a subpar version of Claude Code which doesn't support MCP.
- d_watt 1y agoIt totally is! I bias a bit to wanting the agent to be a pluggable component into a flow I own, rather than a platform in a box. It'll be interesting to see where the different value props/use cases of a Delvin/v0 vs a Codex Cloud vs Claude Code/Codex CLI vs Cursor land.
- sync 1y agoAnthropic also announced something along those lines today as well, in beta: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-actions https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action...
- MattSayar 1y agoHow did you find this? It doesn't pop up on any news sections on their site. I want to be on top of these kinds of things too!
- naiv 1y agoplayed around with connecting https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master via mcp to create a prd which basically replaces the ticket grooming process and then executing it with claude code creating a branch named like the ticket and pushing after having created the unit tests and constant linting.
- k__ 1y agoCan't you have that already? Put the Aider CLI into a GitHub action that's triggered by an issue creation and you're good to go.
- d_watt 1y agoAider is definitely in the same camp. Last time I checked, they weren't optimizing for the full "agent infinitely looping until completion" usecase, and didn't have MCP support. But it's 100% the same class of tool and the awesome part of the unixy model is hopefully agents can be substituted in for each other in your pipeline for whichever one is better for the usecase, just like models are interoperable.
- MrDarcy 1y agoI tried aider today with a Gemini API key and billing account. It’s not close to the experience I have with Claude Code on Saturday which was able to implement a full feature. The main difference is I interact with Claude Code only through conversation. Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools, the model and Aider. For example, constantly having to add files and parse the less than ideal console output compared to how Claude code handles user feedback.
- k__ 1y ago"Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools" I personally see that as a plus, because other tools are lacking on the tool side. Aider seems to have solid "traditional" engineering behind its tooling. "constantly having to add files" That's fair. However, Aider automatically adds files that trigger it via comments and it asks to add the files that are mentioned in the conversation. "parse the less than ideal console output" That's fair too. Still, the models aren't there yet, so I value tools that don't hide the potential crap that thee models produce 20-30% of the time.
- alvis 1y agoThe vision of submitting a feature request and receiving a ready-to-review PR is equally compelling and horrifying from the standpoint of strategy management. Like Anthropic and most big tech companies, they don't want to show off the best until they need to. They used to stockpile some cool features, and they have time to think about their strategy. But now I feel like they are in a rush to show off everything and I'm worried whether the management has time to think about the big picture.
- pjmlp 1y agoThe moment I am able to outsource work for Jira tickets to a level that AI actually delivers a reasonable pull request, many corporate managers will seriously wonder why keep the offshoring team around.
- StefanBatory 1y agoOffshoring team? No, any team.
- pjmlp 1y agoThat will be the next step.
- belter 1y agoIncluding the management team?
- StefanBatory 1y agoOkay, okay, you got me :D
- cortesoft 1y agoYes. You are seriously overestimating the power most management has. If ownership could build a company without them, they would in a heartbeat. Management only appears to have power because ownership wants workers to point their ire to them instead of at the real power.
- neta1337 1y agoI guess their customers will be AI, too, at some point? Where does this lead?
- ryandrake 1y agoIt seems like the Holy Grail here has become: "A business is one person, the CEO, sitting at his desk doing deals and directing virtual and physical agents to do accounting, run factories, manage R&D, run marketing campaigns, everything." That's it. A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer, and a big AI/robotics bill = every business. No pesky employees to pay. That's the ultimate end game here, that's what these guys want. Is that what we want?
- max_on_hn 1y ago(please pardon the self-promotion) This is exactly what my product https://cheepcode.com https://cheepcode.com does (connects to your Linear/Jira/etc and submits PRs to GitHub) - I agree that’s the golden state, and that’s why I’m rushing to get out of private beta as fast as I can* :) It’s a bootstrapped operation right now which limits my speed a bit but this is the vision I’ve been working towards for the past few months. *I have a few more safety/scalability changes to make but expecting public launch in a few weeks!
- mistrial9 1y agogolden age consultant paycheck
- dakiol 1y agoNo. The "golden" end state of coding agents is free and open source coding agents running on my machine (or in whatever machine I want). Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal? For every `ls`, `ps`, `kill`? No sense, right? Well, same for LLMs. I'm not saying "ban propietary LLMs", I'm saying: hackers (the ones that used to read sites like this) should have as their main tools free and open source ones.
- dontlikeyoueith 1y ago> Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal? Yes, because hardware and electricity aren't free. I literally DO pay for every command. I just don't get an itemized bill so there's no transparency about it. Instead, I made some lump-sum hardware payment which is amortized over the total usage I get out of it, plus some marginal increase in my monthly electric bill when I use it.
- troyvit 1y agoSure but the same thing would apply to the original comment, only that it's a locally hosted LLM that you're buying electricity for. That's different than paying rent for the privilege of using those commands and being at the mercy of the providers who choose to modify or EOL those commands as they see fit.
- notpushkin 1y agoI agree with the sentiment, but isn’t Claude Code (the CLI) FOSS already? (Not sure it’s coupled to Claude the model API either, but if it is I imagine it’s not too hard to fix.)
- bugglebeetle 1y agoClaude Code is closed source and Anthropic does take downs of decompilations.
- breckenedge 1y ago> Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI. I was doing this with Cursor and MCPs. Got about a full day of this before I was rate limited and dropped to the slowest, dumbest model. I’ve done it with Claude too and quickly exhaust my rate limits. And the PRs are only “good to go” about 25% of the time, and it’s often faster to just do it right than find out where the AI screwed up.
- morsecodist 1y agoSetting aside predictions about the future and what is best for humanity and all that for a moment this is just such a bummer on a personal level. My whole job would become the worst parts of my job.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- arkadiytehgraet 1y agoYou should use some of those agents yourself to fix some glaring issues at your landing page.