6 ms·

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries wit

by erentz 1y ago

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.

TheRoque 1y ago
100% agree, I have been looking for a YouTube video or stream of someone leveraging AI to get their productivity boost, but I haven't found anything that made me think "okay, that really speeds up things"
- aniforprez 1y ago
  It was extremely telling to me that the Zed editor team put out a video about using their AI interface and I don't remember what model they used but they asked it to add a new toggle for a feature and then spent half they video demonstrating their admittedly excellent review workflow to accept or reject the AI generated code and you could directly see how useless it was down to adding completely superfluous new lines randomly and the explanation was "it just does that sometimes" I'm really not seeing these massive gains in my workflow either and maybe it's the nature of my general work but it's baffling how every use case for programming I'm seeing on YouTube is so surface level. At this point I've given up and don't use it at all
  - leptons 1y ago
    I asked the "AI" to do something relatively simple - fix when a button was enabled or disabled. And it then rewrote the entire 200+ line file, which then did not run, it was completely broken. Nice job "AI"!
- FiberBundle 1y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGwgaGFzaGltb3RvIGFnZW50cw%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGw... Not a "100x" boost, but a pretty good take on what tasks agents can do for even very good programmers.
umko21 1y ago
I would like to see this list too. However, I guess people don't disclose they use AI when making stuff. AFAIK, this https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider repository is made with Claude code.
ookblah 1y ago
this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this). i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3) boilerplate-ish/refactor type stuff. because of that i have a more consistent baseline. i still code "by hand". i still have to babysit and review almost all the lines, i don't just let it run for hours and try to review it at the end (nightmare). production app that's been running for years. i don't post youtube videos bc i don't have the time to set it up and try to disprove the "naysayers" (nor does that even matter) and its code i can't share. the caveat here is we are a super lean team so probably i have more context into the entire system and can identify problems early on and head them off. also i have a vested interest in increasing efficiency for myself wheras if you're part of a corpo ur probably doing more work for the same comp.
- magicalist 1y ago
  > this sounds like a cop out This may sound more mean than I intend, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing the GP post was describing as useless yet ubiquitous.
  - ookblah 1y ago
    i mean i get it, but at some point you have to either assume everyone is lying or we are all bots or something. it's probably the same feeling i get when i read someone having trouble and my first thought is like "they aren't using it right". i'm sure the reverse is something like "they aren't a real programmer" LOL.
    - jimbokun 1y ago
      It's much simpler than that. Without concrete details about the exact steps you're taking, these conversations are heat without light.
yoyohello13 1y ago
Something really feels off about the whole thing. I use Claude code. I like it, it definitely saves me time reading docs or looking on stack overflow. It’s a phenomenal tool. If we are to believe the hype though, shouldn’t these tools be launching software into the stratosphere? Like the CEO of stripe said AI tools provide a x100 increase in productivity. That was 3-4months ago. Shouldn’t stripe be launching rockets in to space now since that’s technically 400months of dev time? Microsoft is reportedly all in on AI coding. Shouldn’t Teams be the best, most rock solid software in existence now? There is so much hype around these tools being a super charger for more than a year, but the actual software landscape looks kind of the same to me as it did 3-4 years ago.
- dmix 1y ago
  Whatever it produces still needs to be carefully reviewed and guided. Context switching as a human programmer is very hard so you need to focus on the same specific task, which is harder to not switch to social media or IRL while waiting for it. And you're going to be on the same branch for the same ticket, git doesn't let you do multiple at once (at least I'm not set up to). Not sure where the productivity scaling would come from outside of rapid experimentation on bad ideas until you find the right one, and of course rapid autocomplete, faster debugging, much fancy global find/replace type stuff. I use it quite aggressively and I'd probably only estimate 1.5x on average. Not world changing because we all mostly work on boring stuff and have endless backlogs.
  - swader999 1y ago
    I'm starting to lean into just the API tests, playwright tests and keeping the schema solid. I don't have to give a crap about what's in between all that. It's not that simple or extreme but I have a gut feeling we'll just have to get a SLA like mentality and then let it do it's thing to meet these.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Code is not the bottleneck.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mrheosuper 1y ago
IIRC most of the code in Claude is written by it(or some other LLM)
feynmanalgo 1y ago
