11 ms·

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

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
    - muspimerol 1y ago
      > a mishmash of vibe coded stuff you don’t understand. No, there is a difference between "I wrote this code" and "I understand this code". You don't need to write all the code in a project to understand it. Otherwise writing software in a team would not be a viable undertaking.
  - ruszki 1y ago
    I don’t remember what architecture was used by PRs I reviewed a month ago. I remember what architecture I designed 15 years ago for projects I was part of.
  - everforward 1y ago
    I've only used the agentic tools a bit, but I've found that they're able to generate code at a velocity that I struggle to keep in my head. The development loop also doesn't require me to interact with the code as much, so I have worse retention of things like which functions are in which file, what helper functions already exist, etc. It's less that I can't understand, and more that my context on the code is very weak.
    - ako 1y ago
      Ask it to document the code with design documents and mermaid diagrams. Much faster to review.
      - everforward 1y ago
        I might have to try this. Without having tried it, it feels like the context I think I lack is more nitty gritty than would be exposed like this. It's not like I'm unsure of how a request ends up in a database transaction, but more "do we need or already have an abstraction over paging in database queries?". It doesn't feel like mermaid diagrams or design documents would include that, but I'm open to being wrong there.
        ako 1y ago
        If you have a question like that, just ask.
- jshen 1y ago
  The trick is to ask it to do more narrow tasks and design the structure of the code base yourself.
  - hkt 1y ago
    This. It helps to tell it to plan and to then interrogate it about that plan, change it to specification etc. Think of it as a refinement session before a pairing session. The results are considerably better if you do it this way. I've written kubernetes operators, flask applications, Kivy applications, and a transparent ssh proxy with Claude in the last two months, all outside of work. It also helps to tell it to write tests first: I lean towards integration tests for most things but it is decent at writing good unit tests etc too. Obviously, review is paramount if TDD is going to work.
    - tiahura 1y ago
      As a hobbyist coder, the more time I spend brainstorming with all the platforms about specs and tests and architecture, the better the ultimate results.
- skippyboxedhero 1y ago
  Yes, the default when it does anything is to try and create. It will read my CLAUDE.md file, it will read the code that is already there, and then it will try to write it again. I have had this happen many times (today, I had to prompt 5/6 times to read the file as a feature had already been implemented). ...and if something is genuinely complex, it will (imo) generally do a bad job. It will produce something that looks like it works superficially, but as you examine it will either not work in a non-obvious way or be poorly designed. Still very useful but to really improve your productivity you have to understand when not to use it.
  - bboygravity 1y ago
    How do you write complex code as a human? You create abstraction layers, right? Why wouldn't that work with an llm? It takes effort, sure, but it certainly also takes effort if you have to do it "by hand"?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - sidjxjxbnxkxkkx 1y ago
      English is much less expressive compared to code. Typing the keys was never the slow part for senior developers. It does work with an LLM, but you’re reinventing the wheel with these crazy markup files. We created a family of language to express how to move bits around and replacing that with English is silly. Vibe coding is fast because you’re ok with not thinking about the code. Anytime you have to do that, an LLM is not going to be much faster.
    - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
      Because it creates the wrong layers. In theory, there is no reason why this is the case. For the same reason, there is no reason why juniors can't create perfect code first time...it is just the tickets are never detailed enough? But in reality, it doesn't work like that. The code is just bad.
      - 1y ago
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  You're not setting good enough boundaries or reviewing what it's doing closely enough. Police it, and give it explicit instructions. Then after it's done its work prompt it with something like "You're the staff engineer or team lead on this project, and I want you to go over your own git diff like it's a contribution from a junior team member. Think critically and apply judgement based on the architecture of the project describes @HERE.md and @THERE.md."
  - GiorgioG 1y ago
    Ah yes…the old “you’re holding it wrong”. The problem is these goddamn things don’t learn, so you put in the effort to police it…and you have to keep doing that until the end of time. Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.
    - hkt 1y ago
      Not so. Adding to context files helps enormously. Having touchstone files (ARCHITECTURE.md) you can reference helps enormously. The trick is to steer, and create the guardrails. Honestly, it feels like DevOps had a kid with Product.
      - GiorgioG 1y ago
        > Honestly, it feels like DevOps had a kid with Product. You've just described a match made in hell. DevOps - let's overcomplicate things (I'm looking at you K8s) and Product - they create pretty screenshots and flows but not actually think about the product as a system (or set of systems.)
    - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
      It's just a tool, not an intelligence or a person. You use it to make your job easier. If it doesn't make your job easier, you don't use it. Anybody trying to sell you on a bill of goods that this is somehow "automating away engineers" and "replacing expensive software developers" is either stupid or lying (or both). I find it incredibly useful, but it's garbage-in, garbage-out just like anything else with computers. If your code base is well commented and documented and laid out in a consistent pattern, it will tend to follow that pattern, especially if it follows standards. And it does better in languages (like Rust) that have strict type systems and coding standards. Even better if you have rigorous tests for it to check its own work against.
- rane 1y ago
  Having used Claude Code extensively for the last few months, I still haven't reached this "until it isn't" point. Review the code that comes out. It goes a long way.
  - risyachka 1y ago
    >> Review the code that comes out. It goes a long way. Sure, but if I do 5 reviews for a task - in 99% of cases it is net negative as it is faster to DIY it at that point. Harder for sure, but faster.
    - rane 1y ago
      Maybe our brains are wired different but reading and reviewing code is way faster for me than writing it.
      - wredcoll 1y ago
        There's very few objective ways to measure review 'performance'. Coding is easy, it works or doesn't.
        pixl97 1y ago
        Or it works till it doesn't. There is a lot of code that will work until some condition is met.
        nosianu 1y ago
        This ignores a bunch of higher level and long-term concepts like maintenance, complexity and extensibility. With only "it works" you end up like this (iconic HN comment on Oracle codebase): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637
        wredcoll 1y ago
        Yes, my point is that you don't even have "it compiles" as a way to measure a code review. Maybe you did a great job, maybe you did a terrible job, how do you tell?
- Aurornis 1y ago
  The people successfully using Claude Code for big projects aren’t letting it get to the point where they don’t understand what it wrote. The best results come from working iteratively with it. I reject about 1/3 of edits to request some changes or a change of direction. If you just try to have it jam on code until the end result appears to work then you will be disappointed. But that’s operator error.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    So far I'm bullish on subagents to help with that. Validate completion status, bullshit detection, catching over engineering etc. I can load them with extra context like conventions ahd specific prompts to clamp down on the Claude-isms during development.
  - AtlasBarfed 1y ago
    Remind me in two years... I understand completely what you're saying. But with the delusions that management is under right now, you're just going to seem like someone that's resisting the flow of code and becoming a bottleneck.
- epolanski 1y ago
  You're misusing the tool starting from not giving clear instructions.
baq 1y ago
Fascinating since I found the recent Claude models untrustworthy for writing and editing SQL. E.g. it'd write conditions correctly, but not add parens around ANDs and ORs (which gemini pro then highlighted as a bug, correctly.)
- risyachka 1y ago
  I bet it highly depends on the work you do. It is very useful for simpler tasks like writing tests, converting code bases etc where the hard part is already done. When it comes to actually doing something hard - it is not very useful at least in my experience. And if you do something even a bit niche - it is mostly useless and its faster do dig into topic on your own that try to have Claude implement it.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    Even when I hand roll certain things, it still nice to have Claude Code take over any other grunt work that might come my way. And there are always yaks to shave, always.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  If you aren't already (1) telling Claude Code which flavor of SQL you want (there are several major dialects and many more minor ones) and (2) giving it access to up-to-date documentation via MCP (e.g. https://github.com/arabold/docs-mcp-server https://github.com/arabold/docs-mcp-server) so it has direct access to canonical docs for authoritative grounding and syntax references, you'll find that you get much better results by doing one or both of those things.
