Trying to make a media player, media server, all by using ffmpeg and a pre-built media streaming engine as it's core. Python and SQLite. About a week's worth of effort every time until it begins to go too far off the rails to be reliable to continue to develop with. It never did get the ffmpeg commands right, I had to go back to crafting those by hand, it never did get the streaming engine to play in the browser's video player in the supported hls and dash formats. Asked it to build a file and file metadata caching layer and then had to continue to re-prompt it to poll the caching layers before trying to get values from the database. Never even got to the library, metadata, or library image functionality. Had to ask it to create the rbac permissions model I wanted despite it being very junior-level common sense (super-admin, user-admin, metadata admin, image admin).

Not exactly world-class software.

> A. You're working on some really deep thing that only world-class expects can do, like optimizing graphics engines for AAA games.

This is a relatively common skill. One thing I always notice about the video game industry is it's much more globally distributed than the rest of the software industry.

Being bad at writing software is Japan's whole thing but they still make optimized video games.

It’s a simple compiler optimization over bayesian statistics. It’s masters-level stuff at best, given that I’m on it instead of some expert. The codebase is mixed python and rust, neither of which are uncommon.

The issues I ran into are primarily “tail-chasing” ones - it gets into some attractor that doesn’t suit the test case and fails to find its way out. I re-benchmark every few months, but so far none of the frontier models have been able to make changes that have solved the issue without bloating the codebase and failing the perf tests.

It’s fine for some boilerplate dedup or spinning up some web api or whatever, but it’s still not suitable for serious work.

The possibility that the performance of these tools still isn't at the level some people need it to be is not an option?

It's insulting that criticism is often met with superficial excuses and insinuation that the user lacks the required skills.

> like optimizing graphics engines for AAA games.

Claude would be worse than an expert at this, but this is a benchmarkable task. Claude can do experiments a lot quicker than a human can. The hard part would be ensure that the results aren't just gaming your benchmark.

What if you are going to spend 5400 either way, you go all agent or get an apprentice and an agent for them too.

It’s funny so many companies making people RTO and spending all this money on offices to get “hallway” moments of innovation, while emptying those offices of the people most likely to have a new perspective.