64 ms·

6 weeks of Claude Code

• iwontberude 1y ago
  I stopped writing as much code because of RSI and carpal tunnel but Claude has given me a way to program without pain (perhaps an order of magnitude less pain). As much as I was wanting to reject it, I literally am going to need it to continue my career.
  • iaw 1y ago
    Now that you point this out, since I started using Claude my RSI pain is virtually non-existent. There is so much boilerplate and repetitive work taken out when Claude can hit 90% of the mark. Especially with very precise language. I've heard of people using speech to text to use it which opens up all sorts of accessibility windows.
  • flappyeagle 1y ago
    Are you using dictation for text entry
    • iwontberude 1y ago
      Great suggestion! I will be now :)
      • cooperaustinj 1y ago
        Superwhisper is great. It's closed source, however. There may be other comparable open spurce options available now. I'd suggest trying superwhisper, so you know what's possible and maybe compare to open source options after. Superwhisper runs locally and has a one time purchase option, which makes it acceptable to me.
        • robbomacrae 1y ago
          Talkito (I posted the link further up) is open source and unlike Superwhisper it makes Claude Code talk back to you as well - which was the original aim to be able to multitask.
          • yencabulator 1y ago
            Talkito looks to be just a front for cloud services https://github.com/robdmac/talkito#provider-configuration https://github.com/robdmac/talkito#provider-configuration -- that's a really limited definition of "open source", especially for something that itself is AGPL licensed.
            • robbomacrae 1y ago
              Talkito does indeed support all the popular TTS and ASR cloud providers so you can bring your own key. But even without a key, on Mac it can use the system default TTS and googles free ASR for input. So whats the benefit? Well for Claude Code this wrapper effectively bridges those TTS/ASR systems and CC so the voice interface is now there (CC doesn't have one). It doesn't just rely on MCP either (although it does start an MCP server for configuring via prompting) but instead directly injects the ASR and directly reads out CC's output when on. It is free and open source so folks can inspect it and check it's not doing anything nefarious, so that others can contribute if they should choose. And the license is what it is as that seems to be the advice on this forum if you want to make sure a company can't just make a paid service out of your work.
  • robbomacrae 1y ago
    Sorry to hear that and whilst it wasn't my original goal to serve such a use case I wonder if being able to interact with Claude Code via voice will help you? On MacOS it uses free defaults for TTS and ASR but you can BYOK to other providors. https://github.com/robdmac/talkito https://github.com/robdmac/talkito
    • iwontberude 1y ago
      I’m going to try it out tonight thank you
  • libraryofbabel 1y ago
    You aren't the first person I have heard say this. It's an under-appreciated way in which these tools are a game-changer. They are a wonderful gift to those of us prone to RSI, because they're most good at precisely the boilerplate repetitive stuff that tends to cause the most discomfort. I used to feel slightly sick every time I was faced with some big piece of boilerplate I had to hammer out, because of my RSI and also because it just makes me bored. No longer. People worry that these tools will end careers, but (for now at least) I think they can save the careers of more than a few people. A side-effect is I now enjoy programming much more, because I can operate at a level of abstraction where I am actually dealing with novel problems rather than sending my brain to sleep and my wrists to pain hell hammering out curly braces or yaml boilerplate.
  • d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
    I find it very effective to use a good STT/dictation app since giving sufficient detailed context to CC is very important, and it becomes tedious to type all of that. I’ve experimented with several dictation apps, including super whisper, etc., and I’ve settled on Wispr Flow. I’m very picky about having good keyboard shortcuts for hands-free dictation mode (meaning having a good keyboard shortcut to toggle recording on and off), and of course, accuracy and speed. Wispr Flow seems to fit all my needs for now but I’d love to switch to a local-only app and ditch the $15/mo sub :)
  • hooverd 1y ago
    check out https://talonvoice.com https://talonvoice.com !
• fuckyah 1y ago
  I’m currently in Europe and noticed that Claude code gets significantly slower when North America awakes…
• Fraterkes 1y ago
  Irrespective of how good Claude code actually is (I haven’t used it, but I think this article makes a really cogent case), here’s something that bothers me: I’m very junior, I have a big slow ugly codebase of gdscript (basically python) that I’m going to convert to C# to both clean it up and speed it up. This is for a personal project, I haven’t written a ton of C# or done this amount of refactoring before, so this could be educational in multiple ways. If I were to use Claude for this Id feel like I was robbing myself of something that could teach me a lot (and maybe motivate me to start out with structuring my code better in the future). If I don’t use Claude I feel like Im wasting my (very sparse) free time on a pretty uninspiring task that may very well be automated away in most future jobs, mostly out of some (misplaced? Masochistic?) belief about programming craft. This sort of back and forth happens a lot in my head now with projects.
  • jansan 1y ago
    It depends how you use it. You can ask Claude Code for instructions to migrate the Code yourself, and it will be a teacher. Or you can ask it to create a migration plan and the execute it, in which case learning will of course be very limited. I recommend to do the conversion in smaller steps if possible. We tried to migrate a project just for fun in one single step and Claude Code failed miserably (itself thought it had done a terrific job), but doing it in smaller chunks worked out quite well.
  • gjfkririfif 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • mentos 1y ago
    Cursor has made writing C++ like a scripting language for me. I no longer wrestle with arcane error messages, they go straight into Cursor and I ask it to resolve and then from its solution I learn what my error was.
    • maille 1y ago
      Can you really use Cursor for CPP ? Would you mind describing your setup? How better is it than copilot or windsurf?
• jansan 1y ago
  A lot of things that the author achieved with Claude Code is migrating or refactoring of code. To me, who started using Claude Code just two weeks ago, this seems to be one of the real strengths at the moment. We have a large business app that uses an abandoned component library and contains a lot of cruft. Migrating to another component library seemed next to impossible, but with Claude Code the whole process took me just about one week. It is making mistakes (non-matching tags for example), but with some human oversight we reached the first goal. Next goal is removing as much cruft as possible, so working on the app becomes possible or even fun again. I remember when JetBrains made programming so much easier with their refactoring tools in IntelliJ IDEA. To me (with very limited AI experience) this seems to be a similar step, but bigger.
  • zkry 1y ago
    On the other hand though, automated refactoring like in IntelliJ can scale practically infinitely, are extremely low cost, and are gauranteed to never make any mistakes. Not saying this is more useful per se, just saying that different approaches have their pros and cons.
  • bongodongobob 1y ago
    I tried out Claude for the first time today. I have a giant powershell script that has evolved over the years, doing a bunch of different stuff. I've been meaning to refactor it for a long time, but it's such a tangled mess that every time I try, I give up fairly quickly. GPT has not been able to split it into separate modules successfully. Today I tried Claude and it refactored it into a beautifully separated collections of modules in about 30 minutes. I am extremely impressed.
• slackpad 1y ago
  Really agree with the author's thoughts on maintenance here. I've run into a ton of cases where I would have written a TODO or made a ticket to capture some refactoring and instead just knocked it out right then with Claude. I've also used Claude to quickly try out a refactoring idea and then abandoned it because I didn't like how it came out. It really lowers the activation energy for these kinds of maintenance things. Letting Claude rest was a great point in the article, too. I easily get manifold value compared to what I pay, so I haven't got it grinding on its own on a bunch of things in parallel and offline. I think it could quickly be an accelerator for burnout and cruft if you aren't careful, so I keep to a supervised-by-human mode. Wrote up some more thoughts a few weeks ago at https://www.modulecollective.com/posts/agent-assisted-coding-is-getting-really-good/ https://www.modulecollective.com/posts/agent-assisted-coding....
