> most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today
Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.
For context before that I had ~15 years of experience coding the traditional way.
I think the crucial difference is that I do actually see evidence (ie the codebase) posted sometimes for the former, the latter could well be entirely mythos -- a 24 day old account evangelizing for the legion of agents story does kind of fit the theme.
Let me guess this has something to do with AI?
In what way? Lisp (Common Lisp) is the most stable and unchanging language out there. If you learned it anytime after the late 80s, you still know it, and will know it until the end of time. Meanwhile, here, we hear that "a year ago" is so much time that everything changed (for the better, of course).
Or is it about needing some serious time investment to get comfortable with Lisp? Even then, once you do spend enough time that s-exprs stop being a problem, that's it; there's nothing else to be getting comfortable with, and certainly, you won't need to relearn any of that a year into the future.
I don't think AI coding and Lisp are comparable, even considering just the tone of messages on the topic (as far as I can see, "smug lisp weenies" are a thing of the ancient past).
The difference from an actual junior developer, of course, is that the human junior developer learns from his mistakes and gets better, but Claude seems to be stuck at the level of expertise of its model, and you have to wait for the model to improve before Claude improves.
This, this is you. This is the entire charade. It seems poetic somehow.
I am always so skeptical of this style of response. Because if it takes hundreds of hours to learn to use something, how can it really be the silver bullet everyone was claiming earlier? Surely they were all in the midst of the 100 hours. And what else could we do if we spent 100 hours learning something? It's a lot of time, a huge investment, all on faith that things will get better.
I’ve invested hundreds of hours in process and tooling, and can now ship major features with tests in record time with Claude Code.
You have to coach it in TDD - no matter how much you explain in CLAUDE.md. That’s part because “a test that fails because the code isn’t written yet” is conceptually very similar to “a test that passes without the code we’re about to write” and is also similar to “a test that asserts the code we’re about to write is not there”. You have to watch closely to make sure it produces the first thing.
Why does it keep getting confused? You can’t blame it really. When two things are conceptually similar, models need lots of examples to distinguish between them. If the set of samples is sparse the model is likely to jump the small distance from a concept to similar ones.
So, you have to accept this as how Claude 4 works, keep it on a short leash, keep reminding it that it must watch the test fail, ask it if the test failed for the right reason (not some setup issue), and THEN give it permission to write the code.
The result is two mirror copies of your feature or fix: code and tests.
Reviewing code and tests together is pleasant because they mirror one another. The tests forever ensure your feature works as described, no manual testing needed, no regressions. And the model knows all the tricks to make your tests really beautiful.
TDD is the check and balance missing from most people’s agentic software dev process.
But I have repeatedly seen claude get hung up on TDD itself and I've tried lots of different prompts/directions. It runs into a problem and inevitably runs ever more complicated shell commands and creating weird temp input files than sticking to "cargo test" and addressing the failing test.
Since I need to review the agent's code, I'd much prefer it to use a workflow like a human, with a progression of small commits following TDD--much easier to review the code then. If it's just splatting up big diffs, then it makes review harder, and that offsets any productivity gains.
It’s amazing at reviewing code. It will identify what you fear, the horrors that lie within the codebase, and it’ll bring them out into the sunlight and give you a 7 step plan for fixing them. And the coding model is good, it can write a function. But it can’t follow a plan worth shit. And if I have to be extremely detailed at the function by function level, then I should be in the editor coding. Claude code is an amazing niche tool for code reviews and dialogue and debugging and coping with new technologies and tools, but it is not a productivity enhancement for daily coding.