  - impure-aqua 1y ago
    Documentation on features your SQL dialect supports and key requirements for your query are very important for incentivizing it to generate the output you want. As a recent example, I am working on a Rust app with integrated DuckDB, and asked it to implement a scoring algorithm query (after chatting with it to generate a Markdown file "RFC" describing how the algorithm works.) It started the implementation with an absolute minimal SQL query that pulled all metrics for a given time window. I questioned this rather than accepting the change, and it said its plan was to implement the more complex aggregation logic in Rust because 1) it's easier to interpret Rust branching logic than SQL statements (true) and 2) because not all SQL dialects include EXP(), STDDEV(), VAR() support which would be necessary to compute the metrics. The former point actually seems like quite a reasonable bias to me, personally I find it harder to review complex aggregations in SQL than mentally traversing the path of data through a bunch of branches. But if you are familiar with DuckDB you know that 1) it does support these features and 2) the OLAP efficiency of DuckDB makes it a better choice for doing these aggregations in a performant way than iterating through the results in Rust, so the initial generated output is suboptimal. I informed it of DuckDB's support for these operations and pointed out the performance consideration and it gladly generated the (long and certainly harder to interpret) SQL query, so it is clearly quite capable, just needs some prodding to go in the right direction.
asdev 1y ago
I feel like Cursor gives the same experience without having to be in the terminal. I don't see how Claude Code is so much better
- mattmanser 1y ago
  I went on n a bit of a YouTube frenzy last weekend on getting an overview of agentic tools. A lot of people are saying that cursor is much worse than Claude Code who have used both.
  - CharlesW 1y ago
    Having spent a couple of weeks putting both AIDE-centric (Cursor, Windsurf) and CLI-centric (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI) options through real-world tasks, Cursor was one of the least effective tools for me. I ultimately settled on Claude Code and am very happy with it.
    - danielbln 1y ago
      I realized Claude Code is the abstraction level I want to work in. Cursor et al still stick me way down into the code muck when really I only want to see the code during review. It's an implementation detail that I still have to review because it's makes mistakes, even when guided perfectly, but otherwise I want to think in interfaces, architecture, components. The low level code, don't care. Is it up to spec and conventions, does it work? Good enough for me.
- maouida 1y ago
  I use neovim so claude code makes more sense to me. I think having the code agent independent from the code editor is a plus.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  I haven’t found massive performance between tools that use the same underlying LLM The benefit of Claude Code is that you can pay a fixed monthly fee and get a lot more than you would with API requests alone.
Aurornis 1y ago
> as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. The interesting thing about all of this vibe coding skepticism, cynicism, and backlash is that many people have their expectations set extremely low. They’re convinced everything the tools produce will be junk or that the worst case examples people provide are representative of the average. Then they finally go out and use the tools and realize that they exceed their (extremely low) expectations, and are amazed. Yeah we all know Claude Code isn’t going to generate a $10 billion SaaS with a team of 10 people or whatever the social media engagement bait VCs are pushing this week. However, the tools are more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for.
- Freedom2 1y ago
  It doesn't help that a lot of skeptics are also dishonest. A few days ago someone here tried to claim that inserting verbose debug logging, something Claude Code would be very good at, is "actually programming" and it's important work for humans to do. No, Claude can create logs all across my codebase with much better formatting far faster than I can, so I can focus on actual problem solving. It's frustrating, but par for the course for this forum. Edit: Dishonest isn't correct, I should have said I just disagree with their statements. I do apologize.
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    That's not what dishonesty means. That's just someone who disagrees with you
    - Freedom2 1y ago
      Thank you for calling out my inaccuracy. One thing I'm always appreciative for in HN is the level of pedantry day after day.
      - tecleandor 1y ago
        That's not pedantry, pedantry would be if it were a very minor or technical detail, but being dishonest doesn't have anything to do with having a different opinion. But this comment might step a bit into pedantry.
indigodaddy 1y ago
Maybe instead try opencode or crush with Gemini/Google auth when your Claude Code hits the limit.
- cpursley 1y ago
  Gemini is shockingly, embarrassingly, shamefully bad (for something out of a company like Google). Even the open models like Qwen and Kimi are better on opencode.
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Ah I was thinking maybe the Gemini-cli agent itself might be attributable to the problems, thus maybe try the opencode/Gemini combo instead.. I'd like to mess around with "opencode+copilot free-tier auth" or "{opencode|crush}+some model via groq(still free?)" to see what kind of mileage I can get and if it's halfway decent..
  - skerit 1y ago
    In my experience, Gemini is pretty good in multishotting. So just give it a system prompt, some example user/assistant pairs, and it can produce great results! And this is its biggest weakness for coding. As soon as it makes a single mistake, it's over. It somehow has learned that during this "conversation" it's having, it should make that mistake over and over again. And then it starts saying things like "Wow, I'm really messing up the diff format!"
j45 1y ago
I was the same and switched t the first max plan. It’s very efficient with token usage for what I’ve been trying so far.
einpoklum 1y ago
What exactly have you written with Claude Code? I have not tried it, for a variety of reasons, but my (quite limited, anecdotal, and gratis) experience with other such tools is, that I can get them to write something I could perhaps get as an answer on StackOverflow: Limited scope, limited length, address at most one significant issue; and perhaps that has to do with what they are trained on. But that once things get complicated, it's hopeless. You said Claude Code was significantly better than some alternatives, so better than what I describe, but - we need to know _on what_.
- M4v3R 1y ago
  Not with Claude Code but with Cursor using Claude Sonnet 4 I coded an entire tower defense game, title, tutorial, gameplay with several waves of enemies, and a “rewind time” mechanic. The whole thing was basically vibe coded, I touched maybe a couple dozen lines of code. Apparently it wasn’t terrible [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967
- UncleEntity 1y ago
  I've been working on the design of a fairly complicated system using the daffy robots to iterate over a bunch of different ideas. Trying things out (conceptually) to explore the pros and cons of each decision before even writing a single line of code. The code is really a formality at this point as each and every piece is laid out and documented. Contrast this with the peg parser VM it basically one-shotted but needed a bunch of debug work. A fuzzy spec (basically just the lpeg paper) and a few iterations and it produced a fully tested VM. After that the AST -> Opcode compiler was super easy as it just had to do some simple (fully defined by this point) transforms and Bob's your uncle. Not the best code ever but a working and tested system. Then my predilection for yak shaving took over as the AST needed to be rewritten to make integration as a python C extension module viable (and generated). And why have separate AST and opcode optimization passes when they can be integrated? Oh, and why even have opcodes in the first place when you can rewrite the VM to use Continuation Passing Style and make the entire machine AST-> CPS Transform -> Optimizer -> Execute with a minimum of fuss? So, yeah, I think it's fair to say the daffy robots are a little more than a StackOverflow chatbot. Plus, what I'm really working on is a lot more complicated than this, needing to redo the AST was just the gateway drug.
msikora 1y ago
Just a few months ago I couldn't imagine paying more than $20/mo for any kind of subscription, but here I am paying $200/mo for the Max 20 plan! Similarly amazed as an experienced dev with 20 YoE (and a fellow Slovak, although US based). The other tools, while helpful, were just not "there" and they were often simply more trouble than they were worth producing a lot of useless garbage. Claude Code is clearly on another level, yes it needs A LOT of handholding; my MO is do Plan Mode until I'm 100% sure it understands the reqs and the planned code changes are reasonable, then let it work, and finally code review what it did (after it auto-fixes things like compiler errors, unit test failures and linting issues). It's kind of like a junior engineer that is a little bit daft but very knowledgeable but works super, super fast and doesn't talk back :) It is definitely the future, what can I say? This is a clear direction where software development is heading.
- bonzini 1y ago