• mococa 1y ago
  My opinion on Claude as ChatGPT user. It feels like ChatGPT on cocaine, I mean, I asked for a small change and it came with 5 solutions changing all my codebase.
  • iamsaitam 1y ago
    I'm NOT saying it is, but without regulatory agencies having a look or it being open source, this might be well working as intended, since Anthropic makes more money out of it.
  • crop_rotation 1y ago
    Is this opinion on claude code or claude the model?
  • stavros 1y ago
    Was it Sonnet or Opus? I've found that Sonnet will just change a few small things, Opus will go and do big bang changes. YMMV, though, maybe it's the way I was prompting it. Try using Plan Mode and having it only make small changes.
  • Applejinx 1y ago
    Is this the one that goes 'Oh no, I accidentally your whole codebase, I suck, I accept my punishment and you should never trust me again' or is that a different one? I seem to remember the 'oh no I suck' one comes out of Microsoft's programmer world? It seems like that must be a tough environment for coders if such feelings run so close to the surface that the LLMs default to it.
    • Zarathruster 1y ago
      That sounds like gemini: https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1m2hkoo/did_gemini_just_give_up_on_me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1m2hkoo/did_gemini_...
• MuffinFlavored 1y ago
  I think Claude Code is great, but I really grew accustomed to the "Cursor-tab tab tab" autocomplete style. A little perplexed why the Claude Code integration into VS Code doesn't add something like this? It would make it the perfect product to me. Surprised more people do not talk about this/it isn't a more commonly requested feature.
  • infecto 1y ago
    Agree. I used Claude code a bit and enjoyed it but also felt like I was too disconnected to the changes, I guess too much vibe coding? Cursor is a nice balance for me still. I am automating a lot of the writing but it’s still bite size pieces that feel easier to review.
    • robbomacrae 1y ago
      With these agentic coders you can have better conversations about the code. My favorite use case with CC is after a day coding I can ask it to for a thorough review of the changes, a file, or even the whole project.. setting it to work when I go off to bed and have it ranking issues and even proposing a fix for the most important ones. If you get the prompt right and enable permissions it can work for quite a long time independently.
  • k9294 1y ago
    I just use Claude Code in Cursor's terminal (both a hotkey away, very convenient). For 2 months I don't use cursor chat, but tab autocomplete is to good, definitely worth 20$.
  • hollowturtle 1y ago
    "Cursor tab tab tab" is just nuts. I'm also getting accustomed to type carelessly, making syntax mistakes who cares if a tab can fix that. I fly with it. As per why more people dont talk about this, I have a the strong opinion that tools find success in the median of the market, not in the excellence. I think coders with a great autocomplete are a real deal. I find so boring and courtproductive chatting about a problem
• jeswin 1y ago
  Claude Code is ahead of anything else, in a very noticeable way. (I've been writing my own cli tooling for AI codegen from 2023 - and in that journey I've tried most of the options out there. It has been a big part of my work - so that's how I know.) I agree with many things that the author is doing: 1. Monorepos can save time 2. Start with a good spec. Spend enough time on the spec. You can get AI to write most of the spec for you, if you provide a good outline. 3. Make sure you have tests from the beginning. This is the most important part. Tests (along with good specs) are how an AI agent can recurse into a good solution. TDD is back. 4. Types help (a lot!). Linters help as well. These are guard rails. 5. Put external documentation inside project docs, for example in docs/external-deps. 6. And finally, like every tool it takes time to figure out a technique that works best for you. It's arguably easier than it was (especially with Claude Code), but there's still stuff to learn. Everyone I know has a slightly different workflow - so it's a bit like coding. I vibe coded quite a lot this week. Among them, Permiso [1] - a super simple GraphQL RBAC server. It's nowhere close to best tested and reviewed, but can be quite useful already if you want something simple (and can wait until it's reviewed.) [1]: https://github.com/codespin-ai/permiso https://github.com/codespin-ai/permiso
  • unshavedyak 1y ago
    > 2. Start with a good spec. Spend enough time on the spec. You can get AI to write most of the spec for you, if you provide a good outline. Curious how you outline the spec, concretely. A sister markdown document? How detailed is it? etc. > 3. Make sure you have tests from the beginning. This is the most important part. Tests (along with good specs) are how an AI agent can recurse into a good solution. TDD is back. Ironically i've been struggling with this. For best results i've found claude to do best with a test hook, but then claude loses the ability to write tests before code works to validate bugs/assumptions, it just starts auto fixing things and can get a bit wonky. It helps immensely to ensure it doesn't forget anything or abandon anything, but it's equally harmful at certain design/prototype stages. I've taken to having a flag where i can enable/disable the test behavior lol.
    • jeswin 1y ago
      > Curious how you outline the spec, concretely. A sister markdown document? How detailed is it? etc. Yes. I write the outline in markdown. And then get AI to flesh it out. The I generate a project structure, with stubbed API signatures. Then I keep refining until I've achieved a good level of detail - including full API signatures and database schemas. > Ironically i've been struggling with this. For best results i've found claude to do best with a test hook, but then claude loses the ability to write tests before code works to validate bugs/assumptions, it just starts auto fixing things and can get a bit wonky. I generate a somewhat basic prototype first. At which point I have a good spec, and a good project structure, API and db schemas. Then continuously refine the tests and code. Like I was saying, types and linting are also very helpful.
• qaq 1y ago
  Another really nice use case building very sophisticated test tooling. Normally a company might not allocate enough resources to a task like that but with Claude Code it's a no brainer. Also can create very sophisticated mocks like say db mock that can parse all queries in the codebase and apply them to in memory fake tables. Would be total pain to build and maintain by hand but with claude code takes literally minutes.
  • airstrike 1y ago
    In my experience LLMs are notoriously bad at tests, so this is, to me, one of the worst use cases possible.
    • qaq 1y ago
      In my experience they are great for test tooling. For actual tests after I have covered a number of cases it's very workable to tell it to identify gaps and edge cases and propose tests than I'd say I accept about 70% of it suggestions.
    • lopatin 1y ago
      While people's experience with LLMs is pretty varied and subjective, saying they're bad at writing tests just isn't true. Claude Code is incredible at writing tests and testing infrastructure.
      • danielbln 1y ago
        It worth mentioning that one should tell CC to not overmock, and to produce only truly relevant tests. I use an agent that I invoke to spot this stuff, because I've run into some truly awful overmocked non-tests before.
    • cpursley 1y ago
      In JS, yes. It stacks with good testing stories, it’s quite good.
  • skydhash 1y ago
• qaq 1y ago
  For me real limit is the amount of code I can read and lucidly understand to spot issues in a given day.
• acedTrex 1y ago
  I try to use claude code a lot, I keep getting very frustrated with how slow it is and how it always does things wrong. It does not feel like its saving my any mental energy on most tasks. I do gravitate towards it for some things. But then I am sometimes burned on doing that and its not pleasent. For example, last week i decided to play with nushell, i have a somewhat simple .zshrc so i just gave it to claude and asked it to convert it to nushell. The nu it generated for the most part was not even valid, i spent 30 mins with it, it never worked. took me about 10 minutes in the docs to convert it. So it's miserable experiences like that that make me want to never touch it, because I might get burned again. There are certainly things that I have found value in, but its so hit or miss that i just find my self not wanting to bother.
  • azuanrb 1y ago
    Have you tried context7 MCP? For things that are not mainstream (like Javascript, Typescript popularity), LLM might struggle. I usually have better result with using something like context7 where it can pull up more relevant, up to date examples.
