As a research project, I built a needed tool with Claude Code. I thought it would be a disaster, but it wasn't. I have some complicated feelings about it.
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@mttaggart how did you find the model’s performance with Svelte? I haven’t had a lot of success there.
@mttaggart This was a great read, thank you for writing up your experiences.
As someone who is going back to school to transition into the field, the whole topic of AI is intriguing and intimidating at the same time. I am thankful I've been a hobbyist programmer for a long time, so I can recognize when it feels bad to use, along a lot of the lines you wrote about.
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@glyph I'm curious about why you have reservations about the purity section, or, to put it another way, why it apparently did raise your hackles to some extent. @mttaggart
@matt @mttaggart "ideological purity" is a bit of a loaded phrase. While I'm sympathetic to the *sentiment*, I don't think it's true that "purity is a weapon used to divide labor against each other"; the thing that was used to divide labor against each other was racism. Now… purity does come into that, because once a bunch of racists are wandering around your movement, you've got difficult choices to make about how you maintain your coalition.
@matt @mttaggart so, like, you could argue that it's "purity testing" to say that racists are unwelcome in your movement, and that we can't fight amongst "ourselves", except that the opposite of that is to welcome racists into the coalition and now it's just a coalition of racists because the racists are going to chase all the minorities out
@matt @mttaggart there's a very delicate line to walk where you don't "purity test" casual racists by being super aggressive to them, but instead you make it clear that while *they* are welcome, their *racism* isn't welcome, so you can try to rehabilitate the casual rubes while aggressively excluding the heartfelt bigots. it's kind of impossible, which is why I am more sympathetic to this sentiment than to other recent formulations of this problem.
@glyph @matt So, this is probably the most misunderstood part of the piece, and that's on me. I am concerned about ideological purity in this context. Purity as a concept, whether ideological or otherwise (i.e. racial), is what I was calling dangerous. And racism, among many other things, is a derangement that weaponizes purity. This is an instrument capitalists used heavily throughout the latter 19th and early 20th centuries to disrupt labor movements and prevent workers of different races from finding common cause. That's not to say racism wasn't elsewhere or sourced from within all socioeconomic echelons. Even so, the weaponization and exacerbation is relevant. Purity is a way to pit people against each other.
Ideological purity, less dangerous than racism, still prevents finding common cause. Building movements requires working with those who do not agree with you on everything. There are lines we cannot cross to be sure, but we must be vigilant to prevent those lines from excluding all but exact matches to our own beliefs. This is the challenge, and one we are not meeting.
Am I a fascist for having used Claude Code and paying $20 to test it as others have? Some will say I am, or adjacent, because I have used a fascist tool. I find this deeply unhelpful to anyone. And that's my point. If you demonize anyone who touches this technology, your opposition movement is doomed to failure.
What do we want to accomplish? Stopping or stemming the spread of the disease, or building a commune of the untouched?
I also had questions about this section. While I read, I wondered how you thought of maintaining a social unit of any kind without censure and expulsion in some cases. And that's not a trick question btw; maybe you havr some ideas.
Or to pose the question to this toot, what makes you think purity itself is the problem, as opposed to a fixation on it? Compare with money, which isn't itself evil, but an over-veneration of it can ruin a person.
@dogfox @glyph @matt To the first:
There are lines we cannot cross to be sure, but we must be vigilant to prevent those lines from excluding all but exact matches to our own beliefs. This is the challenge, and one we are not meeting.
Once again, I am making no case for a lack of boundaries. I am making the case that the boundaries currently in play are counterproductive.
I can not and will not give you a maxim for establishing them. Looking for empiricism there is where you get into weird inversions of moral obligation.
As for obsession versus the thing itself, I see a distinction without a difference. To maintain "purity" as a virtue is to seek it, and without clarity that it is unattainable, you end up with some version of obsession. I would prefer a heuristic of growth and estimation of intent. Not perfect metrics, and deeply subjective. It's something best done in human relations, and not conducive to a few hundred characters of pith.
@mttaggart I wanted to write almost the same post, as this
> I let this thing into my brain, and now it is always there. For any new potential project, there is a voice in my head telling me how much easier it would be to let the model do it. How much faster it would be to simply describe the objective in a prompt and let go.
is what I'm strugling with now, but you wrote it perfectly
@mttaggart Debates aside, your thorough post was also a charm to read this gem.
"Do I think LinkedIn is the digital River Styx, where damned souls clamber over each other and claw at the boat passing overhead in the dim hope of salvation from those who have escaped the shambling horde?"
Also happy to read it works with Discourse.
@mttaggart
This might the best, most nuanced writeup I have read.
@EricCarroll Wow, thank you so much! I really appreciate that, and you taking the time to read it.
@mttaggart really excellent write up! Thanks for taking the time to do it
@mttaggart I feel very similar and have gone down a similar path recently. For me I've found it does very little wrong for the apps I am trying to make and I am more eager to press 2 because I enjoy the outcome and testing that outcome more then have control over the code.
I've been calling myself a self loathing AI user but I'm in the process of building 5 or 6 apps and tools I have wanted over the years but never found the effort to do.
@stefan would you be willing to share one example? The kind of app that you would want to build that you need to use this claud. What would be the difference of you doing it vice the ai doing it? Thank you.
@skykiss I just launched this mastodon client that is focused on live blogging. This probably would have taken me weeks or months to get it to the state I have gotten it in in just 2 weeks.
I certainly didn't need calaude to do it technically... but I did need it to lower the effort bar low enough that I actually got code committed to repo.
@stefan Thank you for sharing that experience, and thank you for reading!
@mttaggart "the best way to be pickled is to stay in the brine" - Gerald M. Weinberg
We are all in the brine now. Does the brine evaporate fast enough, or does it thicken?
