6 ms·

Doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve spent over $1,000 on Claude Code at this point and the return is worth it. The spend feels cheap compared to output. In c

by ramoz 1y ago

Doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve spent over $1,000 on Claude Code at this point and the return is worth it. The spend feels cheap compared to output. In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.

tkzed49 1y ago
hey, I'm open to that possibility. Maybe I'll grab $5 in API credit and give it a shot (for 5 minutes or a week depending on who you ask)
- keerthiko 1y ago
  i got $100 of credit at the start of the year, and have been using +1$ each month, starting at $2 in january using aider at the time. just switched to claude code this week, since it follows a similar UX. agentic CLI code assist really has been growing in usefulness for me as i get faster at reviewing its output. i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.
  - stavros 1y ago
    What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me). AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size. I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      I tested Aider a few times, and gave up because at the time it was so bad - it might be time to try it again, and I'll add that my experience with seeing how Claude Code works for me while lots of other people struggle with it suggests to me that my experience with Aider might well be that my style of working just meshes better with Claude Code than Aider. Claude Code was the first assistant that gelled for me, and I use it daily. It wrote the first pass of multi-monitor support for my window manager. It's written the last several commits of my Ruby X11 bindings, including a working systray example, where it both suggested the whole approach and implemented it, and tested it with me just acting as a clicking monkey (because I haven't set up any tooling to let it interact with the GUI) when it ran test scripts. I think you just needs to test the two side by side and see what works for you. I intend to give Aider a go at some point again, as I would love to use an open source tool for this, but ultimately I'll use the one that produces better results for me.
      - stavros 1y ago
        Makes sense, thanks. I've used Claude Code but it goes off on its own too much, whereas Aider is more focused. If you do give Aider another shot, use the architect/editor mode, with Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7, respectively. It's produced the best results for me.
- vidarh 1y ago
  A couple of tips if you're just starting with it: The two worst ways of burning API credits I've found with Claude Code are: 1. Getting argumentative/frustrated with the model if it goes off the rails and continuing to try to make something work when the model isn't getting anywhere. If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? If it's not making forward progress after a couple of prompts, it's not likely to unless you split up the task and/or provide more details. This is how you burn $10 instead of $0.60 for a task that "should" be simple. It's bad at telling you something is hard. 2. Think about when you either /compact (trims the context but retains important details) or clear the context entirely. E.g. always clear when moving to another task unless they're closely related. Letting it retain a long context is a surefire way of burn through a lot (and it also slows you down a lot, not least because there's a bug that affects some of us - maybe related to TERM settings? no idea - where in some cases it will re-print the entire history to the terminal, so between tasks it's useful to quit and restart) Also use /init, but also ask it to update CLAUDE.md with lessons learned regularly. It's pretty good at figuring things out, such as how my custom ORM for a very unusual app server I'm working on works, but it's a massive waste of tokens to have it re-read the ORM layer every time instead of updating CLAUDE.md.
  - UncleEntity 1y ago
    > If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? This. I was fighting with Claude for a good chunk of yesterday (usage limits seemed broken so it didn't really time me out) and most of that was getting it to fix one small issue with three test cases. It would fix one test and break the others, round and round we go. After it broke unrelated tests I had to back out all the changes and, by then, I understood the problem well enough so could direct it how to fix it with a little help from Deepseek. As there are a bunch of other sections of code which suffer from the same problem I can now tell it to "look at the fixed code and do it like that" so, hopefully, it doesn't flail around in the dark as much. Admittedly, this is fairly complicated code, being an AST to bytecode compiler with a bunch of optimizations thrown in, and part of the problem was a later optimization pass undoing the 'fixes' Claude was applying which took quite a while to figure out. Now I just assume Claude is being intentionally daft and treat it as such with questions like "why would I possibly want a fix specifically designed to pass one test instead of a general fix for all the cases?" Oh, yeah, that's its new trick, rewriting the code to only pass the failing test and throwing everything else out because, why not?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem 1y ago
> the return is worth it I'm curious, what was the return? What did you do with the 1k?
- edoceo 1y ago