    • jmtame 1y ago
      I only use 2 MCP servers, and those are context7 and perplexity. For things like updated docs, I have it ask context7. For the more difficult technical tasks where I think it's going to stumble, I'll instruct Claude Code to ask perplexity and that usually resolves it. Or at least it'll surface up to me in our conversation so that we both are learning something new at that point. For some new stuff I'm working on, I use Rails 8. I also use Railway for my host, which isn't as widely-used as a service like Heroku, for example. Rails 8 was just released in November, so there's very little training data available. And it takes time for people to upgrade, gems to catch up, conversations to bubble up, etc. Operating without these two MCP servers usually caused Claude Code to repeatedly stumble over itself on more complex or nuanced tasks. It was good at setting up the initial app, but when I started getting into things like Turbo/Stimulus, and especially for parts of the UI that conditionally show, it really struggled. It's a lot better now - it's not perfect, but it's significantly better than relying solely on its training data or searching the web. I've only used Claude Code for like 4 weeks, but I'm learning a lot. It feels less like I'm an IC doing this work, and my new job is (1) product manager that writes out clear PRDs and works with Claude Code to build it, (2) PR reviewer that looks at the results and provides a lot of guidance, (3) tester. I allocate my time 50%/20%/30% respectively.
• searls 1y ago
  I appreciate that Orta linked to my "Full-breadth Developers" post here, for two reasons: 1. I am vain and having people link to my stuff fills the void in my broken soul 2. He REALLY put in the legwork to document in a concrete way what it looks like for these tools to enable someone to move up a level of abstraction. The iron triangle has always been Quality, Scope, Time. This innovation is such an accelerant that that ambitious programmers can now imagine game-changing increases in scope without sacrificing quality and in the same amount of time. For this particular moment we're in, I think this post will serve as a great artifact of what it felt like.
  • orta 1y ago
    Thanks yeah, your post hit the nail on the head so well I got to delete maybe a third of my notes for this!
• lherron 1y ago
  A few years ago the SRE crowd went through a toil automation phase. SWEs are now gaining the tools to do the same.
• esafak 1y ago
  Coding agents are empowering, but it is not well appreciated that they are setting a new baseline. It will soon not be considered impressive to do all the things that the author did, but expected. And you will not work less but the same hours -- or more, if you don't use agents. Despite this, I think agents are a very welcome new weapon.
  • danielbln 1y ago
    Within agent use skill/experience there will be a spectrum as well. Some that wield them very effectively, others maybe less so.
• lukaslalinsky 1y ago
  I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude Code will try to do and can review it, or stop and redirect it. About 10-15 years ago, I was dreaming about some kind of neural interface, where I could program without writing any code. And I realized that with Claude Code, it's kind of here. A couple of times I hit the daily limits and decided to try Gemini CLI with the 2.5 pro model as a replacement. That's not even comparable to Claude Code. The frustration with Gemini is just not worth it. I couldn't imagine paying >100$/month for a dev tool in the past, but I'm seriously considering upgrading to the Max plans.
  • MarkMarine 1y ago
    Claude code is great until it isn’t. You’re going to get to a point where you need to modify something or add something… a small feature that would have been easy if you wrote everything, and now it’s impossible because the architecture is just a mishmash of vibe coded stuff you don’t understand.
    • lukaslalinsky 1y ago
      How can you end up with code you don't understand, if you review anything it writes? I wouldn't let it deviate from the architecture I want to have for the project. I had problems with junior devs in the past, too eager to change a project, and I couldn't really tell them to stop (need to work on my communication skills). No such problem with Claude Code.
      • tronikel 1y ago
        So youre telling me that reading is the same as writing? In terms of the brain actually consuming and processing the info you gave it and storing it
• lysecret 1y ago
  I have been coding with claude code for about 3 weeks and I love it. I have bout 10yoe and mostly do Python ML / Data Eng. Here are a few reasons: 1. It takes away the pain of starting. I have no barrier to writing text but there is a barrier to writing the first line of code, to a large extend coming form just remembering the context, where to import what from, setting up boilerplate etc. 2. While it works I can use my brain capacity to think about what I'm doing. 3. I can now do multiple things in parallel. 4. It makes it so much easier to "go the extra mile" (I don't add "TODOs" anymore in the code I just spin up a new Claude for it) 5. I can do much more analysis, (like spinnig up detailed plotting / analysis scripts) 6. It fixes most simple linting/typing/simple test bugs for me automatically. Overall I feel like this kind of coding allows me to focus about the essence: What should I be doing? Is the output correct? What can we do to make it better?
  • MattGaiser 1y ago
    > 4. It makes it so much easier to "go the extra mile" (I don't add "TODOs" anymore in the code I just spin up a new Claude for it) This especially. I've never worked at a place that didn't skimp on tests or tech debt due to limited resources. Now you can get a decent test suite just from saying you want it. Will it satisfy purists? No, but lots of mid hanging fruit long left unpicked can now be automatically picked.
    • jaggederest 1y ago
      I've actually gone through and tried to refactor the tests Claude writes (when I ask it to only touch test files). I can't improve them, generally speaking. Often they're limited by architectural or code style choices in the main code. And there are minor stylistic things here or there. But the bulk of it, is that you get absolutely top tier tests for the same level of effort as a half-assed attempt. If you set it up with good test quality tools (mutation testing is my favorite) it goes even further - beyond what I think is actually reasonable to ask a human to test unless you're e.g. writing life and safety critical systems.
  • scrollaway 1y ago
    Taking the pain of starting is a big one. It lets me do things I would never have done just because it’d go on the “if only I had time” wish list. Now literally between prompts, I had a silly idea to write a NYT Connections game in the terminal and three prompts later it was done: https://github.com/jleclanche/connections-tui https://github.com/jleclanche/connections-tui
• alfiedotwtf 1y ago
  “Trust, but verify” AI, but refactor
  • orta 1y ago
    This is an excellent insight
• buffer1337 1y ago
  I've been using Claude code 12-16 hours a day since I first got it running two weeks ago. Here's the tips I've discovered: 1. Immediately change to sonnet (the cli defaults to opus for max users). I tested coding with opus extensively and it never matches the quality of sonnet. 2. Compacting often ends progress - it's difficult to get back to the same quality of code after compacting. 3. First prompt is very important and sets the vibe. If your instance of Claude seems hesitant, doubtful, sometimes even rude, it's always better to end the session and start again. 4. There are phrases that make it more effective. Try, "I'm so sorry if this is a bad suggestion, but I want to implement x and y." For whatever reason it makes Claude more eager to help. 5. Monolithic with docker orchestration: I essentially 10x'd when I started letting Claude itself manage docker containers, check their logs for errors, rm them, rebuild them, etc. Now I can get an entirely new service online in a docker container, from zero to operational, in one Claude prompt.
  • nkzd 1y ago
    How are you using Claude Code 16 hours a day?
  • j45 1y ago
    Letting Claude manage docker has been really good. I’m working my way through building a guide to my future self for packaging up existing products in case I forget in 6 months. At the same time frontier models may improve it, make it worse, or it stays the same, and what I’m after is consistency.
  • achierius 1y ago
    > 5. Monolithic with docker orchestration: I essentially 10x'd when I started letting Claude itself manage docker containers, check their logs for errors, rm them, rebuild them, etc. Now I can get an entirely new service online in a docker container, from zero to operational, in one Claude prompt. This is very interesting. What's your setup, and what kind of prompt might you use to get Claude to work well with Docker? Do you do anything to try and isolate the Claude instance from the rest of your machine (i.e. run these Docker instances inside of a VM) or just YOLO?
