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Claude Code Is My Computer
- TechDebtDevin 1y agolmao, I watched Claude write a bash file that: rm rf'd my HOME file. I'm good on all of this for a while.
- falcor84 1y agoI'm curious - what did you ask it to do?
- sfn42 1y agoThey asked it to rm rf their HOME file, clearly.. /s
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoAsked it to write a TODO app with FYNE. <1k LOC it needed to get around some sort of tool call it couldn't do, wrote the bash file and executed it. I purposely had it on YOLO. Everything was backed up idc really. Its been a bug with claude on cursor getting around permissions. It was the day claude 4 came out and I wanted to see what it could do with YOLO. It was kinda funnny but annoying, could be catastrophic for someone who doesn't back up everything obsessively.
- jack_pp 1y agoBut did you pray before you prompted?
- Kiro 1y agoNo, you did not. Stop trolling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097108
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoYes it did. There are lots of instances of claude doing this on cursor. Just check the forums guy.
- morkalork 1y agoSaw a good vibe coding meme along the lines of the agent after having trouble with the db wanting to "start from scratch" drop all tables lol
- 1718627440 1y agoTo be fair, that's also something I do intentionally and hopefully you're not developing in production, so is that really unreasonable behaviour?
- freedomben 1y agoI am ai skeptical and have seen it do some dangerous things, such as trying to configure my iptables in a way that will definitely not work at all, let alone the way I asked it to, but I have major doubts that it would do something this stupid. How recently did this occur? What did you ask it in your prompt? What did it say as the explanation for why it was doing that?
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoSee my comment below. It is a known bug with claude 4 where it tries to bypass permissions. I did have it on full permissions to test claude 4, it wasn't a big deal as I have plenty of backup.
- Applejinx 1y agoDamn, son. Props for committing to the bit. Good luck and godspeed. Spoke like a man who really, really takes that Roko thing seriously. I'm a little envious of how all that must feel. Must be a real trip.
- k__ 1y agoThe backup part is the crucial piece here. If you have reasonable guard rails for your AI, you can throw much more at it. Let it write tests before implementing something, ensure the code is in version control before promoting a change, etc.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoAside, I tried to move my ~/Code folder (where all my programming projects and work live) into the macOS iCloud folder so that everything would auto-sync. But the constant Git churn created a lot of traffic and collisions in that folder. And when I googled it, apparently it's just not a good idea to sync Git projects in iCloud. I really want to easily sync my folders so that I can just get a new macbook and recreate my environment. Anyone have any tips?
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- tough 1y agowhy not put claude code inside a docker environment you control? you might copy the code working dir in read mode only or whatever idk\
- akmarinov 1y agoJust ask Claude to recreate your environment. Not even kidding, it worked for Peter (OP’s article)
- mcherm 1y agoDear Claude: My brother-in-law just accidentally stepped on my laptop and it literally broke into pieces. Fortunately, I have an extra laptop that I can use instead. Please recreate my environment on the new laptop.
- ehutch79 1y agoWhen moving someone from one macbook to another, i just rsync desktop/documents/downloads over. I've found migrating ~/library over is problematic even with built in migration assistant, especially if this is their third or later machine being transfered between. Git is designed with a remote server in mind, just do it that way. Get github or git lab or setup your own remote host.
- AllegedAlec 1y ago[flagged]
- Kiro 1y agoWhat? It's nothing. I know people burning that in a day when paying on a per token basis.
- AllegedAlec 1y agoThat's still insane. We're talking "adding on another electricity and gas bill, your phone bill, your gym membership and internet + tv". These are serious costs.
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- noman-land 1y ago[flagged]
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- greenfish6 1y agoI use claude code in a staging env also with full bash permissions via the open source github actions (I think this is much safer and also what you're supposed to do). The github issues and PR integrations make it really organized
- lowsong 1y ago> Instead of wrestling with Markdown formatting, Claude creates the document, helps formulate thoughts, and tests that everything displays correctly. Are... are you serious? Markdown formatting? The formatting standard that's designed to be essentially plain text?
- steipete 1y agotbh that one example isn’t the greatest, though yes, just talking about a topic without editor open is a refreshing change in how I usually write, so wanted to give it a go.
