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How Anthropic teams use Claude Code
- chubot 1y agoI use Claude and like it, but this post has kind of a clunky and stilted style So I guess the blog team also uses Claude
- mepiethree 1y agoYeah this is kind of a stunning amount of information to provide but also basically like polished bullet points
- vlovich123 1y agoMust feel that way because that’s probably exactly what it is
- jonstewart 1y agoYou’re absolutely right!
- AIPedant 1y agoI don't think the problem is using Claude - in fact some of the writing is quite clumsy and amateurish, suggesting an actual human wrote it. The overall post reads like a collection of survey responses, with no overarching organization, and no filtering of repetitive or empty responses. Nobody was in charge.
- kylestanfield 1y agoThe MCP documentation site has the same problem. It’s basically just a list of bullet points without any details
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- maxnevermind 1y agoAlso started to suspect that, but I have a bigger problem with the content than styling: > "Instead of remembering complex Kubernetes commands, they ask Claude for the correct syntax, like "how to get all pods or deployment status," and receive the exact commands needed for their infrastructure work." Duh, you can ask LLM tech questions and stuff. What is the point of putting something like that on the tech blog of the company which supposed to be working on beading edge tech.
- politelemon 1y agoI think this is meant to serve as a bit of an advert/marketing and bit of a signal to investors that look, we're doing things.
- LeafItAlone 1y agoTo get more people using it, and more. I’ve encountered people who don’t use it because they think that it isn’t something that will help them, even in tech. Showing how different groups find value in it might get people in those same positions using it. Even with people who do use it, they might thinking about it narrowly. They use it for code generation, but might not think to use it for simplified man pages. Of course there are people who are the exact opposite and use it for every last thing they do. And maybe from this they learn how to better approach their prompts.
- buggy6257 1y ago@dang looks like HN ate the leading “How” in the title.
- kevmo314 1y agoYeah, I was about to say, I sure hope they do.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- laborcontract 1y agofyi @dang doesn't actually flag dang. They've always advised emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
- OJFord 1y agoIt's intentional. Imagine a blog post 'How I whizzed foobars to optimise my Home Assistant garbage collection' - it's unnecessary filler. I agree it has times like this it doesn't work and makes the title worse though. The submitter can edit it, and this reformatting (and others) are not applied again.
- NotMichaelBay 1y agowhy use many word, etc
- ants_everywhere 1y agoI've been trying Claude Code for a few weeks after using Gemini Cli. There's something a little better the tool use loop, which is nice. But Claude seems a little dumber and is aggressive about "getting things done", often ignoring common sense or explicit instructions or design information. If I tell it to make a test pass, it will sometimes change my database structure to avoid having to debug the test. At least twice it deleted protobufs from my project and replaced it with JSON because it struggled to immediately debug a proto issue.
- jonstewart 1y agoThe hilarious part I’ve found is that when it runs into the least bit of trouble with a step on one of its plans, it will say it has been “Deferred” and then make up an excuse for why that’s acceptable. It is sometimes acceptable for humans to use judgment and defer work; the machine doesn’t have judgment so it is not acceptable for it to do so.
- ants_everywhere 1y agoOh yeah totally. It feels a bit deceptive sometimes. Like just now it says "great the tests are consistently passing!" So I ran the same test command and 4 of the 7 tests are so broken they don't even build.
- enobrev 1y agoI've noticed in the "task complete" summaries, I'll see something like "250/285 tests passing, but the broken tests are out of scope for this change". My immediate and obvious response is "you broke them!" (at least to myself), but I do appreciate that it's trying to keep focused in some strange way. A simple "commit, fix failing tests" prompt will generally take care of it. I've been working on my "/implement" command to do a better job of checking that the full test suite is all green before asking if I want to clear the task and merge the feature branch
- quintu5 1y agoMy favorite is when you ask Claude to implement two requirements and it implements the first, gets confused by the the second, removes the implementation for the first to “focus” on the second, and then finishes by having implemented nothing.
- minimaxir 1y agoA repeated trend is that Claude Code only gets 70-80% of the way, which is fine and something I wish was emphasized more by people pushing agents. This bullet point is funny: > Treat it like a slot machine > Save your state before letting Claude work, let it run for 30 minutes, then either accept the result or start fresh rather than trying to wrestle with corrections. Starting over often has a higher success rate than trying to fix Claude's mistakes. That's easy to say when the employee is not personally paying the massive amount of compute running Claude Code for a half-hour.