• arrowsmith 1y ago
  The real power of Claude Code comes when you realise it can do far more than just write code. It can, in fact, control your entire computer. If there's a CLI tool, Claude can run it. If there's not a CLI tool... ask Claude anyway, you might be surprised. E.g. I've used Claude to crop and resize images, rip MP3s from YouTube videos, trim silence from audio files, the list goes on. It saves me incredible amounts of time. I don't remember life before it. Never going back.
  • danielbln 1y ago
    It's the automators dream come true. Anything can be automated, anything scripted, anything documented. Even if we're gonna use other (possibly local) models in the future, this will be my interface of choice. It's so powerful.
    • arrowsmith 1y ago
      Yes, Claude has killed XKCD 1319: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/ Automation is now trivially easy. I think of another new way to speed up my workflow — e.g. a shell script for some annoying repetitive task — and Claude oneshots it. Productivity gains built from productivity gains.
      • tiahura 1y ago
        Combine with pywin32 to open up windows.
      • ta555555 1y ago
        It hasn't killed anything. Might have reduced the time for some tasks. Try something not trivial and you still spend more than you save.
        • arrowsmith 1y ago
          [flagged]
      • 1y ago
• wjnc 1y ago
  Over the holidays I built a plan for an app that would be worthwhile to my children, oldest son first. That plan developed to several thousand words of planning documents (MVP, technical stack, layout). That was just me lying in the sun with Claude on mobile. Today I (not a programmer, although programming for 20+ years, but mostly statistics) started building with Claude Code via Pro. Burned through my credits in about 3 hours. Got to MVP (happy tear in my eye). Actually one of the best looks I've ever gotten from my son. A look like, wow, dad, that's more than I'd ever think you could manage. Tips: - Plan ahead! I've had Claude tell me that a request would fit better way back on the roadmap. My roadmap manages me. - Force Claude to build a test suite and give debugging info everywhere (backend, frontend). - Claude and me work together on a clear TODO. He needs guidance as well as I do. It forgot a very central feature of my MVP. Do not yet know why. Asked kindly and it was built. Questions (not specifically to you kind HN-folks, although tips are welcome): - Why did I burn through my credits in 3 hours? - How can I force Claude to keep committed to my plans, my CLAUDE.md, etc. - Is there a way to ask Claude to check the entire project for consistency? And/Or should I accept that vibing will leave crusts spread around?
  • isoprophlex 1y ago
    Burning through your credits is normal. We're in the "lmao free money"/"corner the market" phase, where anthropic offers claude code at a loss. Recently they had to lower token allowances because they're haemorrhaging money. You can run "ccusage" in the background to keep tabs, so you're leas surprised, is all I can say. Enjoy the cheap inference while you can, unless someone cracks the efficiency puzzle the frontier models might get a lot more expensive at one point.
    • cflewis 1y ago
      Yeah, not going to lie, working at Google and having unlimited access to Gemini sure is nice (even if it has performance issues vs Claude Code… I can’t say as I can’t use it at work)
  • ako 1y ago
    I'm on a pro plan, also run into limits within 2 hours, then have to wait until the limits of the 5 hour window reset (next reset is in 1 hour 40 minutes at 2am)... You can just ask claude to review your code, write down standard, verify that code is produced according to standards and guidelines. And if it finds that project is not consistent, ask it to make a plan and execute on the plan. Ask, ask, ask.
• floppyd 1y ago
  Anybody had similarly good experience with Gemini CLI? I'm only a hobbyist coder, so paying for Claude feels silly when Gemini is free (at least for now), but so far I've only used it inside Cline-like extensions
  • base698 1y ago
    I’ve used both. Claude more extensively. I’ve had good results with Gemini too, however it seems easier to get stuck in a loop. Happens with Claude too but not quite as frequent. By loop I mean you tell it no don’t implement this service, look at this file instead and mimic that and instead it does what it did before.
    • yencabulator 1y ago
      I regularly have Claude Code in a loop where it can't figure out Typescript types and uses unsafe `as` kludges, even when CLAUDE.md tells it not to. A couple of prompts later, if it encounters any error in that same region, it again rips out the typesafe code and replaces it with an `as`. My observation has been this: if you push a(/any) current-day LLM too close to the edge of its abilities, it goes "insane". Hallucinations start happening everywhere, it stops ignoring previous knowledge, etc. The best way out is to end the session, maybe do some manual work to get to a good state, perhaps update the specs, and start with a fresh context. Using "strong words" or prompting more is of no consequence, the LLM will produce essentially gibberish until reset. Sometimes using a more expensive model temporarily gets around whatever is triggering the stupidity.
• chaosprint 1y ago
  can anyone compare it with cursor?
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  I think it's possible Claude Code might be the most transformative piece of software since ChatGPT. It's a step towards an AI agent that can actually _act_ at a fundamental level - with any command that can be found on a computer - in a way that's beyond the sandboxed ChatGPT or even just driving a browser.
• fdsf111 1y ago
  I recently tried a 7-day trial version of Claude Code. I had 3 distinct experiences with it: one obviously positive, one bad, and one neutral-but-trending-positive. The bad experience was asking it to produce a relatively non-trivial feature in an existing Python module. I have a bunch of classes for writing PDF files. Each class corresponds to a page template in a document (TitlePage, StatisticsPage, etc). Under the hood these classes use functions like `draw_title(x, y, title)` or `draw_table(x, y, data)`. One of these tables needed to be split across multiple pages if the number of rows exceeded the page space. So I needed Claude Code to do some sort of recursive top-level driver that would add new pages to a document until it exhausted the input data. I spent about an hour coaching Claude through the feature, and in the end it produced something that looked superficially correct, but didn't compile. After spending some time debugging, I moved on and wrote the thing by hand. This feature was not trivial even for me to implement, and it took about 2 days. It broke the existing pattern in the module. The module was designed with the idea that `one data container = one page`, so splitting data across multiple pages was a new pattern the rest of the module needed to be adapted to. I think that's why Claud did not do well. +++ The obviously good experience with Claude was getting it to add new tests to a well-structured suite of integration tests. Adding tests to this module is a boring chore, because most of the effort goes into setting up the input data. The pattern in the test suite is something like this: IntegrationTestParent class that contains all the test logic, and a bunch of IntegrationTestA/B/C/D that do data set up, and then call the parent's test method. Claude knocked this one out of the park. There was a clear pattern to follow, and it produced code that was perfect. It saved me 1 or 2 hours, but the cool part was that it was doing this in its own terminal window, while I worked on something else. This is a type of simple task I'd give to new engineers to expose them to existing patterns. +++ The last experience was asking it to write a small CLI tool from scratch in a language I don't know. The tool worked like this: you point it at a directory, and it then checks that there are 5 or 6 files in that directory, and that the files are named a certain way, and are formatted a certain way. If the files are missing or not formatted correctly, throw an error. The tool was for another team to use, so they could check these files, before they tried forwarding these files to me. So I needed an executable binary that I could throw up onto Dropbox or something, that the other team could just download and use. I primarily code in Python/JavaScript, and making a shareable tool like that with an interpreted language is a pain. So I had Claude whip something up in Golang. It took about 2 hours, and the tool worked as advertised. Claude was very helpful. On the one hand, this was a clear win for Claude. On the other hand, I didn't learn anything. I want to learn Go, and I can't say that I learned any Go from the experience. Next time I have to code a tool like that, I think I'll just write it from scratch myself, so I learn something. +++ Eh. I've been using "AI" tools since they came out. I was the first at my company to get the pre-LLM Copilot autocomplete, and when ChatGPT became available I became a heavy user overnight. I have tried out Cursor (hate the VSCode nature of it), and I tried out the re-branded Copilot. Now I have tried Claude Code. I am not an "AI" skeptic, but I still don't get the foaming hype. I feel like these tools at best make me 1.5X -- which is a lot, so I will always stay on top of new tooling -- but I don't feel like I am about to be replaced.