  When I first tried letting Cursor loose on a relatively small code base (1500 lines, 2 files), I had it fix a bug (or more than one) with a clear testcase and a rough description of the problem, and it was a disaster. The first commit towards the fix was plausible, though still not fully correct, but in the end not only it wasn't able to fix it, each commit was also becoming more and more baroque. I cut it when it wrote almost 100 lines of code to compare version numbers (which already existed in the source). The problem with discussing the plan is that, while debugging, you don't yourself have a full idea of the plan. I don't call it a total failure because I asked the AI to improve some error messages to help it debug, and I will keep that code. It's pretty good at writing new code, very good at reviewing it, but for me it was completely incapable of performing maintainance.
  - brandall10 1y ago
    This was a problem I regularly had using Copilot w/ GPT4o or Sonnet 3.5/3.7... sometimes I would end up down a rabbit hole and blow multiple days of work, but more typically I'd be out an hour or two and toss everything to start again. Don't have this w/ Claude Code working over multiple code bases of 10-30k LOC. Part of the reason is the type of guidance I give in the memory files helps keep this at bay, as does linting (ie. class/file length), but I also chunk things up into features that I PR review and have it refactor to keep things super tidy.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
If you are a Senior Developer, who is comfortable giving a Junior tips, and then guiding them to fixing them (or just stepping in for a brief moment and writing where they missed something) this is for you. I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand. For me the sweet spot is for boilerplate (give me a blueprint of a class based on a description), translate a JSON for me into a class, or into some other format. Also "what's wrong with this code? How would a Staff Level Engineer white it?" those questions are also useful. I've found bugs before hitting debug by asking what's wrong with the code I just pounded on my keyboard by hand.
- channel_t 1y ago
  Yes, can confirm that as a senior developer who has needed to spend huge amounts of time reviewing junior code from off-shore contractors with very detailed and explicit instructions, dabbling in agentic LLM coding tools like Claude Code has felt like like a gift from heaven. I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and being able to understand the difference between a good solution and a bad solution, they will produce tons of awful, but technically working code.
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    This. I've got myself in a PILE of trouble when trying to use LLMs with languages/technologies I am unfamiliar with (React, don't judge me). But with something that I am familiar with (say Go, or Python) LLMs have improved my velocity massively, with the caveat that I have had to explicitly tell the LLM when it is producing something that I know that I don't want (me arguing with an LLM was an experience too!)
  - willsmith72 1y ago
    Totally agree with the off-shore component of this. I'm already going to have to break a task down into clear detail and resolve any anticipated blocker myself upfront to avoid multi-timezone multi-day back and forth. Now that I'm practiced at that, the off-shored part is no longer valuable
deadbabe 1y ago
After 25 years, do you think this is the climax of your career? Where do you go from here? Just Claude code until the end of your days?
- lukaslalinsky 1y ago
  This is not actually such a big change for me. I've been doing mostly architecture for several years now. Thinking about the big picture, how things fit together, and how to make complex things simple is what I care about. I've been jokingly calling what I do "programming without coding" even before the current AIs existed. It's just that now I have a extra tool I can use for writing the code.
ako 1y ago
Completely agree. You really have to learn how to use it. For example, heard many say that doing big refactorings is causing problems. Found a way that is working for SwiftUI projects. I did a refactoring, moving files, restructuring large files into smaller components, and standardizing component setup of different views. The pattern that works for me: 1) ask it to document the architecture and coding standards, 2) ask it to create a plan for refactoring, 3) ask it to do a low-risk refactoring first, 4) ask it to update the refacting plan, and then 5) go through all the remaining refactorings. The refactoring plan comes with timeline estimates in days, but that is completely rubbish with claude code. Instead i asked it to estimate in 1) number of chat messages, 2) number of tokens, 3) cost based on number of tokens, 4) number of files impacted. Another approach that works well is to first generate a throw away application. Then ask it to create documentation how to do it right, incorporate all the learning and where it got stuck. Finally, redo the application with these guidelines and rules. Another tip, sometimes when it gets stuck, i open the project in windsurf, and ask another LLM (e.g., Gemini 2.5 pro, or qwen coder) to review the project and problem and then I will ask windsurf to provide me with a prompt to instruct claude code to fix it. Works well in some cases. Also, biggest insight so far: don't expect it to be perfect first time. It needs a feedback loop: generate code, test the code, inspect the results and then improve the code. Works well for SQL, especially if it can access real data: inspect the database, try some queries, try to understand the schema from your data and then work towards a SQL query that works. And then often as a final step it will simplify the working query. I use an MCP tool with full access to a test database, so you can tell it to run explain plan and look at the statistics (pg_stat_statements). It will draw a mermaid diagram of your query, with performance numbers included (nr records retrieved, cache hit, etc), and will come back with optimized query and index suggestions. Tried it also on csv and parquet files with duckdb, it will run the explain plan, compare both query, explain why parquet is better, will see that the query is doing predicate push down, etc. Also when it gets things wrong, instead of inspecting the code, i ask it to create a design document with mermaid diagrams describing what it has built. Quite often that quickly shows some design mistake that you can ask it to fix. Also with multiple tools on the same project, you have the problem of each using it's own way of keeping track of the plan. I asked claude code to come up with rules for itself and windsurf to collaborate on a project. It came back with a set of rules for CLAUDE.md and .windsurfrules on which files to have, and how to use them (PLAN.md, TODO.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, DECISION.md, COLLABORATION.md)
_l7dh 1y ago
Feels like the most valuable skill to have as a programmer in times of Claude Code is that of carefully reading spec documentation and having an acute sense of critical thinking when reviewing code.
- raincole 1y ago
  For seniors these skills are very valuable before LLM anyway.
- sc077y 1y ago
  Critical Skills is spotting the potential bugs before they happen but in order to do that you need to have an extremely acute understanding or a have a lot of experience in the stack, libs and programming language of choice. Something that, ironically, you will not get by "vibe coding".
- anthonypasq 1y ago
  so... software engineering?
DrStartup 1y ago
hook up zen mcp to openrouter and use cerabras inference with kimi k2 and qwen3 480b at 2k tok/sec
sergiotapia 1y ago
I haven't used Claude Code - but have been using Amp a lot recently. Amp always hits on target. They created something really special. Has anyone here used both Claude Code and Amp and can compare the two's effectiveness? I know one is CLI and the other an editor extensions. I'm looking for comparisons beyond that. Thanks!
- wordofx 1y ago
  I don’t know why amp isn’t talked about more. It’s better than Claude code.
  - lukaslalinsky 1y ago
    It burns through credit too quickly. As a previous Sourcegraph Cody user, I was trying Amp first, but I've spent tens of dollars every day for the trial, and that was with an eye on the usage. It felt horrible seeing how I pay mostly for it's mistakes and the time it takes debugging. With CC, I can let go of the anxiety. I get several hours a day out of the Claude Pro plan and that's mostly good enough for now. If it's not, I'll upgrade to Max, as at $100 that's still less than what I'd have spent on Amp.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      That's the thing for me too: I don't want to pay for the agent's mistakes, even if those mistakes are in part the fault of my prompt. I'm fine with having usage limits if it means I pay a fixed cost per month. Not sure how long this will last, considering how expensive all this is for the companies to run, though. I feel like Amp's costs are actually in line with Sourcegraph's costs, and eventually Anthropic, OpenAI, et al. will all be charging a lot more than they are now. It's the classic play to entice people to something for low cost, and then later ramp it up once they're hooked. Right now they can afford to burn VC money, but that won't last forever.
    - wordofx 1y ago
      My AMP bill is less than Claude Code but I’m getting more work done.
dimal 1y ago
Technically you’re not vibe coding. You’re using AI to do software engineering. Vibe coding is specifically the process of having AI produce code and plowing ahead without understanding it. I know I’m being pedantic, but people mean very different things when they talk about this stuff, and I don’t think any credence should be given to vibe coding.
- radley 1y ago
  Both are vibe coding. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla. Maybe you're thinking of slop coding?
  - danparsonson 1y ago