  Produce working code faster => ship faster => paid faster? That's the valu-prop right? So, naturally the $JOB will cover the bill.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    so you didn’t spend a penny? :)
  - ramoz 1y ago
    something like that. Think "paid more" as well
    - satvikpendem 1y ago
      So just for work then or personal projects too? For work I can understand but for personal projects I haven't necessarily gotten more success out of AI than my own code, to be honest.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        In terms of personal projects, I use my own custom Ruby X11 window manager, and when I moved and got the office space for an extra monitor, Claude Code wrote the basics of the multi-monitor support by itself. It's notable to me because there are to my knowledge no other Ruby wm's (there's at least one that allows scripting with Ruby, I believe, but not the whole codebase), the X11 bindings are custom (no Xlib or XCB), and there are few great examples that fits into the structure of my wm. Yet it made it work. The code was ugly, and I haven't committed it yet as I want to clean it up (or get Claude to) but my priority was to be able to use the second monitor without spending more than a few hours on it, and starting with no idea how multi-monitor support in X11 worked. Since then, Claude Code has added Xinerama support to my X11 bindings, and selection support to enable a systray for my pager, and written the systray implementation (which I also didn't have the faintest clue how worked, and so had Claude explain to me before starting). I use it for work too, but for these personal projects priority has been rough working code over beauty, because I use them every day and rely on the features, and want to spend as little time as possible on them, and so the work has been very different from how I work with Claude for work projects where I'll work in much smaller chunks, polish the result etc.
hcnews 1y ago
Could you anonymize and share your last 5-10 prompts? Just wanna understand how people are using Claude Code.
- winrid 1y ago
  "Ensure all our crons publish to telegraf when they start and finish. Include the cron name and tenant id when applicable. For crons that query batch jobs, only publish and take a lock when there is work to do. look at <snip> as an example. Here is the complete list to migrate. Create a todo list and continue until done. <insert list of 40 file paths>" (updated for better example)
  - winrid 1y ago
    The thing I forgot is the command for it to get the next set of files to process. Otherwise it will migrate 30% of them and say "look dad, I'm done!"
- csomar 1y ago
  I used it yesterday to convert a website from tailwind v1 to v4. Gave it the files (html/scss/js), links to tailwind and it did the job. Needed some back and forth and some manual stuff but overall it was painless. It is not a challenging technical thing to do. I could have sat there for hours reading the conversion from v1 to v2 to v3 to v4. It is mostly just changing class names. But these changes are hard to do with %s/x/x, so you need to do them manually. One by One. For hundreds of classes. I could have as easily shot myself in the head. > Could you anonymize and share your last 5-10 prompts? The prompt was a simple "convert this site from tailwind v1 to v4". I use neovim copilot chat to inject context and load URLs. I have found that prompts have no value, it is either something the LLM can do or not.
- ramoz 1y ago
  These aren't that fun but sure. - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ca49f356bdd2ab7bb7a366efd8b5f518 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ca49f356bdd2ab7bb7a366ef... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d9f1d9f9b4379d6551ba967c1cbdcd02 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d9f1d9f9b4379d6551ba967c... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/e74b5b0f714e0429750ef6b06a19be7b https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/e74b5b0f714e0429750ef6b0... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/91f1a08d9c27698310d63e068ff541e1 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/91f1a08d9c27698310d63e06... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/7f7cb63aceb7560e51c02a9d393ae3c2 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/7f7cb63aceb7560e51c02a9d... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/94080dde34bfca3dd9c48f1463e9e609 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/94080dde34bfca3dd9c48f14... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ea3a5c3a31799236115abc76b2e8ade0 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ea3a5c3a31799236115abc76... Taken from 2 recent systems. 90% of my interaction is assurance, debugging, and then having claude operate within the meta context management framework. We work hard to set the path for actual coding - thus code output (even complex or highly integrated) usually ends up being fairly smooth+fast. When I "wake" CC up I usually use a prompt like this to preface any complex work: https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d2e4547fc4546eea071b9b683c6105ad https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d2e4547fc4546eea071b9b68... (the goal is to get all relevant context in-memory). For most planning I use Gemini. I copy either the entire codebase (if less than ~200k tokens) or select only that parts that matter for the task in large codebases. I built a tool to help me build these prompts, keep the codebase organized well in xml structure. https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower

