Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Continuous Improvement in LLM Code Generation

One week ago, I wrote:

"I wish wish wish that Claude Code would automatically populate a .gitignore for node_modules. Not for the first time, I checked 437 Megabytes of code into git and had to rewrite the history to remove it."

I used Claude Code to create a new frontend project, using Qwik this time, and what do I see?

dgentry@llm:frontend$ cat .gitignore
# Build
/dist
/lib
/lib-types
/server

# Development
node_modules
.env
*.local

...

A classic hacker stock photo in a darkened room sitting in front of a laptop wearing a hoodie and mask, except the person typing is a robot I don't know if this represents something which the Claude Code team specifically made happen since the last time I had it generate code like this, or if the training data of Qwik codebases is so much more likely to have included node_modules in their .gitignore file.

It is one of the perverse things about use of tools like this: we tend to give credit to the tool, and not the community which created the information upon which it relies.