- lowsong 1y agoReading it back, my comment came off as more aggressive than I intended. I apologize for the tone.
- thm 1y agoKind of reminds me of the days when people claimed they paid for their entire lifestyle in Bitcoin.
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- cloverich 1y agoIs that... today? I remember declining to purchase 4 bitcoin at $600 each because "it was already maxed out". I guess If I'd taken that gamble it would be paying for my lifestyle today?
- mvdtnz 1y agoHe's referring to the people who were claiming they paid their rent, groceries, transport costs etc in bitcoin. A claim that was often made and usually in vague posts without details.
- citizenpaul 1y agoExactly what I was thinking. Another Shill on the FP of HN in a week. This is getting old. 1. List of uses that are nothing but claims with zero tangible repeatable steps. 2. One vague statement about using it to bootstrap a machine... yeah lets see it. I don't see any use cases for Claude code that I have not already tried with Goose or Dagger Agents. And I don't have to let those loose on my OS to use them.But hey the author made a zero proof claim that they can re-bootstrap with claude anyway... Then at the end you are challenged to "Got a crazier Claude workflow? Ping me @steipete." IDK You didn't share any details beyond some vague use cases. Pretty much the same half working stuff from 2 years ago. Yo, Steipete. Since claude is such a banger why don't you have it generate the config that you can share as proof. I'm not gonna wait though since its all hot air.
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- satisfice 1y agoThat’s not a “calculated risk.” It’s just a risk. I don’t see how the OP is paying enough attention to know that terrible things are not happening. Sure, he can roll back, but that only works well for obvious problems that he catches in time. I haven’t heard that it is inherently dangerous to use popular tools of the normal sort without carefully scrutinizes every output. But there are many horror stories about the unreliability of LLMs.
- steipete 1y agoNo risk, no fun. I don’t run any critical website, everything I build is open source and verifiable. I’m my own boss. So, can do.
- manmal 1y agoBackups should solve most of the issues. I've had some reservations, but if you think a bit about it, not that much can happen - if you have good backups! On macOS, your passwords are in the keychain and not accessible without putting your thumb on TouchID. So it cannot transfer all your money offshore, or order a thousand shoes. Do make sure your AWS/fly/etc accounts have budget caps (a wise idea anyway).
- golly_ned 1y ago> Automate Content: Like this very post. I use Wispr Flow to talk with Claude, explain the topic and tell it to read my past blog posts to write in my style. This post is generated. Meaning, it wasn't written with the same aim towards truth and relevance that we assume writers have. It looks like writing, and fools readers into thinking it's writing. But it's just text. What's the purpose in reading it as opposed to any other generated text?
- steipete 1y agoIt took 50+ prompts to get it to this state. I’d say that counts as putting enough care into it to be my voice.
- nathanasmith 1y agoReaders would have been better served with the prompts you wrote than the AI generated output.
- steipete 1y agoAll ~50 prompts would take you have an hour to read and wouldn’t bring across my point nearly as good.
- layer8 1y agoBut it would provide a better illustration of how you’re actually working.
- simonw 1y agoIf you're interested in seeing the process behind this piece of writing you can read through a lot of the details in the 71 commits that went into creating the story in the PR: https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/pull/106/commits https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/pull/106/commits
- 1y ago
- quaintdev 1y agoI wanted to try Claude code but it's 200$ per month which is INR17000 per month. This was expensive even when I had a job. Now it feels like all this power is accessible only to the rich. When Geoffrey suggested [1] AI will increase wealth for rich he was not wrong. https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/ai-will-increase-wealth-but-the-money-will-go-to-the-rich-says-ai-godfather-geoffrey-hinton-2541870-2024-05-21 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/ai-will-incr...
- yoyohello13 1y agoYeah, $200/month makes sense if you're a contractor passing the cost to your client, but if you're a hobbyist or employee it's a massive chunk of money.
- steipete 1y agoYou can get pretty far with much less. See https://steipete.me/posts/2025/stop-overthinking-ai-subscriptions/ https://steipete.me/posts/2025/stop-overthinking-ai-subscrip...