by ramoz 1y ago

tkzed49 1y ago

hey, I'm open to that possibility. Maybe I'll grab $5 in API credit and give it a shot (for 5 minutes or a week depending on who you ask)

keerthiko 1y ago
i got $100 of credit at the start of the year, and have been using +1$ each month, starting at $2 in january using aider at the time. just switched to claude code this week, since it follows a similar UX. agentic CLI code assist really has been growing in usefulness for me as i get faster at reviewing its output. i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.
- stavros 1y ago
  What do you prefer, between Aider and CC? I use Aider for when I want to vibe code (I just give the LLM a high-level description and then don't check the output, because it's so long), and Cursor when I want to AI code (I tell the AI to do low-level stuff and check every one of the five lines it gives me). AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size. I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    I tested Aider a few times, and gave up because at the time it was so bad - it might be time to try it again, and I'll add that my experience with seeing how Claude Code works for me while lots of other people struggle with it suggests to me that my experience with Aider might well be that my style of working just meshes better with Claude Code than Aider. Claude Code was the first assistant that gelled for me, and I use it daily. It wrote the first pass of multi-monitor support for my window manager. It's written the last several commits of my Ruby X11 bindings, including a working systray example, where it both suggested the whole approach and implemented it, and tested it with me just acting as a clicking monkey (because I haven't set up any tooling to let it interact with the GUI) when it ran test scripts. I think you just needs to test the two side by side and see what works for you. I intend to give Aider a go at some point again, as I would love to use an open source tool for this, but ultimately I'll use the one that produces better results for me.
    - stavros 1y ago
      Makes sense, thanks. I've used Claude Code but it goes off on its own too much, whereas Aider is more focused. If you do give Aider another shot, use the architect/editor mode, with Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7, respectively. It's produced the best results for me.
vidarh 1y ago
A couple of tips if you're just starting with it: The two worst ways of burning API credits I've found with Claude Code are: 1. Getting argumentative/frustrated with the model if it goes off the rails and continuing to try to make something work when the model isn't getting anywhere. If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? If it's not making forward progress after a couple of prompts, it's not likely to unless you split up the task and/or provide more details. This is how you burn $10 instead of $0.60 for a task that "should" be simple. It's bad at telling you something is hard. 2. Think about when you either /compact (trims the context but retains important details) or clear the context entirely. E.g. always clear when moving to another task unless they're closely related. Letting it retain a long context is a surefire way of burn through a lot (and it also slows you down a lot, not least because there's a bug that affects some of us - maybe related to TERM settings? no idea - where in some cases it will re-print the entire history to the terminal, so between tasks it's useful to quit and restart) Also use /init, but also ask it to update CLAUDE.md with lessons learned regularly. It's pretty good at figuring things out, such as how my custom ORM for a very unusual app server I'm working on works, but it's a massive waste of tokens to have it re-read the ORM layer every time instead of updating CLAUDE.md.
- UncleEntity 1y ago
  > If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? This. I was fighting with Claude for a good chunk of yesterday (usage limits seemed broken so it didn't really time me out) and most of that was getting it to fix one small issue with three test cases. It would fix one test and break the others, round and round we go. After it broke unrelated tests I had to back out all the changes and, by then, I understood the problem well enough so could direct it how to fix it with a little help from Deepseek. As there are a bunch of other sections of code which suffer from the same problem I can now tell it to "look at the fixed code and do it like that" so, hopefully, it doesn't flail around in the dark as much. Admittedly, this is fairly complicated code, being an AST to bytecode compiler with a bunch of optimizations thrown in, and part of the problem was a later optimization pass undoing the 'fixes' Claude was applying which took quite a while to figure out. Now I just assume Claude is being intentionally daft and treat it as such with questions like "why would I possibly want a fix specifically designed to pass one test instead of a general fix for all the cases?" Oh, yeah, that's its new trick, rewriting the code to only pass the failing test and throwing everything else out because, why not?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

satvikpendem 1y ago

> the return is worth it I'm curious, what was the return? What did you do with the 1k?