    No, they're not. "A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.[1] Programmer Simon Willison said: 'If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant.'" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding) > The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla. And...?
    - radley 1y ago
      I wasn't familiar with his full message, so I didn't realize that the current definition of vibe coding was so cynical. Many of us don't see it that way.
  - Leynos 1y ago
    Karpathy's definition definitely requires: 1. Not looking at the code 2. YOLO everything 3. Paste errors back into the model verbatim That said, I describe what I do as vibe coding, but I introduce code review bots into the mix. I also roadmap a plan with deep research before hand and require comprehensive unit and behavioural tests from the model.
  - 1y ago
Lucasoato 1y ago
> I couldn't imagine paying >100$/month for a dev tool in the past, but I'm seriously considering upgrading to the Max plans. Sadly, my experience with the Max plan has been extremely poor. It’s not even comparable, I’ve been vastly experimenting with claude code in the last weeks, spending more than 80$ per day, it’s amazing. The problem is that in the Max plan you’re not the one managing the context length, and this ruins the model ability to keep things memory. Of course this is expected, the longer the context the more expensive to run, but it’s so frustrating to fail in a coding task because it’s so obvious the model lost a crucial part of the context.
- loandbehold 1y ago
  What do you mean you are not managing context length? Context length is same, 200K tokens.
maxjustus 1y ago
One thing I’ve started doing is using Gemini cli as a sidecar for Claude Code to load in a huge amount of context around a set of changes to get a second opinion - it’s been pretty handy for that particular use case due to its context size advantage
nmfisher 1y ago
I found Gemini CLI to be totally useless too. Last week I tried Claude Code with GLM4.5 (via z.ai API), though, and it was genuinely on par with Sonnet.
- lukaslalinsky 1y ago
  Thank you for the recommendation. I've been testing this on an open source project and it's indeed good. Not as good as Sonnet 4, but good enough. And the pricing is very reasonable. Don't know if I'd trust it to work on private code, but for public code it's a great option.
kelnos 1y ago
My experience has been similar, over perhaps 4-6 weeks of Claude Code. My first few days were a bit rough, and I was tempted to give up and proclaim that all my skeptic's opinions were correct and that it was useless. But there is indeed a learning curve to using it. After a month I'm still learning, but I can get it to give me useful output that I'm happy committing to my projects, after reviewing it line by line. Agreed that context and chunking are the key to making it productive. The times when I've tried to tell it (in a single prompt) everything I want it to do, were not successful. The code was garbage, and a lot of it just didn't do what I wanted it to do. And when there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, CC has trouble making targeted changes to fix issues one by one. Much better is to build each small chunk, and verify that it fully works, before moving on to the next. You also have to call its bullshit: sometimes it will try to solve a problem in a way you know is wrong, so you have to stop it and tell it to do it in another way. I suppose I shouldn't call it "bullshit"; if we're going to use the analogy of CC being like an inexperienced junior engineer, then that's just the kind of thing that happens when you pair with a junior. I still often do find that I give it a task, and when it's done, realize that I could have finished it much faster. But sometimes the task is tedious, and I'm fine with it taking a little longer if I don't have to do it myself. And sometimes it truly does take care of it faster than I would have been able to. In the case of tech that I'm learning myself (React, Tailwindcss, the former of which I dabbled with 10 years ago, but my knowledge is completely out of date), CC has been incredibly useful when I don't really know how to do something. I'm fine letting CC do it, and then I read the code and learn something myself, instead of having to pore over various tutorials of varying quality in order to figure it out on my own. So I think I'm convinced, and I'll continue to make CC more and more a part of my workflow. I'm currently on the Pro plan, and have hit the usage limits a couple times. I'm still a little shy about upgrading to Max and spending $100/mo on a dev tool... not sure if I'll get over that or not.
bsder 1y ago
> I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. And, yet, when I asked it to correct a CMake error in a fully open source codebase (broken dependency declaration), it couldn't work it out. It even started hallucinating version numbers and dependencies that were so obviously broken that at least it was obvious to me that it wasn't helping. This has been, and continues to be, my experience with AI coding. Every time I hit something that I really, really want the AI to do and get right (like correcting my build system errors), it fails and fails miserably. It seems like everybody who sings the praises of AI coding all have one thing in common--Javascript. Make of that what you will.
- lukaslalinsky 1y ago
  This is typically the outcome, when you have it look at a generic problem and fix it, especially if the problem depends on external information (like specific version numbers, etc). You have to either tell it where to look it up, or ask it to ask you questions how things need to be resolved. I personally use it to work on native code, C++ (with CMake), Zig, some Python. Works fine.
  - bsder 1y ago
    Except the whole point of using AI is to be able to actively route around gigantic dumpster fires of fail like CMake. The bug was the CMake-specific formulation and incantation of a Git tag. Something that should be in the documentation that it ingested. If AI can't even fix something this simple, what's the point?
enobrev 1y ago
I have a similar amount of engineering experience, was highly skeptical, and I've come to similar conclusions with Claude Code after spending two weeks on a greenfield project (TS api, react-native client, TS/React admin panel). As I've improved planning and context management, the results have been fairly consistent. As long as I can keep a task within the context window, it does a decent job almost every time. And occasionally I have to have it brute-force its way to green lint/typecheck/tests. That's been one of the biggest speed bumps. I've found that gemini is great at the occasional detailed code-review to help find glaring issues or things that were missed, but having it implement anything has been severely lacking. I have to literally tell it not to do anything because it will gladly just start writing files on a whim. I generally use the opus model to write detailed plans, sonnet to implement, and then opus and gemini to review and plan refactors. I'm impressed. The progress is SLOW. I'd have gotten to the stage I'm at in 1/3 to 1/2 the time, likely with fewer tests and significantly less process documentation. But the results are otherwise fairly great. And the learning process has kept me motivated to keep this old side-project moving. I was switching between two accounts for a week while testing, but in the end upgraded to the $100/month plan and I think I've been rate-limited once since. I don't know if I'll be using this for every-day professional work, but I think it's a great tool for a few categories of work.
luxuryballs 1y ago
check out openrouter.ai you can pay for credits that get used per prompt instead of forking out a fixed lump sum and it rotates keys so you can avoid being throttled, you can even use the same credits on any model in their index
mywacaday 1y ago
I completed my degree over 20 years ago and due to dot com bust and the path I took never coded as a full time role, some smallbits of dev and scripting but nothing where I would call myself a developer. I've had loads of ideas down through the years but never had the time work to complete them or learn the language/stack to complete them. Over the last 3 weeks I've been working on something small that should be ready for a beta release by the end of August. The ability to sit down and work on a feature or bug when I only have a spare 30 mins and be immediately productive without having to get in the zone is a game changer for me. Also while I can read and understand the code writing it would be at least 10 times slower for me. This is a small codebase that will have less than 5k lines and is not complicated so github copilot is working well for me in this case. I could see me paying for higher tiers given the productivity gains. The only issue I can see is that we might end up with a society where those that can afford the best subscriptions have more free time, get more done, make more money and are more successful in general. Even current base level subscriptions are too expensive for huge percentage of the global population.
bamboozled 1y ago
The more I use it the more I realise my first two weeks and the amazement I felt were an illusion. I’m not going to tell you it’s not useful, it is. But then shine wears off pretty fast and when it does, you’re basically left with a faster way to type. At least in my experience. It’s amazing , but it’s dumb.
narrator 1y ago
Gemini is not that good right now. GLM-4.5, which just came out, is pretty decent and very cheap. I use these with the RooCode plugin for VSCode that connects to it via OpenRouter. $10 of credits lasts a day of coding for me where as Claude would run that out in an hour.
SV_BubbleTime 1y 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. I had a similar thought about the Turing Test… It as science fiction for decades… then it passed silently in the night and we barely noticed.