- throwmeaway222 1y agoThanks for the tip - we employees should run and re-run the code generation hundreds of times even if the changes are pretty good. That way, the brass will see a huge bill without many actual commits. Sorry boss, it looks like we need to hire more software engineers since the AI route still isn't mathing.
- mdaniel 1y ago> we employees should run and re-run the code generation hundreds of times Well, Anthropic sure thinks that you should. Number go up!
- drewvlaz 1y agoOne really has to wonder what their actual margins are though, considering the Claude Code plans vs API pricing
- wahnfrieden 1y agoIt is accurate though. I even run multiple attempts in parallel. Which is a strategy that can work with human teams too.
- gmueckl 1y agoData centers are CapEx, employees are OpEx. Building more data centers is cheap. Employees can always supervise more agents...
- mdaniel 1y agoOh, come on https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-anthropic-teams-use-claude-code#claude-code-for-legal https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-anthropic-teams-use-claud... is not "for legal" - Custom accessibility solution for family members - The team created prototype "phone tree" systems to help team members connect with the right lawyer at Anthropic - Team coordination tools - Rapid prototyping for solution validation So, not legal
- jasonthorsness 1y agoClaude Code works well for lots of things; for example yesterday I asked it to switch weather APIs backing a weather site and it came very close to one-shotting the whole thing even though the APIs were quite different. I use it at home via the $20/m subscription and am piloting it at work via AWS Bedrock. When used with Bedrock APIs, at the end of every session it shows you the dollar amount spent which is a bit disconcerting. I hope the fine-grained metering of inference is a temporary situation otherwise I think it will have a chilling/discouraging effect on software developers, leading to less experimentation and fewer rewrites, overall lower quality. I imagine Anthropic gets to consume it unmetered internally so I they probably completely avoid this problem.
- lumost 1y agoonce upon a time - engineers often had to concern themselves with datacenter bills, cloud bills, and eventually SaaS bills. We'll probably have 5-10 years of being concerned about AI bills before the AI expense is trivial compared to the human time.
- nextworddev 1y agoYou will start seriously worrying about coding AI bills within 6 months
- philomath_mn 1y agoWhy is that?
- throwawayoldie 1y agoBecause at some point, Anthropic needs to stop hemorrhaging money and actually make some.
- fragmede 1y agoUber, founded in 2009 was finally profitable in 2023. That's a bit longer than 6 months.
- neom 1y agoWouldn't it be a bit unusual if that wasn't true? We build our coding agent...with our coding agent... feeling like this is table steaks.
- chrisweekly 1y agoFYI the idiom comes from card games, not restaurants. It's "table stakes", as in "the minimum amount required to commit to the game to be allowed to play".
- neom 1y agoI'm bad at speeling. :(
- tkzed49 1y agommmm... table steak
- readthenotes1 1y agoI bet your dog really loves you if steak is your idea of dogfooding ;)
- pton_xd 1y agoYeah that'd be a big misteak
- arrowsmith 1y agoThe actual title is "How Anthropic teams use Claude Code". HN automatically strips the "How" from any title that starts with it, for dubious reasons — and this thread is a great example of the drawbacks.
- wgjordan 1y agoCompletely agree- this is a very well-done, A1 argument I can certainly sink my teeth into.
- bilsbie 1y agoWe passed a milestone with little fanfare. AI is now improving itself.
- AIPedant 1y agoBy this standard we passed the milestone in the 60s when Lisp was used to build better Lisp compilers. By a more honest standard we are still a very long way away from AI suggesting new ANN architectures, new approaches to managing RLHF, better training data, new benchmarks, etc etc. LLMs are nowhere close to being able to improve themselves.
- energy123 1y agoIt's not binary. Your example is recursive self improvement, just a weak kind because the productivity bump was small. But now we have AlphaEvolve which can likely come up with new architectures. The productivity bumps are much larger and will keep growing.
- mhrmsn 1y agoIt'd be more interesting if they shared actual examples of complete prompts, CLAUDE.md files, settings and MCP servers to achieve certain things. The documentation is good, but is kept relatively general and I have a feeling that the quality of Claude Code's output really depends on the specific setup and prompts you use.
