LinkedIn loves these, even if they're broken.

But they had already lost me at all the links, and the fact there's not a red wire through the entire article.

The first thing my eyes skimmed was:

> CLAUDE.md: Claude’s instruction manual

> This is the most important file in the entire system. When you start a Claude Code session, the first thing it reads is CLAUDE.md. It loads it straight into the system prompt and keeps it in mind for the entire conversation.

No it's not. Claude does not read this until it is relevant. And if it does, it's not SOT. So no, it's argumentatively not the most important file.

I haven't come around any AI generated imagery in documents / slides that adds any value. It's more the opposite, they stand out like a sore thumb and often even reduce usability since text cannot be copied. Oh and don't get me started on leadership adding random AI generated images to their emails just to show that they use AI.

My eye has started skipping past them, even though they're often quite useful if you engage with them.

I think the problem is that they're uninformative slop often enough that I've subconsciously determined they aren't worth risking attention time on.

I think it's fine. As someone who blogged a lot, the instant visual differentiation among articles offered by the art within is actually valuable.

I am a victim of AI-documentation-slop at work, and the result is that I've become far more "Tuftian" in my preferences than ever before. In the past, I was a fan of beautiful design and sometimes liked nice colors and ornaments. Now, though, I've a fan of sparse design and relevant data (not information -- lots of information is useless slop). I want content that's useful and actionable, and the majority of the documents many of my peers create using Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT are fluffy broadsheets of irrelevant filler, rarely containing insights and calls-to-action.

So yes, it's chartjunk.

This is equivalent to "do people find PowerPoint to be helpful or distracting." Sometimes yes, mostly no.

In this case, I'd say helpful because I didn't have to read the article at all to understand what was being communicated.

No. It adds nothing so nothing is preferred

Most of the time I find them distracting, and sometimes a huge negative on the article. In this particular article though, they're well done and relevant, and I think they add quite a bit. It's a highly personal opinion kind of thing though for sure.

When I see AI images, I skip them, and most likely, the entire article. They're a better warning sign than the ones hidden in the text.

It's not necessarily an AI-generated infographics issue, it's that these aren't good infographics. The graphic part is adding minimal value.

I think I'm finding a pretty good niche for myself honestly. IMO, Software engineering is more so splitting into different professions based on the work is produces.

This sort of "prompt and pray" flow really works for people, as in they can make products and money, however, I do think the people that succeed today also would've reached for no-code tools 5 years ago and seen similar success. It's just faster and more comprehensive now. I think the general theme of the products remains the same though; not un-important or worthless, but it tends to be software that has effects that say INSIDE the realm of software. I feel like there's always been a market for that, as it IS important, it's just not WORTH the time and money to the right people to "engineer" those tools. A lot of SaaS products filled that niche for many years.

While it's not a way I want to work, I am also becoming comfortable with respecting that as a different profession for producing a certain brand of software that does have value, and that I wasn't making before. The intersection of that is opportunity I'm missing out on; no fault to anyone taking it!

The software engineer that writes the air traffic avoidance system for a plane better take their job seriously, understand every change they make, and be able to maintain software indefinitely. People might not care a ton about how their sales tracking software is engineered, but they really care about the engineering of the airplane software.

    > [The] history of the 1907 failure of the Quebec City bridge, which was the inspiration for the Calling of an Engineer ceremony.

When was it not a cargo cult?

Claude itself will grep through old conversations so it’s handy that Claude understands too

"Thinking" is about to get even harder to do for most grifters with newsletters to sell.

Exactly!

Operate == me send https post and pray for the best

Yes, but as soon as you start checking in and sharing access to a project with other developers these things become shared.

Working out how to work on code on your own with agentic support is one thing. Working out how to work on it as a team where each developer is employing agentic tools is a whole different ballgame.

I totally agree with you that this not the right way to start. But, in my experience, the more you use the tool the more of a "feel" you get for it, and knowing how all these different pieces work and line up can be quite useful (though certainly not mandatory). It's been immensely frustrating to me how difficult it is to find all this info with all the low-quality junk that is out there on the internet.

I agree with most of this, with one important exception: you should have some form of sandboxing in place before running any local AI agent. The easiest way to do that is with .claude/settings.json[0].

This is important no matter how experienced you are, but arguable the most important when you don't know what you're doing.

0: or if you don't want to learn about that, you can use Claude Code Web

Issue is that both harness and specific model matters a lot in what type of instruction works best, if you were to use Anthrophic's models together with the best way to do prompting with Codex and GPT models, you'd get a lot worse results compared to if you use GPT models with Codex, prompted in the way GPTs react best to them.

I don't think people realize exactly how important the specific prompts are, with the same prompt you'd get wildly different results for different models, and when you're iterating on a prompt (say for some processing), you'd do different changes depending on what model is being used.

And why would they ever let switch?

Qwen code has a free tier

Opencoder is bring your own model.

You get what you pay for so good luck.

Gemini Code Assist has a free tier.

You log in with your Goggle account.

There are lots! Too many to cover in a single HN comment, and this space is evolving rapidly so I encourage you to look around.

While the coding assistants are pretty much universally free, you still need to connect them to a model. The model tokens generally cost something once you've gone past a certain quota.

I'm not sure if this is still true, but if you have a Google account, Gemini Code Assist had a quite generous "free tier" that I used for a while and found it do be pretty decent.

You’re assuming most people using Claude code are senior engineers.