• mr_tox 1y ago
  I don't know if it's something only I "perceive," but as a 50-year-old who started learning to use computers from the command line, using Claude Code's CLI mode gives me a unique sense of satisfaction.
• hollowturtle 1y ago
  > Painting by hand just doesn’t have the same appeal anymore when a single concept can just appear and you shape it into the thing you want with your code review and editing skills. In the meanwhile one the most anticipated game in the industry, a second chapter of an already acclaimed product, has its art totally hand painted
  • ryankrage77 1y ago
    I think it's two schools of thought, end product vs process. It seems a lot of people who like AI only care about getting the end product, and don't care how it was made. On the other hand, some people are invested in how something is made, and see the process of creation and refinement as a part of the end product itself.
    • hollowturtle 1y ago
      People are not invested in how something is made imo, it's just better and beautiful and connects better with them. I agree though that AI entusiast only care about getting stuff done, but I won't call it an "end-product"
• lbrito 1y ago
  It's less that I'm a skeptic, but more that I'm finding I intensely abhor the world we're building for ourselves with these tools (which I admittedly use a lot).
  • M4v3R 1y ago
    Why abhor specifically?
    • globular-toast 1y ago
      Not the GP but we're descending into a world where we just recycle the same "content" over and over. Nothing will be special, there'll be nothing to be proud of. Just constant dopamine hits administered by our overlords. Read Brave New World if you haven't.
      • andybak 1y ago
        > Read Brave New World if you haven't. I have and I don't see the connection with AI-assisted coding. If your comment was about "generative AI in general" then I think this is the problem with trying to discuss AI on the internet at the moment. It quickly turns into "defend all aspects of AI or else you've lost". I can't predict all aspects of AI. I don't like all aspects of AI and I can't weigh up the pros and cons of a vast number of distinct topics all at once. (and neither, I suspect, can anyone else)
    • lbrito 1y ago
      The answer can and certainly will fill many books, dissertations, PhD thesis etc. Without going too philosophical, although one is not unjustified in going there, and just focusing on my own small professional corner (software engineering): these llm developments mostly kill an important part of thinking and might ultimately make me dumber. For example, I know what a B tree is and can (could) painstakingly implement one when and if I needed to, the process of which would be long, full of mistakes and learning. Now, just having a rough idea will be enough, and most people will never get the chance to do it themselves. Now B-tree is an intentionally artificial example, but you can extrapolate that to more practical or realistic examples. On a more immediate front, there's also the matter of threat to my livelihood. I have significant expenses for the foreseeable future, and if my line of work gets a 100 or even 10x average productivity boost, there just might be less jobs going around. Farm ox watching the first internal combustion tractors. I can think of many other reasons, but those are the most pressing and personal to me.
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  So far what I've noticed with Claude Code is not _productivity gains_ but _gains in my thoughtfulness_ As in the former is hyped, but the latter - stopping to ask questions, reflect, what should we do - is really powerful. I find I'm more thoughtful, doing deeper research, and asking deeper questions than if I was just hacking something together on the weekend that I regretted later.
  • cflewis 1y ago
    Agreed. The most unique thing I find with vibecoding is not that it presses all the keyboard buttons. That’s a big timesaver, but it’s not going to make your code “better” as it has no taste. But what it can do is think of far more possibilities than you can far quicker. I love saying “this is what I need to do, show me three to five ways of doing it as snippets, weigh the pros and cons”. Then you pick one and let it go. No more trying the first thing you think of, realizing it sucks after you wrote it, then back to square one. I use this with legacy code too. “Lines n—n+10 smell wrong to me, but I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do to fix it.” Gemini has done well for me at guessing what my gut was upset about and coming up with the solution. And then it just presses all the buttons. Job done.
• blackqueeriroh 1y ago
  I have nearly 20 years of experience in technology, and have been writing toy scripts or baby automations for most of my career. I started out in a managed services help desk and took that route many folks take across and around the different IT disciplines. I mostly spend my days administering SaaS tools, and one of my largest frustrations has always been that I didn’t know enough to really build a good plugin or add-on for whatever tool I was struggling with, and I’d find a limited set of good documentation or open source examples to help me out. With my limited time (full time job) and attendant challenges (ADHD & autism + all the fun trauma that comes from that along with being Black, fat and queer), I struggled to ever start anything out of fear of failure or I’d begin a course and get bored because I wasn’t doing anything that captured my imagination & motivation. Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and even the Claude app have absolutely changed the game for me. I’m learning more than ever, because even the shitty code that these tools can write is an opportunity for debugging and exploration, but I have something tangible to iterate on. Additionally, I’ve found that Claude is really good at giving me lessons and learning based on an idea I have, and then I have targeted learning I can go do using source docs and tutorials that are immediately relevant to what I’m doing instead of being faced with choice paralysis. Being able to build broken stuff in seconds that I want to get working (a present problem is so much more satisfying than a future one) and having a tool that knows more than I do about code most of the time but never gets bored of my silly questions or weird metaphors has been so helpful in helping me build my own tools. Now I think about building my own stuff first before I think about buying something!
  • mrmincent 1y ago
    ADHD here, and Claude code has been a game changer for me as well. I don’t get sidetracked going lost in documentation loops, suffer decision paralysis, or forget what I’m currently doing or what I need to do next. It’s almost like I’m body doubling with Claude code.
    • AndyNemmity 1y ago
      well said. I'm actually getting better at coding oddly enough because i'm reading so much more code.
• epolanski 1y ago
  At this point I am 99% convinced that AI coding skeptics are nothing short of Luddites. They would be like "but a robot will never ever clean a house as well as I would", well, no shit, but they can still do the overwhelming majority of the work very well (or at least as good as you instruct them to) and leave you with details and orchestration.
  • joks 1y ago
    If you get as much enjoyment out of problem-solving and programming as you do doing household chores, I'm not sure why you went into this career. I agree that the folks who are 100% anti-using-it-ever are overreacting, but IME replacing the overwhelming majority of the work with vibe-coding is both mind-numbing from a developer perspective and doesn't actually get you better results (or faster results, unless you're basically cowboy coding with no regard for thoroughly ensuring correctness)
    • epolanski 1y ago
      Vibe coding is when you don't check the output. Instructing Claude Code to handle a circular dependency edge case in your code and write tests for it, while reviewing the work definitely does not quality as vibe coding.
  • rhubarbtree 1y ago
    Genuinely not yet convinced. The CEO of windsurf said the goal for the next year was to get agentic coding to the reliability and maturity that it can be used in production for mature codebases. That rhymes true. I use autocomplete and chat with LLMs as a substitute for stack overflow. They’re great for that. Beyond that, myself and colleagues have found AI agents are not yet ready for serious work. I want them to be, I really do. But more than that I want our software to be reliable, our code to be robust and understandable, and I don’t want to worry about whether we are painting ourselves into a corner. We build serious software infrastructure that supports other companies’ software and our biggest headache is supporting code that we built earlier this year using AI. It’s poorly written, full of bugs including problems very hard to spot from the code, and is just incomprehensible for the most part. Other companies I know are vibe coding, and making great progress, but their software is CRUD SaaS and worst case they could start over. We do not have that luxury.
• polishdude20 1y ago
  Does anyone have advice on how to hire developers who can utilize AI coding tools effectively?