- qaq 1y agoWonder what the context window is for Claude Code for internal users
- kordlessagain 1y agoNot as much as the $200 month account, that's for fucking certain.
- Shopper0552 1y agoIt's funny since Anthropic asked their job candidates not to use AI [0]. I know it's not the same as actually working at Anthropic already, but I just thought it was funny. [0] https://fortune.com/2025/02/04/anthropic-tells-job-candidates-dont-use-ai-employer-trend/ https://fortune.com/2025/02/04/anthropic-tells-job-candidate...
- bgwalter 1y agoThey want cracked developers and sell the slop generator to script kiddies.
- symfoniq 1y agoAnthropic are trailblazers and this will be everywhere soon. It happened to me tonight with a different company. "We use AI to do our actual work, but please don't use AI for this coding challenge."
- esafak 1y agoThey've relaxed their ban on AI: https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance
- jonstewart 1y ago> Create self-sufficient loops > > Set up Claude to verify its own work by running builds, tests, and lints automatically. I’ve got much better at using Claude.md and plan files, etc., but it still goes off the rails so quickly when I try to get it to follow a normal TDD test/edit/build/commit workflow. It will report success, and then the unit tests will fail or the working copy is dirty or there are build errors, etc. An LLM may be great for figuring out what code to write and what weird tool incantation to run to debug something, but I am fed up enough I want to write my own agent, because all I want is a switch-statement state machine to manage workflow.
- ycombinatornews 1y agoUsing slash commands that describe engineering/task workflow (steps) and /clear once it’s done solves this.
- ojbyrne 1y agoI used to say that the last 10% of software takes 90% of the effort. All the 70 percents and 80 percents in that article reminded me of that.
- bgwalter 1y agoSo this style of articles is the future? Pages of unconnected bullet points that mention the word "Claude" at least 100 times. No real information and nothing to remember.
- joe_the_user 1y agoYeah, I don't think all the information in the article is useful but it seems like disorganized dump - or a melding together of several article - boiler plate "we use Claude for all good things" and specific useful tips all run together. It definitely has a "we use AI enough that we've lost the ability to communicate coherently" vibe to it.
- kylestlb 1y agoI'm assuming there was a directive from comms or someone else requiring each cost center write up examples/demos of what they use Claude Code for. Then dogfooded and turned into what you see here.
- ipnon 1y agoThe future is that articles will generally be read by machine intelligences more often than human ones. You have to optimize for your audience.
- syntaxbush 1y agoI found if you are tightly in the loop, keep the code highly modular, and are developing new functionality alongside tests, Claude works much better.
- corytheboyd 1y agoYeah me too, keeping the code modular being a huge part of it. In the same vein is actually finishing feature flags and removing the old code, killing off truly dead code, tests, documentation… basically eliminate as much noise as you can, so that it reads as much exemplary code as possible.
- syntaxbush 1y agoGood point. I tell Claude in the claude.md to use a linter and formatter which helps it get rid of its own dead code while it develops.
- mixdup 1y agoThe first example was helping debug k8s issues, which was diagnosed as IP pool exhaustion, and Claude helped them fix it without needing a network expert But, if they had an expert in networking build it in the first place, would they have not avoided the error entirely up front?
- mfrye0 1y agoMy optimization hack is that I'm using speech recognition now with Claude Code. I can just talk to it like a person and explain the full context / history of things. Way faster than typing it all out.
- onprema 1y agoThe SuperWhisper app is great, if you use a Mac.
- sipjca 1y agoOpen source and cross platform one: https://handy.computer https://handy.computer
- mfrye0 1y agoI checked that one out. The one that Reddit recommended was Voice Type. It's completely offline and a one-time charge: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voice-type-local-dictation/id6736525125?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voice-type-local-dictation/id6... The developer is pretty cool too. I found a few bugs here and there and reported them. He responds pretty much immediately.
- jwr 1y agoThere is also MacWhisper which works very well. I've been using it for several months now. I highly recommend getting a good microphone, I use a Rode smartlav. It makes a huge difference.
- theshrike79 1y agoSo you sit in a room, talking to it? Doesn't it feel weird? I type a lot faster than I speak :D
- jon-wood 1y agoNot only do I type faster than I speak I'm also able to edit as I go along, correcting any mistakes or things I've stumbled over and can make clearer. Half my experience of using even basic voice assistants is starting to ask for something and then going "ugh, no cancel" because I stumbled over part of a sentence and I know I'll end up with some utter nonsense in my todo list.