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
  - muspimerol 1y ago
    > a mishmash of vibe coded stuff you don’t understand. No, there is a difference between "I wrote this code" and "I understand this code". You don't need to write all the code in a project to understand it. Otherwise writing software in a team would not be a viable undertaking.
- ruszki 1y ago
  I don’t remember what architecture was used by PRs I reviewed a month ago. I remember what architecture I designed 15 years ago for projects I was part of.
- everforward 1y ago
  I've only used the agentic tools a bit, but I've found that they're able to generate code at a velocity that I struggle to keep in my head. The development loop also doesn't require me to interact with the code as much, so I have worse retention of things like which functions are in which file, what helper functions already exist, etc. It's less that I can't understand, and more that my context on the code is very weak.
  - ako 1y ago
    Ask it to document the code with design documents and mermaid diagrams. Much faster to review.
    - everforward 1y ago
      I might have to try this. Without having tried it, it feels like the context I think I lack is more nitty gritty than would be exposed like this. It's not like I'm unsure of how a request ends up in a database transaction, but more "do we need or already have an abstraction over paging in database queries?". It doesn't feel like mermaid diagrams or design documents would include that, but I'm open to being wrong there.
      - ako 1y ago
        If you have a question like that, just ask.
jshen 1y ago
The trick is to ask it to do more narrow tasks and design the structure of the code base yourself.
- hkt 1y ago
  This. It helps to tell it to plan and to then interrogate it about that plan, change it to specification etc. Think of it as a refinement session before a pairing session. The results are considerably better if you do it this way. I've written kubernetes operators, flask applications, Kivy applications, and a transparent ssh proxy with Claude in the last two months, all outside of work. It also helps to tell it to write tests first: I lean towards integration tests for most things but it is decent at writing good unit tests etc too. Obviously, review is paramount if TDD is going to work.
  - tiahura 1y ago
    As a hobbyist coder, the more time I spend brainstorming with all the platforms about specs and tests and architecture, the better the ultimate results.
skippyboxedhero 1y ago
Yes, the default when it does anything is to try and create. It will read my CLAUDE.md file, it will read the code that is already there, and then it will try to write it again. I have had this happen many times (today, I had to prompt 5/6 times to read the file as a feature had already been implemented). ...and if something is genuinely complex, it will (imo) generally do a bad job. It will produce something that looks like it works superficially, but as you examine it will either not work in a non-obvious way or be poorly designed. Still very useful but to really improve your productivity you have to understand when not to use it.
- bboygravity 1y ago
  How do you write complex code as a human? You create abstraction layers, right? Why wouldn't that work with an llm? It takes effort, sure, but it certainly also takes effort if you have to do it "by hand"?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - sidjxjxbnxkxkkx 1y ago
    English is much less expressive compared to code. Typing the keys was never the slow part for senior developers. It does work with an LLM, but you’re reinventing the wheel with these crazy markup files. We created a family of language to express how to move bits around and replacing that with English is silly. Vibe coding is fast because you’re ok with not thinking about the code. Anytime you have to do that, an LLM is not going to be much faster.
  - skippyboxedhero 1y ago
    Because it creates the wrong layers. In theory, there is no reason why this is the case. For the same reason, there is no reason why juniors can't create perfect code first time...it is just the tickets are never detailed enough? But in reality, it doesn't work like that. The code is just bad.
    - 1y ago
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
You're not setting good enough boundaries or reviewing what it's doing closely enough. Police it, and give it explicit instructions. Then after it's done its work prompt it with something like "You're the staff engineer or team lead on this project, and I want you to go over your own git diff like it's a contribution from a junior team member. Think critically and apply judgement based on the architecture of the project describes @HERE.md and @THERE.md."
- GiorgioG 1y ago
  Ah yes…the old “you’re holding it wrong”. The problem is these goddamn things don’t learn, so you put in the effort to police it…and you have to keep doing that until the end of time. Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.
  - hkt 1y ago
    Not so. Adding to context files helps enormously. Having touchstone files (ARCHITECTURE.md) you can reference helps enormously. The trick is to steer, and create the guardrails. Honestly, it feels like DevOps had a kid with Product.
    - GiorgioG 1y ago
      > Honestly, it feels like DevOps had a kid with Product. You've just described a match made in hell. DevOps - let's overcomplicate things (I'm looking at you K8s) and Product - they create pretty screenshots and flows but not actually think about the product as a system (or set of systems.)
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    It's just a tool, not an intelligence or a person. You use it to make your job easier. If it doesn't make your job easier, you don't use it. Anybody trying to sell you on a bill of goods that this is somehow "automating away engineers" and "replacing expensive software developers" is either stupid or lying (or both). I find it incredibly useful, but it's garbage-in, garbage-out just like anything else with computers. If your code base is well commented and documented and laid out in a consistent pattern, it will tend to follow that pattern, especially if it follows standards. And it does better in languages (like Rust) that have strict type systems and coding standards. Even better if you have rigorous tests for it to check its own work against.
rane 1y ago
Having used Claude Code extensively for the last few months, I still haven't reached this "until it isn't" point. Review the code that comes out. It goes a long way.
- risyachka 1y ago
  >> Review the code that comes out. It goes a long way. Sure, but if I do 5 reviews for a task - in 99% of cases it is net negative as it is faster to DIY it at that point. Harder for sure, but faster.
  - rane 1y ago
    Maybe our brains are wired different but reading and reviewing code is way faster for me than writing it.
    - wredcoll 1y ago
      There's very few objective ways to measure review 'performance'. Coding is easy, it works or doesn't.
      - pixl97 1y ago
        Or it works till it doesn't. There is a lot of code that will work until some condition is met.
      - nosianu 1y ago
        This ignores a bunch of higher level and long-term concepts like maintenance, complexity and extensibility. With only "it works" you end up like this (iconic HN comment on Oracle codebase): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442637
        wredcoll 1y ago
        Yes, my point is that you don't even have "it compiles" as a way to measure a code review. Maybe you did a great job, maybe you did a terrible job, how do you tell?
Aurornis 1y ago
The people successfully using Claude Code for big projects aren’t letting it get to the point where they don’t understand what it wrote. The best results come from working iteratively with it. I reject about 1/3 of edits to request some changes or a change of direction. If you just try to have it jam on code until the end result appears to work then you will be disappointed. But that’s operator error.
- danielbln 1y ago
  So far I'm bullish on subagents to help with that. Validate completion status, bullshit detection, catching over engineering etc. I can load them with extra context like conventions ahd specific prompts to clamp down on the Claude-isms during development.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Remind me in two years... I understand completely what you're saying. But with the delusions that management is under right now, you're just going to seem like someone that's resisting the flow of code and becoming a bottleneck.
epolanski 1y ago
You're misusing the tool starting from not giving clear instructions.