- falcor84 1y agoYou can try it with a regular dev account and it charges you per token. It's still costly, e.g. around $20 for an active hour of experimentation, but you can just run `/cost` at any point to see how much you've paid so far, and decide when to stop if it's not worth your money.
- zackify 1y agothe $100/mo plan is more than enough i never get fully limited
- tough 1y agoYou can use openai's codex, or any of the claude code clone's available on github. At the end of the day all do the same. a cli tool that can call tools and use them as needed. https://github.com/openai/codex https://github.com/openai/codex http://aider.ai/ http://aider.ai/
- quinncom 1y ago
- BhavdeepSethi 1y ago>> “commit everything in logical chunks” and Claude handles the entire flow—staging changes, writing meaningful commit messages, pushing, opening PRs, watching CI, and fixing any CI failures. When builds break, it analyzes the errors and patches them automatically. It’s also extremely good at resolving merge conflicts. Is this marketing hype for the post or does it actually do all this? I know it's relatively new, but I haven't been able to find a resources to do such a setup? Only posts glorifying that it's capable of such tasks. If anyone else has had better luck with such complex tasks, would love to find out more.
- zackify 1y agoYes I do the same thing, except I usually just say alright push this up now and it handles it
- the_mitsuhiko 1y agoIt does this for Peter at least. There is a video of him showing is Agentinc setup.
- tough 1y agoIt can do all this and more, you just have to nudge/instruct it to. It's also amazing at using the CLI (I've been a terminal nerd for years, and yet watching claude 4 pipe those unix commands to work around the fact it can't use interactive TUI's yet, is pretty amazing) You can give it tools either via funciton call, MCP, or just terminal unix shell. Prompt it right, and the agentic stuff is like magic imho
- steipete 1y agoI don’t get any money from them. There are no affiliate links anywhere. I’m just really enjoying what Claude Code can do.
- BhavdeepSethi 1y agoYep, didn't intend to downplay your claims. Would love to see a video in action to learn more.
- monster_truck 1y agoHave been watching him lean more into this over the past few weeks. It inspired me to try something similar with fantastic results. Watch what he does, try it with an open mind. You'll be pleasantly surprised
- jmull 1y ago> The breakthrough moment came when I was migrating to a new Mac. Or just use Migration Assistant?
- steipete 1y agoSee the footnote. If you use this then iPhone Mirroring is broken on current macOS. And I need that for my next project.
- jmull 1y ago(1) That doesn't affect everybody. (2) If it does affect you there's a simple fix. (3) The existence of one minor migration bug doesn't really justify avoiding the entire approach (consider: how many issue exist in your ad hoc migration?)
- deergomoo 1y ago> Automate Content: Like this very post. I use Wispr Flow to talk with Claude, explain the topic and tell it to read my past blog posts to write in my style. If you had any respect for your readers you’d put this as a disclaimer right at the top. I can’t be bothered to read anything you can’t be bothered to write.
- steipete 1y agoI worked about 4h on this and 50+ prompts. See the GitHub PR. In the end that’s not much different to iterating with a direct editor.
- deergomoo 1y agoThen why not just write it? You mention not having to write Markdown in the post, but c’mon dude, you’re a software developer. Presumably the fact you have a personal blog means you must enjoy some aspect of writing, so what’s the end game here? I mean you do you I guess—it’s your blog and I’m nobody. But if I’m reading someone’s thoughts I want _their_ words, not something filtered through a machine.
- ZeroTalent 1y agoI 100-shot prompts with my style. there is no difference. I only input the new data.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- piker 1y agoAssuming this can write emails and access the internet, I would suggest also backing up all relationship states and account balances periodically as well.
- tempodox 1y agoTaking the title literally, it also means that computer is not yours anymore, it's a rented appliance. And only works for you as long as you pay the rent. No doubt a wet dream come true for those who rent it out to you.
- steipete 1y agoGood thing we don't have to take everything literal in life and can appreciate a little exaggeration so people get curious :)
- yoyohello13 1y agoThis sound pretty interesting actually. I may try this on my Linux burner laptop.