- bionhoward 1y agoAnthropic goes hard on the virtue signalling but I still don’t get how anyone manages to satisfy “Customer may not and must not attempt to (a) access the Services to build a competing product or service” So I just avoid it and generally think the whole thing isn’t serious, because nobody seems to care enough about the safety implications of building AGI with legal terms which are logically impossible to satisfy to demonstrate appropriate attention to detail (aka, yall are noobs)
- School-Cotton 1y agoAre you trying to build an AI platform to compete with anthropic? If not, why does that line matter?
- astrange 1y agoThat seems pretty problematic to me. Anthropic makes and sells Claude Code, so basically any developer productivity tool is a competitor!
- kordlessagain 1y agoThat's reason enough to leave, if them having one 9 of reliability of the service is not enough.
- amacneil 1y agoIt’s a funny post because our team wanted to use Claude Code, but the team plan of Claude doesn’t include Claude Code (unlike the pro plan at a similar price point). Found this out after we purchased it :( We’re not going to ask every engineer to purchase it separately. Maybe before boasting about how your internal teams use your product, add an option for external companies to pay for it! Industry leading AI models but basic things like subscription management are unsolved…
- baby 1y agoWhy not ask them to purchase it separately?
- theshrike79 1y agoIt's a billing nightmare pretty much. The only reason why "team" plans exist is to have centralised billing and licensing.
- onprema 1y ago> When Kubernetes clusters went down and weren't scheduling new pods, the team used Claude Code to diagnose the issue. They fed screenshots of dashboards into Claude Code, which guided them through Google Cloud's UI menu by menu until they found a warning indicating pod IP address exhaustion. Claude Code then provided the exact commands to create a new IP pool and add it to the cluster, bypassing the need to involve networking specialists. This seems rather inefficient, and also surprising that Claude Code was even needed for this.
- ktzar 1y agoThey're subsidizing a world where we need ai instead of understanding or, at the very least, knowing who can help us. Eventually for us to be so dumb we are the ai slaves.
- moomoo11 1y agoNot really. Is it really value add to my life that I know some detail on page A or have some API memorized? I’d rather we be putting smart people in charge of using AI to build out great products. It should make things 10000x more competitive. I’m for one excited AF for what the future holds. If people want to be purists and pat themselves on the back sure. I mean people have hobbies like arts.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago> for what the future holds AI mostly provides negative efficiency gains. This will not change in the future.
- AstroBen 1y ago> Is it really value add to my life that I know some detail on page A or have some API memorized? yes, actually. Maybe not intimate details but knowing what's available in the API heavily helps with problem solving
- moomoo11 1y ago
- skeeter2020 1y agoThis post had to have been written in a large part by their model, right?
- ku1ik 1y agoIt certainly feels so.
- seba_dos1 1y agoI could already tell that they do by watching how often and how badly their canvas integration breaks.
- dzikibaz 1y agoWhy is everyone so careless about letting Claude Desktop upload their source code and/or private data to its servers? Or maybe I'm too paranoid for caring about where data go.
- drak0n1c 1y agoVeniceAI is great for privacy focused hosting of open-source models. Hopefully they add Qwen 3 Coder (which appears to be on par with Claude 4 for coding) to their API, then I can use my tools with it.
- linkage 1y agoThe codebase I am paid to work on is a dog's breakfast, largely agglomerated over many months by offshore contractors. If Anthropic includes it in their training set, it's their own funeral.
- corytheboyd 1y agoBecause my employer tells me it’s fine so long as we’re using it with AWS Bedrock. Do I believe that Amazon then wouldn’t be siphoning all this as model training data? It’s a fun conspiracy…
- fumeux_fume 1y agoWholesale use of and/or dependence on Claude Code feels like a Faustian bargain from a personal and even a business point of view.
- grensley 1y agoClaude Desktop is one of the buggier applications I've ever used and one of our jokes internally is that it seems like it was very clearly vibe coded.
