I really enjoy coding. I've build a number of projects, personal and professional, with Python, Rust, Java and even some Scala in the mix. However, I've been addicted to Claude Code recently, especially with the superpowers skill. It feels like I can manifest code with my mind. When developing with Claude, I am presented with design dilemmas, architectural alternatives, clarification questions, things that really make me think about the problem. I then choose a solution, propose alternatives, discuss, and the code manifests. I came to realize that I enjoy the problem solving, not the actual act of writing the code. Like I have almost cloned my self, and my clones are working on the projects and coming back to me for instructions. It feels amazing
"Addicted" "Superpowers" "manifest with my mind" "it feels amazing"
Why does it sound like you're on drugs? I know that sounds extremely rude, but I can't think of any other reasonable comparison for that language.
It's hard to take these kinds of endorsements seriously when they're written so hyperbolically, in terms of the same cliches, and focused on entirely on how it makes you feel rather than what it does.
Reading a bunch of posts related to Claude Code and some folks voice genuine upset about rate limits and model intelligence while others seem very upset they can't get their fix because they've reached the five hours limits is genuinely concerning to how addictive LLMs can be for some folks.
I think the social aspect is underreported. I think this applies even for people using Claude Code and not just those treating an LLM as a therapist. In other words, I wonder how many of these people can't call their doctor to make an appointment or call a restaurant to order a pizza. And I say this as someone who struggles to do those things.
People claim that DoorDash and other similar apps are about efficiency, but I suspect a large portion is also a desire to remove human interaction. LLMs are the same. Or, in actuality, to create a simulacrum of human interaction that is satisfying enough.
It's reflecting the value we get from it, relative to the cost of continuing if we switch to the API pricing. It is genuinely upsetting to hit the limits when you face a substantial drop in productivity.
Imagine being an Uber driver and suddenly have to switch to a rickshaw for several hours.
"superpowers" is the exact name of the specific Claude code skill. The rest of your concerns is just me expressing my excitement, as until recently I was very skeptic of the whole vibe-coding movement, but have since done a complete 180.
The drug is the llm coding. I kind of get it, when I was a kid and first got a computer I felt the same way after I learned assembly language. The world is your oyster and you can do what felt like anything. It was why I spent almost every waking hour working on my computer. That wore off eventually but I've spent some time on my backlog of projects with Claude and it feels bit like the old days again.
> Why does it sound like you're on drugs, specifically cocaine?
This has basically been what all of Silicon Valley sounds like to me for a few years now.
They are known for abusing many psycho-stimulants out there. The stupid “manifesto” Marc Andreessen put out a while back sounded like adderall-produced drivel more than a coherent political manifesto.
If I were to go off into the woods, take a lot of drugs, and write my own crank manifesto, the central conceit would be that ADHD is the key to understanding the entirety of Silicon Valley. A bunch of people with stimulus driven brains creating technologies that feed themselves and the rest of the populace more and more stimulation, setting a new baseline and requiring new technologies for higher levels of stimulation in an endless loop until we all stimulate ourselves to death. Delayed gratification is the enemy.
This is similar to how we have already found hacks in our evolutionary programming to directly deliver high amounts of flavor without nutrition, and we've been working on ever more complex means of delivering social stimulation without the need for other human (one of the key appeals of AI for many people, as well).
Of course these are all the ravings of a crank and should be ignored.
That’s like saying enjoying composing music, but not enjoying playing music. Or creating stories, but don’t like writing. Yes they’re different activities, but linked together. The former is creativity, the latter is a medium of transmission.
Code is notation, just like music sheets, or food recipes. If your interaction with anyone else is with the end result only (the software), the. The code does not matter. But for collaboration, it does. When it’s badly written, that just increase everyone burden.
It’s like forcing everyone to learn a symphony with the record instead of the sheets. And often a badly recorded version.
> That’s like saying enjoying composing music, but not enjoying playing music
Do you think that is impossible? There are plenty of people who enjoy composing music on things like trackers, with no intent of ever playing said music on an instrument.
I love coding, but I also like making things, and the two are in conflict: When I write code for the sake of writing code, I am meticulous and look for perfection. When I make things, I want to move as fast as possible, because it is the end-product that matters.
There is also a hidden presumption in what you've written that 1) the code will be badly written. Sometimes it is, but that is the case for people to, but often it is better than what I would produce (say, when needing to produce something in a language I'm not familiar enough with), 2) and that the collaboration will be with people manually working on the code. That is increasingly often not true.
I struggle to understand that comparison. Code is notation, you can’t write code for the sake of writing code. You have a problem and you instruct the computer how to do it. And for the sake of your collaborator and your futher self, you take care of how you write that. There’s no real distinction IMO.
> There is also a hidden presumption in what you've written that 1) the code will be badly written
The computers does not really care about what programming language you’re using and the name of your variables and other indentifiers. People do. You can have correct code (decompiled assembly or minified JavaScript) and no one will wants to collaborate on that.
Code is often the most precise explanation of some process. By being formal, it’s a truthful representation of the process. Specs and documentations can describe truth, but they do not embody it.