baq 1y ago

Fascinating since I found the recent Claude models untrustworthy for writing and editing SQL. E.g. it'd write conditions correctly, but not add parens around ANDs and ORs (which gemini pro then highlighted as a bug, correctly.)

risyachka 1y ago
I bet it highly depends on the work you do. It is very useful for simpler tasks like writing tests, converting code bases etc where the hard part is already done. When it comes to actually doing something hard - it is not very useful at least in my experience. And if you do something even a bit niche - it is mostly useless and its faster do dig into topic on your own that try to have Claude implement it.
- danielbln 1y ago
  Even when I hand roll certain things, it still nice to have Claude Code take over any other grunt work that might come my way. And there are always yaks to shave, always.
CharlesW 1y ago
If you aren't already (1) telling Claude Code which flavor of SQL you want (there are several major dialects and many more minor ones) and (2) giving it access to up-to-date documentation via MCP (e.g. https://github.com/arabold/docs-mcp-server https://github.com/arabold/docs-mcp-server) so it has direct access to canonical docs for authoritative grounding and syntax references, you'll find that you get much better results by doing one or both of those things.
- impure-aqua 1y ago
  Documentation on features your SQL dialect supports and key requirements for your query are very important for incentivizing it to generate the output you want. As a recent example, I am working on a Rust app with integrated DuckDB, and asked it to implement a scoring algorithm query (after chatting with it to generate a Markdown file "RFC" describing how the algorithm works.) It started the implementation with an absolute minimal SQL query that pulled all metrics for a given time window. I questioned this rather than accepting the change, and it said its plan was to implement the more complex aggregation logic in Rust because 1) it's easier to interpret Rust branching logic than SQL statements (true) and 2) because not all SQL dialects include EXP(), STDDEV(), VAR() support which would be necessary to compute the metrics. The former point actually seems like quite a reasonable bias to me, personally I find it harder to review complex aggregations in SQL than mentally traversing the path of data through a bunch of branches. But if you are familiar with DuckDB you know that 1) it does support these features and 2) the OLAP efficiency of DuckDB makes it a better choice for doing these aggregations in a performant way than iterating through the results in Rust, so the initial generated output is suboptimal. I informed it of DuckDB's support for these operations and pointed out the performance consideration and it gladly generated the (long and certainly harder to interpret) SQL query, so it is clearly quite capable, just needs some prodding to go in the right direction.

asdev 1y ago

I feel like Cursor gives the same experience without having to be in the terminal. I don't see how Claude Code is so much better

mattmanser 1y ago
I went on n a bit of a YouTube frenzy last weekend on getting an overview of agentic tools. A lot of people are saying that cursor is much worse than Claude Code who have used both.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Having spent a couple of weeks putting both AIDE-centric (Cursor, Windsurf) and CLI-centric (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI) options through real-world tasks, Cursor was one of the least effective tools for me. I ultimately settled on Claude Code and am very happy with it.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    I realized Claude Code is the abstraction level I want to work in. Cursor et al still stick me way down into the code muck when really I only want to see the code during review. It's an implementation detail that I still have to review because it's makes mistakes, even when guided perfectly, but otherwise I want to think in interfaces, architecture, components. The low level code, don't care. Is it up to spec and conventions, does it work? Good enough for me.
maouida 1y ago
I use neovim so claude code makes more sense to me. I think having the code agent independent from the code editor is a plus.
Aurornis 1y ago
I haven’t found massive performance between tools that use the same underlying LLM The benefit of Claude Code is that you can pay a fixed monthly fee and get a lot more than you would with API requests alone.