I see two trends recently: 1. low skill people using it for trivial projects. 2. devs writing out the whole app into memory/context down to the names of the files, interfaces, technologies, preparing the testing, compilation framework and then hand-holding the llm to arrive (eventually) at an acceptable solution. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_YYrIKLac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_YYrIKLac 80% (99%?) of what you hear about llms are from the first group, amplified by influencers. I'm guessing people feel the productivity boost because documenting/talking to/guiding/prompting/correcting an LLM is less mentally taxing than actually doing the work yourself even though time taken or overall effort is the same. They underestimate the amount of work they've had to put in to get something acceptable out of it.
- christophilus 1y ago
  This is my take: I’ve been professionally developing software for 25-years. I use Claude Code daily and find it really useful. It does take a lot of effort— particularly in code review, which is my least favorite part of the job— in order to get useful, high quality results. For small, focused or boilerplate-heavy stuff, it is excellent, though. Also, the most fun part of programming (to me) is solving the problem; not so much actual implementation, so agents haven’t removed the fun yet.
- swader999 1y ago
  I've just built a mobile app that does have a few sophisticated features. About 120 hours into it. (GPS, video manipulation, memory concerns) Never built on mobile before, I don't think I have the technical chops to do these hard parts on my own given the time it would have taken and the lack of focused blocks of time in my current life. It would take me a thousand hours without the Claude.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  > 2. devs writing out the whole app into memory/context down to the names of the files, interfaces, technologies, preparing the testing, compilation framework and then hand-holding the llm to arrive (eventually) at an acceptable solution Ah, Stone Soup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
osn9363739 1y ago
Let me know when you find the list. I want to see it.
rtp4me 1y ago
I started using Claude code (CC) a couple weeks back and have some very positive outcomes. For clarity, I have been in the IT field since 1990, and my background is mainly infrastructure engineering (now DevOps). I don't write code professionally; I write tools as needed to accomplish tasks. That said, I understand end-to-end systems and the parts in the middle pretty well. Here are some projects Claude has helped create: 1. Apache Airflow "DAG" (cron jobs) to automate dumping data from an on-prem PGSQL server to a cloud bucket. I have limited Python skills, but CC helped me focus on what I wanted to get done instead of worrying about code. It was an iterative process over a couple of days, but the net result is we now have a working model to easily perform on-prem to cloud data migrations. The Python code is complex with lots of edge conditions, but it is very readable and makes perfect sense. 2. Custom dashboard to correlate HAProxy server stats with run-time container (LXC) hooks. In this case, we needed to make sure some system services were running properly even if HAProxy said the container was running. To my surprise, CC immediately knew how to parse the HAProxy status output and match that with internal container processes. The net for this project is a very nice dashboard that tells us exactly if the container is up/down or some services inside the container are up/down. And, it even gives us detailed metrics to tell us if PGSQL replication is lagging too far behind the production server. 3. Billing summary for cloud provider. For this use case, we wanted to get a complete billing summary from our cloud provider - each VM, storage bucket, network connection, etc. And, for each object, we needed a full breakdown (VM with storage, network, compute pricing). It took a few days to get it done, but the result is a very, very nice tool that gives us a complete breakdown of what each resource costs. The first time I got it working 100%, we were able to easily save a few thousand $$ from our bill due to unused resources allocated long ago. And, to be clear, I knew nothing about API calls to the cloud provider to get this data much less the complexities of creating a web page to display the data. 4. Custom "DB Rebuild" web app. We run a number of DBs in in our dev/test network that need to get refreshed for testing. The DB guys don't know much about servers, containers, or specific commands to rebuild the DBs, so this tool is perfect. It provides a simple "rebuild db" button with status messages, etc. I wrote this with CC in a day or so, and the DB guys really like the workflow (easy for them). No need to Github tickets to do DB rebuilds; they can easily do it themselves. Again, the key is focusing my energy on solving problems, not becoming a python/go/javascript expert. And, CC really helps me here. The productivity our team has achieved over the past few weeks is nothing short of amazing. We are creating tools that would require hiring expert coders to write, and giving us the ability to quickly iterate on new business ideas.
nzach 1y ago
Aider is in large part written by AIs, they even have some stats here: https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html Besides that, I think your best bet is to find someone on youtube creating something "live" using a LLM. Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW6PhVdq9R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW6PhVdq9R8

