1. This is a fantastic resource for someone who hasn't really coded since RAM was measured in KB and cell phones were bricks you could defend yourself with in a street fight.
2. However, Claude does not get it right the 1st time. I had to do about as much debugging as I would normally have done for a chunk of code that size. Fortunately, you can tell Claude what the bug is and Claude will identify the error.
3. Claude's code is not elegant -- it does kludgy things like put a "goto" at the end of every branch of an if/elseif/else structure rather than just putting one goto after the structure. Yecch.
4. These are tiny stretches of code. I don't know how well Claude would handle a bigger coding project. But a programmer could probably use it to generate bits and pieces of code more quickly.
5. Technology has rarely reduced the amount of work. It has increased the productivity of that work. Since the arrival of personal computers, there aren't fewer people in offices, there are more. Programming itself has gone through multiple iterations of automation. Assembly language was a way to automate machine language. Programming languages were a way to automate assembly language. Scripting (in various environments such as game engines) is a way to automate programming. I suspect we won't need fewer programmers, we'll just have more complex software for the same price.
No comments:
Post a Comment