Aurornis 1y ago

> as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. The interesting thing about all of this vibe coding skepticism, cynicism, and backlash is that many people have their expectations set extremely low. They’re convinced everything the tools produce will be junk or that the worst case examples people provide are representative of the average. Then they finally go out and use the tools and realize that they exceed their (extremely low) expectations, and are amazed. Yeah we all know Claude Code isn’t going to generate a $10 billion SaaS with a team of 10 people or whatever the social media engagement bait VCs are pushing this week. However, the tools are more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for.

Freedom2 1y ago
It doesn't help that a lot of skeptics are also dishonest. A few days ago someone here tried to claim that inserting verbose debug logging, something Claude Code would be very good at, is "actually programming" and it's important work for humans to do. No, Claude can create logs all across my codebase with much better formatting far faster than I can, so I can focus on actual problem solving. It's frustrating, but par for the course for this forum. Edit: Dishonest isn't correct, I should have said I just disagree with their statements. I do apologize.
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  That's not what dishonesty means. That's just someone who disagrees with you
  - Freedom2 1y ago
    Thank you for calling out my inaccuracy. One thing I'm always appreciative for in HN is the level of pedantry day after day.
    - tecleandor 1y ago
      That's not pedantry, pedantry would be if it were a very minor or technical detail, but being dishonest doesn't have anything to do with having a different opinion. But this comment might step a bit into pedantry.

indigodaddy 1y ago

Maybe instead try opencode or crush with Gemini/Google auth when your Claude Code hits the limit.

cpursley 1y ago
Gemini is shockingly, embarrassingly, shamefully bad (for something out of a company like Google). Even the open models like Qwen and Kimi are better on opencode.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Ah I was thinking maybe the Gemini-cli agent itself might be attributable to the problems, thus maybe try the opencode/Gemini combo instead.. I'd like to mess around with "opencode+copilot free-tier auth" or "{opencode|crush}+some model via groq(still free?)" to see what kind of mileage I can get and if it's halfway decent..
- skerit 1y ago
  In my experience, Gemini is pretty good in multishotting. So just give it a system prompt, some example user/assistant pairs, and it can produce great results! And this is its biggest weakness for coding. As soon as it makes a single mistake, it's over. It somehow has learned that during this "conversation" it's having, it should make that mistake over and over again. And then it starts saying things like "Wow, I'm really messing up the diff format!"

j45 1y ago

I was the same and switched t the first max plan. It’s very efficient with token usage for what I’ve been trying so far.

einpoklum 1y ago

What exactly have you written with Claude Code? I have not tried it, for a variety of reasons, but my (quite limited, anecdotal, and gratis) experience with other such tools is, that I can get them to write something I could perhaps get as an answer on StackOverflow: Limited scope, limited length, address at most one significant issue; and perhaps that has to do with what they are trained on. But that once things get complicated, it's hopeless. You said Claude Code was significantly better than some alternatives, so better than what I describe, but - we need to know _on what_.

M4v3R 1y ago
Not with Claude Code but with Cursor using Claude Sonnet 4 I coded an entire tower defense game, title, tutorial, gameplay with several waves of enemies, and a “rewind time” mechanic. The whole thing was basically vibe coded, I touched maybe a couple dozen lines of code. Apparently it wasn’t terrible [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44463967
UncleEntity 1y ago
I've been working on the design of a fairly complicated system using the daffy robots to iterate over a bunch of different ideas. Trying things out (conceptually) to explore the pros and cons of each decision before even writing a single line of code. The code is really a formality at this point as each and every piece is laid out and documented. Contrast this with the peg parser VM it basically one-shotted but needed a bunch of debug work. A fuzzy spec (basically just the lpeg paper) and a few iterations and it produced a fully tested VM. After that the AST -> Opcode compiler was super easy as it just had to do some simple (fully defined by this point) transforms and Bob's your uncle. Not the best code ever but a working and tested system. Then my predilection for yak shaving took over as the AST needed to be rewritten to make integration as a python C extension module viable (and generated). And why have separate AST and opcode optimization passes when they can be integrated? Oh, and why even have opcodes in the first place when you can rewrite the VM to use Continuation Passing Style and make the entire machine AST-> CPS Transform -> Optimizer -> Execute with a minimum of fuss? So, yeah, I think it's fair to say the daffy robots are a little more than a StackOverflow chatbot. Plus, what I'm really working on is a lot more complicated than this, needing to redo the AST was just the gateway drug.

msikora 1y ago

Just a few months ago I couldn't imagine paying more than $20/mo for any kind of subscription, but here I am paying $200/mo for the Max 20 plan! Similarly amazed as an experienced dev with 20 YoE (and a fellow Slovak, although US based). The other tools, while helpful, were just not "there" and they were often simply more trouble than they were worth producing a lot of useless garbage. Claude Code is clearly on another level, yes it needs A LOT of handholding; my MO is do Plan Mode until I'm 100% sure it understands the reqs and the planned code changes are reasonable, then let it work, and finally code review what it did (after it auto-fixes things like compiler errors, unit test failures and linting issues). It's kind of like a junior engineer that is a little bit daft but very knowledgeable but works super, super fast and doesn't talk back :) It is definitely the future, what can I say? This is a clear direction where software development is heading.

bonzini 1y ago
When I first tried letting Cursor loose on a relatively small code base (1500 lines, 2 files), I had it fix a bug (or more than one) with a clear testcase and a rough description of the problem, and it was a disaster. The first commit towards the fix was plausible, though still not fully correct, but in the end not only it wasn't able to fix it, each commit was also becoming more and more baroque. I cut it when it wrote almost 100 lines of code to compare version numbers (which already existed in the source). The problem with discussing the plan is that, while debugging, you don't yourself have a full idea of the plan. I don't call it a total failure because I asked the AI to improve some error messages to help it debug, and I will keep that code. It's pretty good at writing new code, very good at reviewing it, but for me it was completely incapable of performing maintainance.
- brandall10 1y ago
  This was a problem I regularly had using Copilot w/ GPT4o or Sonnet 3.5/3.7... sometimes I would end up down a rabbit hole and blow multiple days of work, but more typically I'd be out an hour or two and toss everything to start again. Don't have this w/ Claude Code working over multiple code bases of 10-30k LOC. Part of the reason is the type of guidance I give in the memory files helps keep this at bay, as does linting (ie. class/file length), but I also chunk things up into features that I PR review and have it refactor to keep things super tidy.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