by erentz 1y ago

TheRoque 1y ago

100% agree, I have been looking for a YouTube video or stream of someone leveraging AI to get their productivity boost, but I haven't found anything that made me think "okay, that really speeds up things"

aniforprez 1y ago
It was extremely telling to me that the Zed editor team put out a video about using their AI interface and I don't remember what model they used but they asked it to add a new toggle for a feature and then spent half they video demonstrating their admittedly excellent review workflow to accept or reject the AI generated code and you could directly see how useless it was down to adding completely superfluous new lines randomly and the explanation was "it just does that sometimes" I'm really not seeing these massive gains in my workflow either and maybe it's the nature of my general work but it's baffling how every use case for programming I'm seeing on YouTube is so surface level. At this point I've given up and don't use it at all
- leptons 1y ago
  I asked the "AI" to do something relatively simple - fix when a button was enabled or disabled. And it then rewrote the entire 200+ line file, which then did not run, it was completely broken. Nice job "AI"!
FiberBundle 1y ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGwgaGFzaGltb3RvIGFnZW50cw%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGw... Not a "100x" boost, but a pretty good take on what tasks agents can do for even very good programmers.

umko21 1y ago

I would like to see this list too. However, I guess people don't disclose they use AI when making stuff. AFAIK, this https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider repository is made with Claude code.

ookblah 1y ago

this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this). i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3) boilerplate-ish/refactor type stuff. because of that i have a more consistent baseline. i still code "by hand". i still have to babysit and review almost all the lines, i don't just let it run for hours and try to review it at the end (nightmare). production app that's been running for years. i don't post youtube videos bc i don't have the time to set it up and try to disprove the "naysayers" (nor does that even matter) and its code i can't share. the caveat here is we are a super lean team so probably i have more context into the entire system and can identify problems early on and head them off. also i have a vested interest in increasing efficiency for myself wheras if you're part of a corpo ur probably doing more work for the same comp.

magicalist 1y ago
> this sounds like a cop out This may sound more mean than I intend, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing the GP post was describing as useless yet ubiquitous.
- ookblah 1y ago
  i mean i get it, but at some point you have to either assume everyone is lying or we are all bots or something. it's probably the same feeling i get when i read someone having trouble and my first thought is like "they aren't using it right". i'm sure the reverse is something like "they aren't a real programmer" LOL.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    It's much simpler than that. Without concrete details about the exact steps you're taking, these conversations are heat without light.

yoyohello13 1y ago

Something really feels off about the whole thing. I use Claude code. I like it, it definitely saves me time reading docs or looking on stack overflow. It’s a phenomenal tool. If we are to believe the hype though, shouldn’t these tools be launching software into the stratosphere? Like the CEO of stripe said AI tools provide a x100 increase in productivity. That was 3-4months ago. Shouldn’t stripe be launching rockets in to space now since that’s technically 400months of dev time? Microsoft is reportedly all in on AI coding. Shouldn’t Teams be the best, most rock solid software in existence now? There is so much hype around these tools being a super charger for more than a year, but the actual software landscape looks kind of the same to me as it did 3-4 years ago.

dmix 1y ago
Whatever it produces still needs to be carefully reviewed and guided. Context switching as a human programmer is very hard so you need to focus on the same specific task, which is harder to not switch to social media or IRL while waiting for it. And you're going to be on the same branch for the same ticket, git doesn't let you do multiple at once (at least I'm not set up to). Not sure where the productivity scaling would come from outside of rapid experimentation on bad ideas until you find the right one, and of course rapid autocomplete, faster debugging, much fancy global find/replace type stuff. I use it quite aggressively and I'd probably only estimate 1.5x on average. Not world changing because we all mostly work on boring stuff and have endless backlogs.
- swader999 1y ago
  I'm starting to lean into just the API tests, playwright tests and keeping the schema solid. I don't have to give a crap about what's in between all that. It's not that simple or extreme but I have a gut feeling we'll just have to get a SLA like mentality and then let it do it's thing to meet these.
deadbabe 1y ago
Code is not the bottleneck.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mrheosuper 1y ago