- zuInnp 1y agoI prefer to use Claude code like a smart rubber ducky while I write most the code in the end. I added rules to make claude first explain what it want to do in chat (and code changes should only be implemented if I ask for it). I like it to talk about ideas, discuss solutions and approaches. But I am in control of it - in the end, I am the person repsonsible for the code. Since I don't like it to automatically do changes to files, I copy&paste the code from terminal to the IDE. That seems slow at first, but it allows me to correct the bigger and smaller issues on the fly faster than prompting Claude to my preffered solution. In my opinion, this makes more sense since I have more control and it is easier to spot problematic code. When fixing such issues, I point Claude to changes afterwards to add to its context. For me Claude is like a very (over) confident junior developer. You have to keep an eye on them and if it is faster do it yourself, then just do it and explain them why you did it. (That might be a bad approach for Juniors, but for Claude it works for me) Btw, can we talk about that this blog post is written by the company that tries to sell the tool? So we should take it with a huge grain of salt... . Like all what these AI companies are telling us, should probably be ignored for 90 % of time. They either want to raise money or or getting bought by some other company in the end ...
- theshrike79 1y agoJust keep it in plan mode and it won't change anything? Unlike Gemini CLI which will just rush into implementation without hesitation :D
- ipnon 1y agoLLMs need documentation for semantic instructions and testing for formal verification. In the past efficient human teams could forego both of these and rely on tacit understanding. But this does not exist with LLMs so we will continue to see proliferation of elaborate documentation bases and test bases. It is very interesting to me how the differences in our intelligences is physically manifested in text. It is one argument against hard-takeoff: the bioneuron can encode information in a sweet spot that cannot be targeted by the perceptron, by the so-called neuralese, by any amount of distillation.
- forgotmypw17 1y agoI’ve implemented and maintained an entire web app with CC, and also used many other tools (and took classes and taught workshops on using AI coding tools). The most effective way I’ve found to use CC so far is this workflow: Have a detailed and also compressed spec in an md file. It can be called anything, because you’re going to reference it explicitly in every prompt. (CC usually forgets about CLAUDE.md ime) Start with the user story, and ask it to write a high-level staged implementation plan with atomic steps. Review this plan and have CC rewrite as necessary. (Another md file results.) Then, based on this file, ask it to write a detailed implementation plan, also with atomic stages. Then review it together and ask if it’s ready to implement. Then tell Claude to go ahead and implement it on a branch. Remember the automated tests and functional testing. Then merge.
- stillsut 1y agoGreat advice, matches up to my experience. Personally I go a little cheaper and dirtier on the first prompt, then revise as needed. By the way what classes / workshops did you teach? I've written a little about some my findings and workflow in detail here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/aba-5.md https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/a...
- forgotmypw17 1y agoThank you for sharing. I taught some workshops on AI-assisted development using Cursor a Windsurf for MIT students (we built an application and wrote a book) and TAed another similar for-credit course. I’ve also been teaching high schoolers how to code, and we use ChatGPT to help us understand and solve leetcode problems by breaking them down into smaller exercises. There’s also now a Harvard CS course on developing with GenAI which I followed along with. The field is exploding.
- beambot 1y agoCan you provide any source materials - course notes, book, etc?
- 1y ago
- rs186 1y agoDoes anyone else find the article difficult to read? I was at 30% and just couldn't withstand it any more. No doubt it was created/heavily revised by LLM, but the whole thing just isn't like anything that a human writes, and definitely unlike those well-structured, interesting and engaging blog articles I have read in the past.
- seaports 1y agoYeah, it was unreadable. Constant start-stoppage
- mvieira38 1y agoI'm surprised they let it generate the tests. Aren't the tests precisely what you want to have fine control over, moreso than the code itself? Letting it write them itself feels like yielding control over what is considered "correct" code
- danielbln 1y agoUnpopular take: I couldn't give a single damn about the code. If it passes the spec and tests (that I review) and the feature works, that is good enough for me. I'm in the business of automation, and in the business of solving problems. Writing perfect, beautiful code is not what I'm in the business of. Now of course, good enough doesn't mean "complete horse shit spaghetti code", but it also doesn't mean I give a damn if some function is maybe not pure enough or whatever.
- netpaladinx 1y agoWhich database is behind Claude Code? Cursor built on top of object storage. They failed with Yugabytes and Postgres
- Adifounder 1y agoI wonder if claude code would benefit from a ui?
- itsafarqueue 1y agoYou’re absolutely right!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]