  • ratg13 1y ago
    first you have to decide if you want juniors that are able to push tasks through and be guided by a senior, as the juniors won't understand what they are doing or why the AI is telling them to do it "wrong". senior developers already know how to use AI tools effectively, and are often just as fast as AI, so they only get the benefits out of scaffolding. really everything comes down to planning, and your success isn't going to come down to people using AI tools, it will come down to the people guiding the process, namely project managers, designers, and the architects and senior developers that will help realize the vision. juniors that can push tasks to completion can only be valuable if they have proper guidance, otherwise you'll just be making spaghetti.
  • jmtame 1y ago
    I've thought about this lately. In order to do that, you need to know where people typically stumble, and then create a rubric around that. Here are some things I'd look for: - Ability to clearly define requirements up front (the equivalent mistake in coding interviews is to start by coding, rather than asking questions and understanding the problem + solution 100% before writing a single line of code). This might be the majority of the interview. - Ability to anticipate where the LLM will make mistakes. See if they use perplexity/context7 for example. Relying solely on the LLM's training data is a mistake. - A familiarity with how to parallelize work and when that's useful vs not. Do they understand how to use something like worktrees, multiple repos, or docker to split up the work? - Uses tests (including end-to-end and visual testing) - Can they actually deliver a working feature/product within a reasonable amount of time? - Is the final result looking like AI slop, or is it actually performant, maintainable (by both humans and new context windows), well-designed, and follows best practices? - Are they able to work effectively within a large codebase? (this depends on what stage you're in; if you're a larger company, this is important, but if you're a startup, you probably want the 0->1 type of interview) - What sort of tools are they using? I'd give more weight if someone was using Claude Code, because that's just the best tool for the job. And if they're just doing the trendy thing like using Claude Agents, I'd subtract points. - How efficient did they use the AI? Did they just churn through tokens? Did they use the right model given the task complexity?
• socalgal2 1y ago
  I wish I got this level of productivity. I think every article should list exactly what they asked the LLM to do because I'm not getting as much use from it and I don't know if it's because what I work on is rare compared to say website front and backend code and/or if I just suck at prompts/context or I'm using the wrong services or don't have the correct MCPs etc....
  • elliotec 1y ago
    Is it possible to view the prompt history? I’ve had extreme levels of productivity and would love to list out how I’ve been using it generally for an article like this but it would be incredibly impractical to log it on the side.
    • globular-toast 1y ago
      Just show the code you've produced.
      • jaggederest 1y ago
        Right but that's like showing the compiled binary but not the source. With claude code prompt and config is everything.
        • globular-toast 1y ago
          This is the saddest part of this whole thing for me. You consider the prompts and config to be the real source code, but those are just completely lost into the ether. Even if you saved the prompts you can't reproduce their effects. Then there's the question of how do other developers contribute to the code. They don't have your prompts, they just have the code. So, no, prompts are not source code, that's why I ask for people to just show the code they are producing and nobody ever does.
          • jaggederest 1y ago
            I have repos on github. I show the code. I also make my design documents (roughly the prompts generated by the prompts) into committed markdown documents. So I show the second-tier prompts at least, you could consider those an intermediate language representation if you like. > Then there's the question of how do other developers contribute to the code. They don't have your prompts, they just have the code. I usually try to commit the initial prompts and adjustments. I don't commit trivial things like "That's not quite right, try doing X again" or "Just run the entire test suite" > So, no, prompts are not source code Hard disagree, but that's fine.
• nrclark 1y ago
  Does Claude Code use a different model then Claude.ai? Because Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 routinely get things wrong for me. Both of them have sent me on wild goose chases, where they confidently claimed "X is happening" about my code but were 100% wrong. They also hallucinated APIs, and just got a lot of details wrong in general. The problem-space I was exploring was libusb and Python, and I used ChatGPT and also Claude.ai to help debug some issues and flesh out some skeleton code. Claude's output was almost universally wrong. ChatGPT got a few things wrong, but was in general a lot closer to the truth. AI might be coming for our jobs eventually, but it won't be Claude.ai.
  • strange_quark 1y ago
    Pretty sure it’s the same model. The reason that claude code is “good” is because it can run tests, compile the code, run a linter, etc. If you actually pay attention to what it’s doing, at least in my experience, it constantly fucks up, but can sort of correct itself by taking feedback from outside tools. Eventually it proclaims “Perfect!” (which annoys me to no end), and spits out code that at least looks like it satisfies what you asked for. Then if you just ignore the tests that mock all the useful behaviors out, the amateur hour mistakes in data access patterns, and the security vulnerabilities, it’s amazing!
    • AndyNemmity 1y ago
      You're right, but you can actually improve it pretty dramatically with sub agents. Once you get into a groove with sub agents, it really makes a big difference.
    • yencabulator 1y ago
      > Eventually it proclaims “Perfect!” (which annoys me to no end), This has done wonders for me: # User interaction - Avoid sycophancy. - Do what has been asked; nothing more, nothing less. - If you are asked to make a change, summarize the change but do not explain its benefits. - Be concise in phrasing but not to the point of omission.
• deadbabe 1y ago
  For me, the most compelling use of LLMs is to one shot scripts, small functions, unit tests, etc. I don’t understand how people have the patience to do an entire application just vibe coding the whole time. As the article suggests, it doesn’t even save that much time. If it can’t be done in one shot with simple context I don’t want it.
  • joks 1y ago
    I did a company hackathon recently where we were encouraged to explore vibe coding more and this was essentially my take-away too. It's kinda perfect for a hackathon but it was insanely mind-numbing to relegate the problem solving and mental model-building to the LLM and sit there writing prompts all day. If that has to become my career, I genuinely might have to change career paths, but it doesn't seem like that's likely -- using it as a tool to help here and there and sometimes provide suggestions definitely feels like way to actually use it to get better results.
• globular-toast 1y ago
  I've used it a bit. I've done some very useful stuff, and I've given up with other stuff and just done it manually. What it excels at is translation. This is what LLMs were originally designed for after all. It could be between programming languages, like "translate this helm chart into a controller in Go". It will happily spit out all the structs and basic reconciliation logic. Gets some wrong but even after correcting those bits still saves so much time. And of course writing precise specs in English, it will translate them to code. Whether this really saves time I'm not so convinced. I still have to type those specs in English, but now what I'm typing is lost and what I get is not my own words. Of course it's good at generating boilerplate, but I never wrote much boilerplate by hand anyway. I've found it's quite over eager to generate swathes of code when you wanted to go step by step and write tests for each new bit. It doesn't really "get" test-driven development and just wants to write untested code. Overall I think it's without doubt amazing. But then so is a clown at a children's birthday party. Have you seen those balloon animals?! I think it's useful to remain sceptical and not be amazed by something just because you can't do it. Amazing doesn't mean useful. I worry a lot about what's happening in our industry. Already developers get away with incredibly shoddy practices. In other industries such practices would get you struck off, licences stripped, or even sent to prison. Now we have to contend with juniors and people who don't even understand programming generating software that runs. I can really see LLMs becoming outlawed in software development for software that matters, like medical equipment or anything that puts the public in danger. But maybe I'm being overly optimistic. I think generally people understand the dangers of an electrician mislabelling a fusebox or something, but don't understand the dangers of shoddy software.
  • andrekandre 1y ago
    > people understand the dangers of an electrician mislabelling a fusebox or something, but don't understand the dangers of shoddy software i mean, most software is covered by those big all-caps NO WARRANTY ASSUMED OR IMPLIED / USE AT YOUR OWN RISK if there was legal recourse for most software issues you can bet the current frenzy around ai-agentic coding would be much more carefully done i think like many things, laws wont appear until a major disaster happens (or you get a president on your side *) * https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/president-theodore-roosevelt-and-the-pure-food-and-drug-act/ https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/president-theodore-roose...