You can always collaborate with markdown files. But eventually someone will have to look at the code and understand what it does, because that’s the truth that matters. Anything else is prayers and hope. And if you’ve never cared about maintainability and quality of the code, it will probably be an arduous process.
> Code is notation, you can’t write code for the sake of writing code.
Of course you can.
> You have a problem and you instruct the computer how to do it.
And sometimes that problem is not the point. Just like sometimes I write for the joy of writing, not because I particularly care about a reader or the meaning of the output.
> The computers does not really care about what programming language you’re using and the name of your variables and other indentifiers. People do. You can have correct code (decompiled assembly or minified JavaScript) and no one will wants to collaborate on that.
This has no relation whatsoever to the sentence you quoted.
> This has no relation whatsoever to the sentence you quoted.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. What I wanted to convey is that the use of programming languages, paradigms, patterns, and other software engineering principles is related to the human side of programming.
You can solve a problem correctly, but with the resulting code being hard to parse. Or you can write readable code but with bugs. And almost everyone prefers the latter.
So badly written means incomprehensible code, mostly due to the size of it in the case of Agents. It’s all right if no one cares about the code. But if you expect someone to review it, changeset that even the author don’t understand is slop.
So again, this presumes that the result must be incomprehensible. That is not at all my experience. It may become incomprehensible if you let it, just as is the case with human developers. It won't be if you enforce reviews, and your harness demands cleanups and sets clear standards.
Using your analogy, I enjoy composing music and enjoy playing music. I don't enjoy going through the notion of writing the notes on a piece of paper with the pen. I have to do it because people can't read my mind, but if they could I would avoid it. Claude code is like that. The code that gets written, feels like the code that I would have written
I feel this sentiment. It’s more like pair programming with someone both smarter and dumber than you. If you’re reviewing the code it is putting down, you’re likely to spot what it’s getting wrong and discussing it.
What I don’t understand, are the people who let it go over night or with whole “agent teams” working on software. I have no idea how they trust any of it.
If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
Prices have been dropping like crazy as the various battery manufacturers have been competing with each other. They are all pretty similarly priced at this point.
A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing.
Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs.
Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
Of course it comes with our charge and discharge circuitry which is the inverter and also acts as the bms. As far as I am aware as a scientist, we are the only one in the world who charge each battery cell in parallel and slower or pulsed without maxing out or overheating, that's why we get 20000 discharge cycles versus the 5000-8000 the battery manufacture quotes.
Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.
Fiberhood has an office in Tucson Arizona and will ship to the US if you want to to pay Trumps tariffs. I'm not aware of reasonably priced good battery or inverter makers in the US, besides ourselves (we are a non-profit so we are cheaper).
It is however not that simple to just give you a link, we need to hear from you for what electronics the software system needs to be fine-tuned. We need to understand what battery and electronics you need for each situation. As a scientist I know for a fact that no one in the world makes good battery systems yet, they are all wrongly designed (especially the ev and car batteries). You can easily spot that yourself, no one charges each individual battery cell individually in parallel. Everyone, including the scientists, charges battery packs in series and has battery management systems and ac-dc or dc-dc inverters that are not designed for the particular battery type and brand. Not a single one. If you ever find one that does charge and discharge each cell in parallel and slowly between 50% and 80%, please tell us and we'll tell the world. Right now only Fiberhood electronics charges cells correctly with specially made charger circuitry. The $0.50 to $2 networked printed circuit boards per battery cell we currently sell are the prototypes for the $0.10 battery charging microcontroller chips that we are making.
You can find dozens of Youtube influencers who test and or build cheap serially charged battery packs and your server rack batteries and inverter systems that you can find on professional China business directories, Tabao, Aliexpress and the like. But they are not exactly what you need and they damage your cells by charging them wrongly. No service, no warranties, no insurance, no buyers protection, buyer beware.
Be aware that ordering such systems directly in China is fraught with difficulties, its easy to lose your money.
You can voice your concerns, but should not go fighting, especially at personal cost. It could be that you may be wrong in your assessment, and the project turns out to be successful, or it could be that you may have been right for the wrong reasons, or it could be that you were right all along.
In any case, you are part of a company, and that means recognizing that yours is only one of many opinions driving strategy and allocating resources. If you find your self often needing to stand up against others for your beliefs, then you are probably not in the right company.
the point of expertise and intelligence is, in part, to be able to know what's going to happen BEFORE doing it. Perhaps without even doing it. You could be wrong, sure -- but there has to be a rate of that happening, and the more intelligent people are wrong less. At some point there are situations where you _know_ what's going to happen and then it happens, inevitably, providing no new information. And in my experience this happens _all the time_ in big tech. It is not hard to predict the failures. But things happen for social and political reasons, not intelligent ones, and so the predictions don't matter.
This is such a utilitarianistic point of view, Not everyone is defined by their work, not everyone cares about how distinguishable they are from the others, or even how the others think of them, and I would even argue, that very few oligarchs/billionaires etc belong to the group of people that truly enjoy life.