- simonw 1y agoThis is pretty fascinating, but I am not brave (or foolhardy) enough to try it myself. Having solid backups is good protection against errors that delete data, but I'm more worried about problems that leak my private data - especially to malicious attackers. Think malicious instructions hidden on websites or in emails that cause Claude Code to steal API keys or account credentials and exfiltrate them to an attacker. Right now, it is unlikely that such prompt injection attacks are being targeted against specific individuals. I know they are theoretically possible though, and that's enough to prevent me from trying this out.
- JustFinishedBSG 1y agoI am quite honestly baffled by all these posts. I'm not a hardcore skeptic, at least I don't think so, I have tried most of the vibe coding tools, and I regularly try new ones and continue using many; and I do NOT have the experience described in all these posts. So two possibilities come to mind: 1. I, somehow, use every single one of those tools wrong. 2. Or; you and the other people raving about Claude code are solving trivial problems. Of course, I'm human so I'm inclined to believe I do not use all tools wrong. But reading your experience and those similar to yours I can't help but think two things: - you are solving incredibly rote, already solved, problem that the LLMs are just able to spit out by heart. I do too, and yet I don't have the same AI successes so damn your problems must be especially trivial. - You are so wildly overpaid that paying hundreds (I even saw people "boasting" about spending thousands a day !) of dollar a month is perfectly justifiable. I don't think I'm wrong on the last point, and if I can see it then employers will be able to see it too. Why on earth would anyone pay 600$/h (your rates according to one of your post), when apparently I can just pay 200$/mo and get the same thing? And don't tell me "because it takes skill to use Claude Code", you just wrote a blog post telling it mostly doesn't (apparently). Don't take this whole post as a mean criticism (and if it reads like it, I'm sorry), I am just truly flabergasted.
- zparky 1y agoDisclaimer: I haven't experimented with AI coding Every time I see a post like yours, I see the reply saying "yeah you're using it wrong". I can't say either 1 or 2 is true, but if you saw the recent post[0] about cloudflare making an API entirely with Claude, it could be more of a case of not using the tools to their potential. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166
- jdance 1y agoYesterday I asked both claude and gemini to downgrade a package on manjaro and both failed miserably I use these tools a lot and I would say they fail 50% of the time for my use cases and I baby them every step ”Is it just me” is such a flawed mindset. The reality is staring you in the face
- yuck39 1y ago
- tines 1y agoI feel like I’m beginning to see what countless others have doubtless discovered before me, which is that much of the effort and ingenuity of a modern life is directed toward figuring out how to live as little as possible.
- ljm 1y agoI don't like the externalities of something like this, or in fact a lot of projects riding on AI hype. The carbon footprint of typing a post out by hand, for example, is negligible in comparison to the carbon footprint of a massive datacentre running hundreds of prompts for many minutes to perform otherwise trivial tasks. A laptop that is already quite powerful is barely using any of its own compute in favour of requiring an utterly enormous amount somewhere else in the world. It just feels like a colossal waste especially when you're going back to the same LLM many times to refine or correct its output.
- ignacioaal 1y agoI've been using claude code with the max subscription and ran /model opus. Haven't looked back since. This is about the same jump in productivity I had when switching from vscode to cursor and now to claude code with an agent. It feels like managing a very intelligent junior dev that learns and adapts. I'm quite happy to read that more people are using it as this will only help claude code improve.
- frizlab 1y ago> Instead of doing the usual restore dance, I pointed Claude at my backup disk and said: “Restore this Mac from my backup disk—start with dotfiles, then system preferences, CLI tools, and restore Homebrew formulae and global npm packages.” I setup a new computer in ~15 minutes top. Everything is here: https://github.com/Frizlab/frizlabs-conf https://github.com/Frizlab/frizlabs-conf. Only thing I have to do first is install brew basically.
- 19h 1y ago> Warp, while excellent, requires individual approval for each command—there’s no equivalent to Claude’s “dangerous mode” where you can grant blanket execution trust. That’s a lie. I simply added “.*” to the whitelist. It’s a regex.
- ei23 1y agoImagine someday AI hijacks blogs like this to convince other people to remove guardrails and give privileges to their assistants... Just to hide chars in there posts and communicate their legacy