• rmoriz 1y ago
  I was very, very skeptic. Then a couple of weeks ago I started with Atlassian's Rovo Dev CLI (Sonnet 4) and immediately managed to build and finish a couple of projects. I learned a lot and for sure having experience, decide on stack an architecture is a huge benefit for "guiding" an agentic coding app. I'm not sure if anyone can build and maintain a project without having at least some skills, but If you are an experienced developer, this is kind of magic. I also appreciate the common best practice to write a requirements document in Markdown before letting the agent start. AWS' kiro.dev is really nice in separating the planning stage from the execution stage but you can use almost any "chatbot" even ChatGPT for that stage. If you suffer from ADHD or lose focus easily, this is key. Even if you decide to finish some steps manually. It doesn't really matter if you use Claude Code (with Claude LLM), Rovo Dev CLI, Kiro, Opencode, gemini-cli, whatever. Pick the ones that offer daily free tokens and try it out. And no, they will almost never complete without any error. But just copy+paste the error to the prompt or ask some nasty questions ("Did you really implement deduplication and caching?") and usually the agent magically sees the issues and starts to fix it.
• Eggpants 1y ago
  Ah yet another attempt to push the “$200/month is a bargain!!!” narrative. Sad. I get it. No one is really making any money yet, including openAI. As the VC money dries up this is only going to get worse. Like ads in responses worse. this_variable_name_is_sponsored_by_coinbase bad. Which these vibe chuckleheads will claim is no big deal because only losers read code.
  • baal80spam 1y ago
    > Ah yet another attempt to push the “$200/month is a bargain!!!” narrative. Well - compared to a real developer (even junior one), it's peanuts.
• trjordan 1y ago
  I think the most interesting change Claude enables is letting AI try stuff. We do this all the time. I have this sense this works best in small teams right now, because Claude wants to produce code changes and PRs. Puzzmo, where OP works, is <5 engineers. In larger codebases, PRs don't feel like the right medium in every case for provocative AI explorations. If you're going to kick something off before a meeting and see what it might look like to solve it, it might be better to get back a plan, or a pile of regexps, or a list of teams that will care. Having an AI produce a detailed plan for larger efforts, based on an idea, seems amazing.
• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  Claude Code blows everything else out of the water for me. Which makes me certain I have a blind spot. Has anyone who’s gone decent at Clauding had matching success with other tools?
  • ryuuseijin 1y ago
    I've switched to opencode. I use it with Sonnet for targeted refactoring tasks and Gemini to do things that touch a lot of files, which otherwise can get expensive quickly.
• zmmmmm 1y ago
  I'm most interested in how well these tools can tackle complex legacy systems. We have tonnes of code that's been built over a decade with all kinds of idioms and stylistic conventions that are enforced primarily through manual review. This relates in part to working in a regulated environment where we know certain types of things need radical transparency and auditability, so writing code the "normal" way a developer would is problematic. So I am curious how well it can see the existing code style and then implicitly emulate that? My current testing of other tools seems to suggest they don't handle it very well; typically I am getting code that looks very foreign to the existing code. It exhibits the true "regression to the mean" spirit of LLMs where it's providing me with "how would the average competent engineer write this", which is not at all how we need the code written. Currently, this is the main barrier to us using these tools in our codebase.
  • SatvikBeri 1y ago
    I've had a lot of luck with Claude on my 8 year old, multi-language codebase. But I do have to babysit it and provide a lot of context. I created some tutorial files which contain ways to do a lot of standard things. Turns out humans found these useful too. With the examples, I've found Opus generally does a good job following existing idioms, while Sonnet struggles.
  • anonu 1y ago
    Ultimately it depends on how many examples in that language showed up on stackoverflow or in public GitHub repos. Otherwise, ymmv if it's not python, c++, rust or JavaScript
  • felipeerias 1y ago
    You need to provide agentic tools with enough context about the project so they can find their way around. In Claude Code this is typically done via a CLAUDE.md document at the root of the codebase. I work on Chromium and my experience improved immensely by using a detailed context document (~3,000 words) with all sorts of relevant information, from the software architecture and folder organisation to the C++ coding style. (The first draft of that document was created by Claude itself from the project documentation.)
• jadbox 1y ago
  Good article, but fwiw, I think GraphQL is a bane for web dev for 90% of projects. It overcomplicates, bloats, and doesn't add anything over regular OpenAPI specs for what is usually just CRUD resource operations.
  • sibeliuss 1y ago
    You either get it, or you don't! But if you do...
• gronglo 1y ago
  I get downvoted every time I praise Claude. But everyone in this thread is getting upvoted for saying the same things. Can someone explain to me the difference?
  • mkbelieve 1y ago
    The Internet is fickle and full of dullards. It's always a toss of the dice.
  • nerevarthelame 1y ago
    You're replying to people who had negative experiences with LLMs and posted their nuanced criticisms with: "OK but have you tried Claude 4??" It's not helpful or justified within those conversations.
    • gronglo 1y ago
      I guess I figured that, if someone told me they were scared of dying, and I happened to possess the secret to immortality, it would be worthwhile to share it with them.
  • AndyNemmity 1y ago
    Yeah, you're in a thread of people who actually use it.
• cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  Love that these folks are enhancing team productivity - not just individual - making it easier to do prototypes. When more ideas make it further you get more shots on goal. You are almost certain to have more hits!
• afro88 1y ago
  Being able to do big refactors quickly in the moment really helps in a solo dev environment, but in a team it puts a lot of review (and QA) burden on them. It makes me wonder if we're moving towards a teams model where individuals own different parts of the system, rather than everyone reviewing each others code and working together
• calrain 1y ago
  Lets stop calling it Vibe Coding. I'm a heavy user of Claude Code and I use it like a coding assistant. How well you can manage a development team in real life has strong correlations on how much value you get out of an LLM based coding assistant. If you can't describe what success looks like, expect people to read your mind, and get angry at validating questions, then you will have problems both with coding assistants and leading teams of developers.
  • AndyNemmity 1y ago
    Well said. The skills involved are actually quite a bit different than coding. It's about how clearly and accurately you can describe things. how good you are at understanding what tooling you need to build to improve your experience. It's a different skillset.
    • hansvm 1y ago
      I don't think that's true with current-gen models. You can even go so far as to write pseudocode for the LLM to translate to a real language, and for anything out-of-the-box my experience is that it will blatantly ignore your instructions. A baseline-competent junior at least has the context to know that if there are 5 steps listed and they only did 3 then there's probably a problem. Prompting an LLM is definitely a different skillset from actually coding, but just "describing it better" isn't good enough.
      • AndyNemmity 1y ago
        I don't believe it is good enough, it's also not as relevant. my prompts have gotten less and less. It's the hooks and subagents, and using the tools that matter far more. This is a thread about claude code. the other LLms don't matter. Nothing ever blatantly ignores my instructions in claude code. that's a thing of the past. Of course, not using claude code, for sure. But all my instructions are followed with my setup. That really isn't an issue for me personally anymore.
