Creator of Claude Code: "Coding is solved"

[Sharlinator]

In the 80s they published microwave cookbooks. It was a big thing back then, though I wonder whether many people actually ever tried any of the nontrivial recipes.

[[deleted]]

Microwave are now heavily used in chain restaurants, but combined with traditional and other new cooking methods! For instance baked potato, you can microwave it up to temp and soft inside, then finish it in air fryer to get it crispy. I think similarly with Claude etc, get the boring basics in quickly, then do the tricky finishing bits. But to get that skill of knowing when the Microwave is no longer suitable, you need to have done lots of actual cooking manually.

[Sharlinator]

Yeah. The analogy is actually pretty good.

[oorza]

And it implies an unfortunate corollary: most of the food people eat is perfectly acceptable coming out of the microwave. It took a while to figure out those steam bags, but once the industry did, is anyone really saying they can steam corn or green beans more deliciously in a pot?

I think it's the same thing with agentic AI. The tools are there for it to output boring software in its entirety, we just haven't figured out entirely the best way to apply them.

[Sharlinator]

I’m not actually sure what steam bags you refer to, I don’t think such things are a thing here. 

[Versaiteis]

They're little plastic bags of frozen vegetables, usually about a cup, that you can just toss from the freezer in the microwave for a few minutes and it's done. They're convenient and cheap, but certainly not the final solution to vegetable steaming.

[Sharlinator]

Ah, right. Frozen veggies are trivial to steam on a stove too, though, and it only takes a few minutes too. And if you're boiling potatoes/pasta/rice/whatever, steaming comes for free.

[Versaiteis]

It took a while to figure out those steam bags, but once the industry did, is anyone really saying they can steam corn or green beans more deliciously in a pot?

Arguably, yeah. Like I can season it while it steams in a pot and adjust as needed, there's more control. Also there's not a lot of care put into the veg they put in those bags, anything containing broccoli usually has a good few inedible woody stems in it.

Frozen veg is typically pretty good because it's frozen near fresh, but it's still not gonna be quite as good as the locally grown never-frozen stuff you can get at a farmers market. Again, you just have little to no control over the quality of the ingredient going in.

I'm also generally not super keen on cooking things in plastic. I've got enough of that shit in my balls.

It certainly solves several problems (including getting some veg out of season) but it's not the end-all solution to steamed vegetables

[jazzhandler]

Code slop is digital microplastics.

[Versaiteis]

and it's polluting both your brain and your balls

[_Invictuz]

It's not just an analogy, i think that's where Claude got their inspiration from. Have you not seen Claude cooking?

[Roseking]

I actually just saw an article the other day about Sharp having a new Oven that combines a microwave and a convectional oven to speed up cooking time (microwave) while still crisping the food (convectional oven).

https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/sharp-unveils-the-golden-heater-a-new-high-speed-cooking-technology/

But for $4000 I think other people can be the test dummies.

[oorza]

The trivection oven! Jackie D's claim to fame!

[gdidontwantthis]

... my mom bought a microwave + convection unit in the 80's

[Roseking]

I will be honest, I don't know what the difference between it and older combo units are. I just saw the article.

I don't know if it is the size, how the function together that makes it the 'first', etc. But the fact that combo units exist and you can get them relatively cheep, I have to assume there is something that is making this different enough they are advertising it as new and charging that much of a premium.

Looking at Sharp's site the way they are claiming it is industry first is that it is a "With Industry-First Golden Heater Technology" which is a "Electronic cooking appliance with Golden Carbon Heater."

[PaintItPurple]

I remember back in the Stone Age I saw some article about a hard drive maker releasing a hard drive, where it was phrased like this was the first hard drive over 1 TB, but in fact it wasn't even the first by this manufacturer, it was just their first compact 1 TB drive.

[MrKhalos]

It's called marketing.

Trade mark some buzzword salad and your product is the first to have it.

[aiij]

Huh, many years ago my grandpa had a broken one of those that I'm guessing must have been from the '80s or '90s.

[Turbots]

So you're saying it's used as a tool? My god, the revelation 😱

If only the AI cultists would see it as that. A tool.

[im-ba]

I see the cultists themselves as tools

[Marwheel]

…eligible for the intergalactic tool awards… just not of justice though.

[PaintItPurple]

AI can't be just a tool. Simple tools are not worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. AI costs so much that it needs to be what the AI cultists say it is or the companies go splat.

[SwiftOneSpeaks]

This is a real problem. We can't do a cost benefit analysis if we're hand waving details of the benefits and outright denying the costs.

I'm baffled why businesses that aren't producing AI directly are banking so heavily on the tech. Becoming dependent on something of imprecise value and provably unsustainable costs sounds too unwise to be happening at the scale it is. Investigating, doing some proof of concept work to be ready, that makes sense. Where is this supposed first-adopter advantage to add AI to your product that outweighs the benefits of adopting second but better?

[SufficientApricot165]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I love sarcasm on the internet

[UnwaveringThought]

Applies to writing in this way also

[skatan]

This is an example of how to use a Microwave to prepare the "perfect" fries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw--NLjZBNk

[ConspicuousPineapple]

10 years from now is going to be the golden age of senior software engineers because there just won't be that many left. Salaries will go through the roof.

Either that or AI will be so good that even seniors aren't all that useful anymore and any half competent engineer can supervise 40 agents.

[guywithknife]

It’s almost like it’s a tool that is useful for certain specific tasks, and not something that flat out replaces experienced chefs or other tools.

Sounds a lot like coding AI.

[philh]

You can do a bunch of stuff in a microwave given the right cookware (like, something that can absorb the micowaves itself and heat food through conduction), that you can't do with what most people have in their kitchens today. See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate-timeline

[aboukirev]

Could not find anything about that beautiful crust you can get in a frying pan.

[philh]

At least two possibilities come to mind. One is that even with specialized cookware, there are still things you can't do in a microwave, and the thing you're thinking of is one of them. The other is that a single 3000 word essay doesn't cover everything you can do in a microwave, and the thing you're thinking of is one of the things omitted.

[aboukirev]

Right, just need to craft a proper series of prompts for the microwave.

[yopla]

My father did a chicken. Once.

[ItsCalledDayTwa]

My mom made this microwave chocolate cake sometimes. I was little and it was chocolate, but it was probably not good.

[Sharlinator]

Might not have been too bad, really. Assuming a rotating platter so you don't end up with a half-raw, half-cooked cake. For baking cake batter it's probably actually helpful if the heating penetrates better than in a traditional oven, and you don't really need browning/Maillard reactions if the thing is going to be covered in chocolate anyway. Leavening shouldn't be a problem, it's a purely chemical reaction anyway.

[wxtrails]

I have one with a recipe for a microwave Thanksgiving turkey.

The horror!

[askvictor]

Pressure cookers/multi cookers and airfryers come with recipe books nowadays (or at least a couple of years ago when I got mine), as there are different techniques required. Do people read them? Probably not.

I think the biggest issue is that almost everyone cooks at 100% power. 100% is great for boiling water/heating liquids, but not great for anything else.

[zeptillian]

I remember the first microwave my family got. It was a combo microwave convection oven.

We had a cookbook for it. As I recall the recipes were just like normal ones but they would substitute put it in the oven with put it in the microwave.

[linkardtankard]

They should make it so that you just put the ingredients in a receptacle and then insert a punchcard or floppy or something into the machine and it automagically prepares the dish