News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 200 times. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by kccqzy on Thursday December 11, 2025 @11:09AM (#46233163)
Not at all my experience. I’ve often tried things like telling Claude this SIMD code I wrote performed poorly and I needed some ideas to make it go faster. Claude usually does a good job rewriting the SIMD to use different and faster operations.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by mainmailman on Thursday December 11, 2025 @11:26AM (#46233423)
I'm not a C++ programmer, but wouldn't your example be a fairly structured problem? You wanted to improve performance of a specific part of your code base.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by zahlman on Thursday December 11, 2025 @11:24AM (#46233379)
That sounds like a pretty "structured" problem to me.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by kccqzy on Thursday December 11, 2025 @12:06PM (#46234003)
Performance optimization isn’t structured at all. I find it amazing that without access to profilers or anything Claude is able to respond to “anything I can do to improve the speed” with acceptable results.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: I've asked Claude to improve codebase quality 20... by chrneu on Thursday December 11, 2025 @11:26AM (#46233431)
that's one of the problems with AI. as it can accomplish more tasks people will overestimate it's ability.

what the person you replied to had claude do is relatively simple and structured, but to that person what claude did is "automagic".

People already vastly overestimate AI's capabilities. This contributes to that.

[ Parent | on HN ]