I've been working with scrapers quite a lot. I started with python requests, then to scrapy, then selenium, then selenium via undetected_chromedriver, and once that started being detected during a chrome update about a year ago, I've switched over to seleniumbase. It got by undetected, but to get it working with pre-downloaded drivers, I had to look into the code. I have never, and I mean never, in all my python years, seen such a horrible mess of code. We are talking 1000lines long methods, with 20-30 different flags and branches Just horrible. I have since switched to Playwright, which seems to be also undetected, and offers a much saner interface.
SeleniumBase modifies the webdriver so that it doesn't get detected when used alongside the CDP stealth mode and methods. It'll download chromedriver for you. Not sure what you mean by the multiple branches, as there's just the primary one. What 1000-line methods are you referring to? By "flags", do you mean the different command-line options available? As for Playwright, they aren't undetected: See https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/issues/23884#issueco... - "Playwright is an end-to-end testing framework, where we expect you test on your own environments. Bypassing any form of bot protection is not something we can act on. Thanks for your understanding." On the contrary, SeleniumBase is OK with bypassing bot detection: https://github.com/seleniumbase/SeleniumBase/blob/master/exa...
Not the commenter, but “multiple branches” in this context is referring to if/else statements in the code, not source-control branches. Similarly, “flags” is referring to function arguments like a boolean “is_original.” More generally, they are just saying that the code has long, complicated, bug-prone functions.
That said, I just spent a few minutes browsing the SeleniumBase repro, and honestly it didn’t seem that unusual to me. Would be interested in seeing a specific example of what the commenter had in mind.
That's not amazing code but that's not that bad. In the grand scheme of things, that's not code debt that would ever seriously make my life any harder.
Yup. At least it's self-contained and easy to step through and modify if something breaks or needs to be changed.
And, a my previous PM would point out, even the copy-pasting and verifying no mistakes were made was a solution that took a fraction of the time a modern "clean" approach would. She had a point; as much as I'm against writing this simple code in the general case, plenty of devs tend to err towards overcomplicating solutions when given a chance.
I mean, the modern, proper, Clean Code™ solution would have this split into multiple files (not counting tests), and across two or three abstraction levels. I've seen this happen enough that I can tell I'd much prefer working with code like this capabilities parser (and hell, it can be beaten into near-perfection in an hour or three).
Call it "legacy code" if you'd like. That specific part is from a less common feature for setting options when running on a Selenium Grid. The new CDP Mode isn't compatible with The Grid (since CDP Mode makes direct CDP API calls without making Selenium API calls).
Maybe I am just a cynic but I would expect Playwright to be detected when using Chrome, I mean I would expect it was to the benefit of Google to make that happen for the sake of making reCaptcha detect bots better.
That's actually why I've been scrapping my Playwright automation (because I expect I will encounter problems even if hasn't happened yet, cynical and paranoid) and moving towards writing a browser extension to automate Firefox.
Basically my use case is automating tedious things for myself not running bots at scale, so that's why it is imperative not to get caught being "not human", because then risk account problems.
well I said when using Chrome, how would they make it happen?
well it's not like it's using AutoHotkey to automate things, it must be using underlying browser apis to move to move the mouse to mouseover something etc. as opposed to actually using the mouse, as an example
naive workflow -
I would think the browser sends message to google that instance (unique id) is being automated, recaptcha is detected by chrome on page, chrome calls hidden recaptcha method .setUniqueId(uniqueID) uniqueID is sent back to Google response tells it this is actually an automated browser that is being used as opposed to recaptcha, recaptcha gives 90% chance browser is automated to site, site stops browser access.
Site happy it uses recaptcha because they stopped automation.
Sure, Playwright can use FF, but most often people just use Chrome.
I meant that some of the code reminds me of enterprise python. The kicker is that code that works > pretty code. People here act as if ugly code is somehow lesser just because it’s ugly. Meanwhile there’s a lot of ugly code making millions of dollars.
Didn’t mean to bash your project. Sorry if it came across that way.
It's OK. No offense was taken. It almost looked like the conversation was expanding into a "Python vs Java" debate, but (thankfully) it did not. I've seen both worlds. I've seen advantages to both. I decided to stay in the Python world.
Not sure if you have explored rolling captcha solving services into your code. Its easy as fuck and you can do it in a few lines of code. Check out DeathByCaptcha or AntiCaptcha. It's like $2.99 per 1,000 successfully solved captchas.
I guess my point is, you dont have to be undetected nor write 1000 lines of code to scrape or do whatever you are needing to do always. Saved me a ton of headaches and time when captchas are involved.
Where I live it is a) very sunny almost all year round and b) very common to have PVs on your roof. I currently have 5KWH installed on my roof, I have a Nissan Leaf which I charge every day whilst I am working for home and I've paid 70euros total for electricity in the last 2 months, whilst running the underfloor heating constantly.
well, they do record my slack messages for 2-3 months, and I am ok with that, even though that's my main method of communicating with my colleagues, and includes a number of personal conversations with them. Now, if my work required me to be able to verbally communicate with my colleagues, and the consequence of miscommunicating was the loss of 100s of lives and millions in property, then I would expect them to record every single thing I said, spoken or written, judiciously.