edoceo 1y ago
Produce working code faster => ship faster => paid faster? That's the valu-prop right? So, naturally the $JOB will cover the bill.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  so you didn’t spend a penny? :)
- ramoz 1y ago
  something like that. Think "paid more" as well
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    So just for work then or personal projects too? For work I can understand but for personal projects I haven't necessarily gotten more success out of AI than my own code, to be honest.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      In terms of personal projects, I use my own custom Ruby X11 window manager, and when I moved and got the office space for an extra monitor, Claude Code wrote the basics of the multi-monitor support by itself. It's notable to me because there are to my knowledge no other Ruby wm's (there's at least one that allows scripting with Ruby, I believe, but not the whole codebase), the X11 bindings are custom (no Xlib or XCB), and there are few great examples that fits into the structure of my wm. Yet it made it work. The code was ugly, and I haven't committed it yet as I want to clean it up (or get Claude to) but my priority was to be able to use the second monitor without spending more than a few hours on it, and starting with no idea how multi-monitor support in X11 worked. Since then, Claude Code has added Xinerama support to my X11 bindings, and selection support to enable a systray for my pager, and written the systray implementation (which I also didn't have the faintest clue how worked, and so had Claude explain to me before starting). I use it for work too, but for these personal projects priority has been rough working code over beauty, because I use them every day and rely on the features, and want to spend as little time as possible on them, and so the work has been very different from how I work with Claude for work projects where I'll work in much smaller chunks, polish the result etc.

hcnews 1y ago

Could you anonymize and share your last 5-10 prompts? Just wanna understand how people are using Claude Code.

winrid 1y ago
"Ensure all our crons publish to telegraf when they start and finish. Include the cron name and tenant id when applicable. For crons that query batch jobs, only publish and take a lock when there is work to do. look at <snip> as an example. Here is the complete list to migrate. Create a todo list and continue until done. <insert list of 40 file paths>" (updated for better example)
- winrid 1y ago
  The thing I forgot is the command for it to get the next set of files to process. Otherwise it will migrate 30% of them and say "look dad, I'm done!"
csomar 1y ago
I used it yesterday to convert a website from tailwind v1 to v4. Gave it the files (html/scss/js), links to tailwind and it did the job. Needed some back and forth and some manual stuff but overall it was painless. It is not a challenging technical thing to do. I could have sat there for hours reading the conversion from v1 to v2 to v3 to v4. It is mostly just changing class names. But these changes are hard to do with %s/x/x, so you need to do them manually. One by One. For hundreds of classes. I could have as easily shot myself in the head. > Could you anonymize and share your last 5-10 prompts? The prompt was a simple "convert this site from tailwind v1 to v4". I use neovim copilot chat to inject context and load URLs. I have found that prompts have no value, it is either something the LLM can do or not.
ramoz 1y ago
These aren't that fun but sure. - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ca49f356bdd2ab7bb7a366efd8b5f518 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ca49f356bdd2ab7bb7a366ef... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d9f1d9f9b4379d6551ba967c1cbdcd02 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d9f1d9f9b4379d6551ba967c... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/e74b5b0f714e0429750ef6b06a19be7b https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/e74b5b0f714e0429750ef6b0... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/91f1a08d9c27698310d63e068ff541e1 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/91f1a08d9c27698310d63e06... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/7f7cb63aceb7560e51c02a9d393ae3c2 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/7f7cb63aceb7560e51c02a9d... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/94080dde34bfca3dd9c48f1463e9e609 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/94080dde34bfca3dd9c48f14... - https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ea3a5c3a31799236115abc76b2e8ade0 https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ea3a5c3a31799236115abc76... Taken from 2 recent systems. 90% of my interaction is assurance, debugging, and then having claude operate within the meta context management framework. We work hard to set the path for actual coding - thus code output (even complex or highly integrated) usually ends up being fairly smooth+fast. When I "wake" CC up I usually use a prompt like this to preface any complex work: https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d2e4547fc4546eea071b9b683c6105ad https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d2e4547fc4546eea071b9b68... (the goal is to get all relevant context in-memory). For most planning I use Gemini. I copy either the entire codebase (if less than ~200k tokens) or select only that parts that matter for the task in large codebases. I built a tool to help me build these prompts, keep the codebase organized well in xml structure. https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower