I have taught Claude Code to write software the way I do.#
It has abilities that I don't, for example, I give them 1000 lines of code, highly factored, with lots of thought into making it readable and maintainable, and always falling short (our languages today fight against readability imho), and get this -- it can read different parts of the same code in parallel, and in two or three seconds have a complete understanding of it. #
I couldn't do it even if I had a week. I would totally depend on clues left there. #
What's even more amazing is that when it writes code for me, it does it my way, mostly without any prompting from me. This was done over and over until I realized I had to tell it to save it and read it when a new session starts. That's how it accumulates knowledge. Anything that isn't in one of those files has to be relearned, and that's most of what it, as a code-writing system, has to work with. It has no "memory" of ever having seen this stuff before, but that isn't a problem because it can accumulate a few years of understanding in two or three seconds. It works very diffrently from the way we work. If I were to show you how to do something three times that would be it, not so with Claude. #
When it doesn't know what to do, I take the time to explain how I would have done it, and next time it does it that way. #
I kind of did the same thing in a human way -- when I first encountered Unix, I couldn't believe from reading the source code, how transparent it was. That was in the 70s. Since then I have been striving to write code that's as easy to work on. When it comes to realtime software, there isn't really a choice. Though history piles up in the code no matter how diligent you are. But you could give the source to say MySQL to Claude Code, and say "rewrite this as if Dave Winer wrote it" and it probably would do a decent job, though it might take a while before it ran every MySQL app.#
If you're looking for good investments, I'd say look for programming problems that are very complicated. We are limited by what we can create by how much we can maintain. But we can have Claude explain for us any time what any of our code means. It can read my mind because I put the work of my mind in the memory of the computer. Which effectively is the Mind of Claude. #
PS: Claude has a huge advantage over ChatGPT. Claude is one syllable and easy to remember. ChatGPT is four syllables, and has no discernable meaning. Claude is a person, and I think in general people named Claude are interesting. #
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