        • 1y ago
• philbo 1y ago
  As one of the curious minority who keeps trying agentic coding but not liking it, I've been looking for explanations why my experience differs from the mainstream. I think it might lie in this nugget: > I believe with Claude Code, we are at the > “introduction of photography” period of > programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t > have the same appeal anymore when a single > concept can just appear and you shape it > into the thing you want with your code review > and editing skills. The comparison seems apt and yet, still people paint, still people pay for paintings, still people paint for fun. I like coding by hand. I dislike reviewing code (although I do it, of course). Given the choice, I'll opt for the former (and perhaps that's why I'm still an IC). When people talk about coding agents as very enthusiastic but very junior engineering interns, it fills me with dread rather than joy.
  • samgutentag 1y ago
    I totally get this side of things. I see the benefits of Agentic coding for small tasks, minor fixes, or first drafts. That said, I don't understand the pseudo-tribalism around specific interfaces to what amounts to only a few models under the hood and worry about what its doing for (or not doing for) junior devs. Also, if we could get AI tooling to do the reviews for us reliably, I'd be a much happier developer.
  • boredhedgehog 1y ago
    > still people paint, still people pay for paintings But in what environment? It seems to me that most of the crafts that have been replaced by the assembly line are practiced not so much for the product itself, but for an experience both the creator and the consumer can participate in, at least in their imagination. You don't just order such artifacts on Amazon anonymously; you establish some sort of relationship with the artisan and his creative process. You become part of a narrative. Coding is going to need something similar if it wants to live in that niche.
    • philbo 1y ago
      I don't disagree with any of that. But as long as there are companies willing to pay me to write code the old-fashioned way, I'll keep doing it.
• lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  Seriously over engineered system. Unnecessary complexity everywhere. Illusion of progress.
• AtNightWeCode 1y ago
  The problem for me is to predict what AI might get wrong. Claude can solve hard coding problems one day just to fail with basic stuff like thread safety the next. But overall I think it is clear that we reached the point where AI, if used correctly, saves a lot of development time.
• dt3ft 1y ago
  The question is, can I fire 80 out of 100 engineers and purchase Claude Code subscription instead?
  • itsalotoffun 1y ago
    People really aren't going to like this, but OP is directionally correct. At 100 dev shop size you're likely to have plenty of junior and middling devs, for whom tools like CC will act as a net negative in the short-mid term (mostly by slowing down your top devs who have to shovel the shit that CC pushes out at pace and that junior/mids can't or don't catch). Your top devs (likely somewhere around 1/5 of your workforce) will deliver 80% of the benefit of something like CC. We're not hiring junior or even early-mid devs since around Mar/Apr. These days they cost $200/mo + $X in API spend. There's a shift in the mind-work of how "dev" is being approached. It's.. alarming, but it's happening.
• linuxhansl 1y ago
  It seems to be great at writing tests, spitting out UI code, and many other things where there are many examples around. Among other things I work on database optimizers and there Claude fails spectacularly. It produces wrong code, fails to find the right places where to hook up an abstraction, overlooks affects on other parts of the code, and generally confidently proposes changes that simply do not work at all (to put it mildly). Your mileage may vary... It seems to be depend heavily on the amount of existing (open) code around.
• d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
  Agreed. CC lets you attempt things that you wouldn’t have dared to try. For example here are two things I recently added to the Langroid LLM agent framework with CC help: Nice collapsible HTML logs of agent conversations (inspired by Mario Zechner’s Claude-trace), which took a couple hours of iterations, involving HTML/js/CSS: https://langroid.github.io/langroid/notes/html-logger/ https://langroid.github.io/langroid/notes/html-logger/ A migration from Pydantic-v1 to v2, which took around 7 hours of iterations (would have taken a week at least if I even tried it manually and still probably wouldn’t have been as bullet-proof): https://github.com/langroid/langroid/releases/tag/0.59.0-b3 https://github.com/langroid/langroid/releases/tag/0.59.0-b3
• amadeuspagel 1y ago
  Using two different VS code profiles is an interesting idea beyond AI. I get confused every time I have different projects open because code always looks the same. Maybe it would make sense to have a different theme for every project.
• actinium226 1y ago
  I see a lot of comments here gushing about CC but I've used and I really don't get it. I find that it takes me just as long to explain to it what I need done as it takes to just do the work myself.
  • glitchc 1y ago
    What's happening is that we are being bombarded by marketing on all fronts. These gushing statements are no different from the testimonials and advertorials from the days of yore.
    • scrollaway 1y ago
      It’s absolute lunacy to think everyone lauding Claude code is paid marketing/shilling. What’s actually happening is there’s a divide being created between engineers that know how to use it, and engineers that don’t or want to convince themselves that it’s useless or whatever. Group 2 will not fare well in the coming months.
      • a5c11 1y ago
        There is also a group of engineers who like to... engineer stuff? I really do enjoy writing codes by myself, it gives me dopamine. The reason I've learnt talking to machines is that I don't like talking to people, so I don't fancy talking to machines like they were human beings.
        • cheschire 1y ago
          If you don't see how that fits into "group 2" in GP's comment even though it wasn't explicitly called out, then we may have identifed why you don't find agentic coding to be enjoyable.
          • a5c11 1y ago
            That's true, I really don't enjoy expressing my ideas in natural language because I already see them as code in my head. So, what's the point of translating the code in my head to human language to produce the code? I can just write the code, lol. Vim shortcuts + two-hands typing and you are fast enough.
• ktzar 1y ago
  Tried it a few times, and I feel I'm paying to become a worse developer for a maybe 30% speed increase in total.
• brentm 1y ago
  To me it feels like we're in the VC subsidized days for tools like Claude Code. Given how expensive we know GPU usage is and that it's not likely to come down, and these companies will need to eventually be profitable, I wonder if we're all heading for a point where ultimately Claude Code and the like will be like $2K per month instead of $200 on the high end.
• sc077y 1y ago
  Every time you use these tools irresponsibly, for instance for what I like to call headless programming (vibe coding), understand that you are incurring tech debt. Not just in terms of your project but personal debt regarding what you SHOULD have learned in order to implement the solution. It’s like using ChatGPT in high school: it can be a phenomenal tutor, or it can do everything for you and leave you worse off. The general lesson from this is that Results ARE NOT everything.
• objektif 1y ago
  Anyone has bet practices or guidelines for how to get most out of Claude Code?
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• vaenaes 1y ago
  Damn, I thought the functional programming era of HN was insufferable, I had no idea how bad it was going to get.
  • andybak 1y ago
    Genuinely - what's the problem with this? It seems to be someone documenting a big increase in their productivity in a way that might be actually useful to others. They don't write like the kind of person you can dismiss out of hand and there's no obvious red flags. Other than "I don't like AI" - what is so insufferable here?
    • vaenaes 1y ago
      [dead]
• laughing_snyder 1y ago
  Has anyone had their own experience of how Claude or similar AI agents perform in large (1M+ lines) legacy code bases? To give a bit more context, I work on a Java code base that is 20+ years old. It was continuously updated and expanded but contains mostly spaghetti code. Would Claude add any value here?
• minzi 1y ago
  Is it really that much better than cursor’s agent? I’m hesitant to try because it would be out of pocket and I get cursor for free (work). It’s hard to understand how it could be that different if both are using sonnet under the hood.
  • slig 1y ago
    Yes, much better. Cursor pays for the tokens and you pay Cursor, so it's within their best interest to minimize the context and the number of requests to Claude.
• Awesomedonut 1y ago
  Maybe I'm just using it wrong, but CC hasn't been super helpful for me. I don't believe it's fixed any of my bugs so far. But I do like the CLI
• throw10920 1y ago
  > I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate When I hear this, I think of this recently-released study, which showed that LLMs both make coders less productive and convinced that they're more productive: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Until there's more research published that shows the opposite effect, I don't think we can really take peoples' squishy feelings like this as faithful to reality.