Whilst editing yet another newsletter on building with AI and Claude gave me this feedback:
Consider replacing “slopping out code” with a more specific term like “generating excessive code”
Apparently, Monsieur Model does not like how I refer to its art! That’s a little sensitive for a billion floating-point numbers masquerading as a French man in a trench coat. 😛
…having an LLM chat running in a terminal session (optionally accepting pastes from another LLM or watching for instructions from special comments in your source tree) is a major shift in how we relate to writing code. … Working this way, it’s easy to get down a rabbit hole of machine-generated code and lose track of either the system changes or the feature you’re trying to build up. There’s plenty of room for UX improvement. But, it’s an intriguing preview of how we might build software in the future.
Regardless of how sensitive or sycophantic models may be, there are practical options, whether you find these things charming or off-putting, to learn how to work (“collaborate”) with models.
Ed. All Beatles/Joe Cocker references in this newsletter and blog are hand-crafted with genuine human intelligence. We take pride in our musical allusions and would never consider outsourcing them to other humans or human-like statistical models. That is our quality promise to you, the reader!