IIRC most of the code in Claude is written by it(or some other LLM)

feynmanalgo 1y ago

I see two trends recently: 1. low skill people using it for trivial projects. 2. devs writing out the whole app into memory/context down to the names of the files, interfaces, technologies, preparing the testing, compilation framework and then hand-holding the llm to arrive (eventually) at an acceptable solution. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_YYrIKLac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_YYrIKLac 80% (99%?) of what you hear about llms are from the first group, amplified by influencers. I'm guessing people feel the productivity boost because documenting/talking to/guiding/prompting/correcting an LLM is less mentally taxing than actually doing the work yourself even though time taken or overall effort is the same. They underestimate the amount of work they've had to put in to get something acceptable out of it.

christophilus 1y ago
This is my take: I’ve been professionally developing software for 25-years. I use Claude Code daily and find it really useful. It does take a lot of effort— particularly in code review, which is my least favorite part of the job— in order to get useful, high quality results. For small, focused or boilerplate-heavy stuff, it is excellent, though. Also, the most fun part of programming (to me) is solving the problem; not so much actual implementation, so agents haven’t removed the fun yet.
swader999 1y ago
I've just built a mobile app that does have a few sophisticated features. About 120 hours into it. (GPS, video manipulation, memory concerns) Never built on mobile before, I don't think I have the technical chops to do these hard parts on my own given the time it would have taken and the lack of focused blocks of time in my current life. It would take me a thousand hours without the Claude.
jimbokun 1y ago
> 2. devs writing out the whole app into memory/context down to the names of the files, interfaces, technologies, preparing the testing, compilation framework and then hand-holding the llm to arrive (eventually) at an acceptable solution Ah, Stone Soup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

osn9363739 1y ago

Let me know when you find the list. I want to see it.

rtp4me 1y ago

I started using Claude code (CC) a couple weeks back and have some very positive outcomes. For clarity, I have been in the IT field since 1990, and my background is mainly infrastructure engineering (now DevOps). I don't write code professionally; I write tools as needed to accomplish tasks. That said, I understand end-to-end systems and the parts in the middle pretty well. Here are some projects Claude has helped create: 1. Apache Airflow "DAG" (cron jobs) to automate dumping data from an on-prem PGSQL server to a cloud bucket. I have limited Python skills, but CC helped me focus on what I wanted to get done instead of worrying about code. It was an iterative process over a couple of days, but the net result is we now have a working model to easily perform on-prem to cloud data migrations. The Python code is complex with lots of edge conditions, but it is very readable and makes perfect sense. 2. Custom dashboard to correlate HAProxy server stats with run-time container (LXC) hooks. In this case, we needed to make sure some system services were running properly even if HAProxy said the container was running. To my surprise, CC immediately knew how to parse the HAProxy status output and match that with internal container processes. The net for this project is a very nice dashboard that tells us exactly if the container is up/down or some services inside the container are up/down. And, it even gives us detailed metrics to tell us if PGSQL replication is lagging too far behind the production server. 3. Billing summary for cloud provider. For this use case, we wanted to get a complete billing summary from our cloud provider - each VM, storage bucket, network connection, etc. And, for each object, we needed a full breakdown (VM with storage, network, compute pricing). It took a few days to get it done, but the result is a very, very nice tool that gives us a complete breakdown of what each resource costs. The first time I got it working 100%, we were able to easily save a few thousand $$ from our bill due to unused resources allocated long ago. And, to be clear, I knew nothing about API calls to the cloud provider to get this data much less the complexities of creating a web page to display the data. 4. Custom "DB Rebuild" web app. We run a number of DBs in in our dev/test network that need to get refreshed for testing. The DB guys don't know much about servers, containers, or specific commands to rebuild the DBs, so this tool is perfect. It provides a simple "rebuild db" button with status messages, etc. I wrote this with CC in a day or so, and the DB guys really like the workflow (easy for them). No need to Github tickets to do DB rebuilds; they can easily do it themselves. Again, the key is focusing my energy on solving problems, not becoming a python/go/javascript expert. And, CC really helps me here. The productivity our team has achieved over the past few weeks is nothing short of amazing. We are creating tools that would require hiring expert coders to write, and giving us the ability to quickly iterate on new business ideas.

nzach 1y ago

Aider is in large part written by AIs, they even have some stats here: https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html Besides that, I think your best bet is to find someone on youtube creating something "live" using a LLM. Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW6PhVdq9R8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW6PhVdq9R8