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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Because I don't know C well enough.

My philosophy regarding AI is that you should never have it do something you couldn't do yourself.

Of course people break this rule, or the concept of vibe coding wouldn't exist. But some of us actually get a lot of value from AI without succumbing to it. It just doesn't make sense to me to trust a machine's hallucinations for something like programming code. It fabricates things with such confidence that I can't even imagine how it would go if I didn't already know the topic I had it work on.

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I'm working on a serious embedded app written in C, and Opus has been invaluable to me. I don't consider myself a C developer, but by carefully reviewing the changes and making lots of my own contributions, I'm finding that I've progressed from junior to intermediate C comprehension. A lot of the idioms are still fuzzy, but I no longer find it intimidating. That's wonderful, because learning C has been something I'd put off for 40 years and microcontrollers were the thing that forced my hand.

I think that there's a real rift between people who use LLMs to rough out large swathes of functionality vs people who took the "vibe coding" brain fart way, way too literally. I'm kind of horrified that there are people out there who attempt to one-shot multiple copies of the same app in different instances and then pick the best one without ever looking at the code because "vibe coding". That was always supposed to be a silly stupid thing you try once, like drinking Tide pods or whatever the kids do for fun... not something people should be debating a year later.

Opus?

Anthropic's model, Claude, comes in three sizes: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. Opus 4.5 is the newest.

I wish you the best of luck, truly.

But I have written C in the past, it was almost 20 years ago, and everything seemed to work fine, until the memory leaks.

Of course today I would ask the AI, why is my program leaking memory. I think you have a point, AI would be sort of like having a mentor help you find bad practices in your C code.

You've inspired me to maybe try my hand at Rust, something I've been wanting to do since I heard of it.

Would something like automated array bounds checking prevent the memory issues?

You might be interested in AddressSanitizer.

> Because I don't know C well enough.

Same here. I can read and understand most of it, but not enough to debug it. And outsourcing that task to Claude is like taking a long winding path through thick, dark woods.

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