Haven't tried Claude for this, but I can't think how it could possibly do.
I built a game bot using Win32 API to send input and screen capture to OCR and some OpenCV to recognize game elements. Dead simple and actually quite boring and repeatitive after I worked on it for a while. How could Claude agents possibly do this ?
I did use Claude to refer docs and API, though.
That actually sounds like something Claude could do pretty easily.
Yegge's book describes his coauthor's first vibe coding project. It went through screenshots he'd saved of youtube videos, read the time with OCR, looked up transcripts, and generated video snippets with subtitles added. (I think this was before youtube added subtitles itself.) He had it done in 45 minutes.
And using agents to control other applications is pretty common.
My elementary schooler did this with pictures of his stuffed animals last week. I helped a little bit, but most of it was Claude. He's never coded before.
Yes, I've doomed him all because of a 30 minute interaction. Just like when he watched Kerbal Space Program videos on YouTube he lost all motivation to get to the moon himself. Oh wait.
And he definitely doesn't make up missions using the mission builder using if / then loops. He'll never learn to code. Oh the humanity.
I'd rather have my kid typing on a real keyboard into Claude, asking questions about what Python, and modifying the Claude-generated code than watching random videos and playing Roblox on his iPad.
When enshittification happens we would just simply go back to code by hand, then. We programmers don't lose the ability to do so when we use LLM, right ?
Waste ? They can become both an AI race winner AND a disruptive Jira vendor. Yet they don't. Why ?
To be a successful Jira vendor will prove their point that software engineers are obsolete now. Why don't they do that already ?
English CAN be ambiguous, but it doesn't have to be.
Think about it. Human beings are able to work out ambiguity when it arrises between people with enough time and dedication, and how do they do it? They use English (or another equivalent human language). With enough back and forth, clarifying questions, or enough specificity in the words you choose, you can resolve any ambiguity.
Or, think about it this way. In order for the ambiguity to be a problem, there would have to exist an ambiguity that could not be removed with more English words. Can you think of any example of ambiguous language, where you are unable to describe and eliminate the ambiguity only using English words?
Human beings are able to work out the ambiguity because a lot of meaning is carried in shared context, which in turn arises out of cultural grounding. That achieves disambiguation, but only in a limited sense. If humans could perfectly disambiguate, you wouldn't have people having disputes among otherwise loving spouses and friends, arising out of merely misunderstanding what the other person said.
Programming languages are written to eliminate that ambiguity because you don't want your bank server to make a payment because it misinterpreted ambiguous language in the same way that you might misinterpret your spouse's remarks.
Can that ambiguity be resolved with more English words? Maybe. But that would require humans to be perfect communicators, which is not that easy because again, if it were possible, humans would have learnt to first communicate perfectly with the people closest to them.