If you are a Senior Developer, who is comfortable giving a Junior tips, and then guiding them to fixing them (or just stepping in for a brief moment and writing where they missed something) this is for you. I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand. For me the sweet spot is for boilerplate (give me a blueprint of a class based on a description), translate a JSON for me into a class, or into some other format. Also "what's wrong with this code? How would a Staff Level Engineer white it?" those questions are also useful. I've found bugs before hitting debug by asking what's wrong with the code I just pounded on my keyboard by hand.

channel_t 1y ago
Yes, can confirm that as a senior developer who has needed to spend huge amounts of time reviewing junior code from off-shore contractors with very detailed and explicit instructions, dabbling in agentic LLM coding tools like Claude Code has felt like like a gift from heaven. I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and being able to understand the difference between a good solution and a bad solution, they will produce tons of awful, but technically working code.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  This. I've got myself in a PILE of trouble when trying to use LLMs with languages/technologies I am unfamiliar with (React, don't judge me). But with something that I am familiar with (say Go, or Python) LLMs have improved my velocity massively, with the caveat that I have had to explicitly tell the LLM when it is producing something that I know that I don't want (me arguing with an LLM was an experience too!)
- willsmith72 1y ago
  Totally agree with the off-shore component of this. I'm already going to have to break a task down into clear detail and resolve any anticipated blocker myself upfront to avoid multi-timezone multi-day back and forth. Now that I'm practiced at that, the off-shored part is no longer valuable

deadbabe 1y ago

After 25 years, do you think this is the climax of your career? Where do you go from here? Just Claude code until the end of your days?

lukaslalinsky 1y ago
This is not actually such a big change for me. I've been doing mostly architecture for several years now. Thinking about the big picture, how things fit together, and how to make complex things simple is what I care about. I've been jokingly calling what I do "programming without coding" even before the current AIs existed. It's just that now I have a extra tool I can use for writing the code.

ako 1y ago

Completely agree. You really have to learn how to use it. For example, heard many say that doing big refactorings is causing problems. Found a way that is working for SwiftUI projects. I did a refactoring, moving files, restructuring large files into smaller components, and standardizing component setup of different views. The pattern that works for me: 1) ask it to document the architecture and coding standards, 2) ask it to create a plan for refactoring, 3) ask it to do a low-risk refactoring first, 4) ask it to update the refacting plan, and then 5) go through all the remaining refactorings. The refactoring plan comes with timeline estimates in days, but that is completely rubbish with claude code. Instead i asked it to estimate in 1) number of chat messages, 2) number of tokens, 3) cost based on number of tokens, 4) number of files impacted. Another approach that works well is to first generate a throw away application. Then ask it to create documentation how to do it right, incorporate all the learning and where it got stuck. Finally, redo the application with these guidelines and rules. Another tip, sometimes when it gets stuck, i open the project in windsurf, and ask another LLM (e.g., Gemini 2.5 pro, or qwen coder) to review the project and problem and then I will ask windsurf to provide me with a prompt to instruct claude code to fix it. Works well in some cases. Also, biggest insight so far: don't expect it to be perfect first time. It needs a feedback loop: generate code, test the code, inspect the results and then improve the code. Works well for SQL, especially if it can access real data: inspect the database, try some queries, try to understand the schema from your data and then work towards a SQL query that works. And then often as a final step it will simplify the working query. I use an MCP tool with full access to a test database, so you can tell it to run explain plan and look at the statistics (pg_stat_statements). It will draw a mermaid diagram of your query, with performance numbers included (nr records retrieved, cache hit, etc), and will come back with optimized query and index suggestions. Tried it also on csv and parquet files with duckdb, it will run the explain plan, compare both query, explain why parquet is better, will see that the query is doing predicate push down, etc. Also when it gets things wrong, instead of inspecting the code, i ask it to create a design document with mermaid diagrams describing what it has built. Quite often that quickly shows some design mistake that you can ask it to fix. Also with multiple tools on the same project, you have the problem of each using it's own way of keeping track of the plan. I asked claude code to come up with rules for itself and windsurf to collaborate on a project. It came back with a set of rules for CLAUDE.md and .windsurfrules on which files to have, and how to use them (PLAN.md, TODO.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, DECISION.md, COLLABORATION.md)

_l7dh 1y ago

Feels like the most valuable skill to have as a programmer in times of Claude Code is that of carefully reading spec documentation and having an acute sense of critical thinking when reviewing code.

raincole 1y ago
For seniors these skills are very valuable before LLM anyway.
sc077y 1y ago
Critical Skills is spotting the potential bugs before they happen but in order to do that you need to have an extremely acute understanding or a have a lot of experience in the stack, libs and programming language of choice. Something that, ironically, you will not get by "vibe coding".
anthonypasq 1y ago
so... software engineering?

DrStartup 1y ago

hook up zen mcp to openrouter and use cerabras inference with kimi k2 and qwen3 480b at 2k tok/sec

sergiotapia 1y ago

I haven't used Claude Code - but have been using Amp a lot recently. Amp always hits on target. They created something really special. Has anyone here used both Claude Code and Amp and can compare the two's effectiveness? I know one is CLI and the other an editor extensions. I'm looking for comparisons beyond that. Thanks!

wordofx 1y ago
I don’t know why amp isn’t talked about more. It’s better than Claude code.
- lukaslalinsky 1y ago
  It burns through credit too quickly. As a previous Sourcegraph Cody user, I was trying Amp first, but I've spent tens of dollars every day for the trial, and that was with an eye on the usage. It felt horrible seeing how I pay mostly for it's mistakes and the time it takes debugging. With CC, I can let go of the anxiety. I get several hours a day out of the Claude Pro plan and that's mostly good enough for now. If it's not, I'll upgrade to Max, as at $100 that's still less than what I'd have spent on Amp.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    That's the thing for me too: I don't want to pay for the agent's mistakes, even if those mistakes are in part the fault of my prompt. I'm fine with having usage limits if it means I pay a fixed cost per month. Not sure how long this will last, considering how expensive all this is for the companies to run, though. I feel like Amp's costs are actually in line with Sourcegraph's costs, and eventually Anthropic, OpenAI, et al. will all be charging a lot more than they are now. It's the classic play to entice people to something for low cost, and then later ramp it up once they're hooked. Right now they can afford to burn VC money, but that won't last forever.
  - wordofx 1y ago
    My AMP bill is less than Claude Code but I’m getting more work done.

dimal 1y ago

Technically you’re not vibe coding. You’re using AI to do software engineering. Vibe coding is specifically the process of having AI produce code and plowing ahead without understanding it. I know I’m being pedantic, but people mean very different things when they talk about this stuff, and I don’t think any credence should be given to vibe coding.

radley 1y ago
Both are vibe coding. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla. Maybe you're thinking of slop coding?
- danparsonson 1y ago
  No, they're not. "A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.[1] Programmer Simon Willison said: 'If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant.'" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding) > The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla. And...?
  - radley 1y ago
    I wasn't familiar with his full message, so I didn't realize that the current definition of vibe coding was so cynical. Many of us don't see it that way.
- Leynos 1y ago
  Karpathy's definition definitely requires: 1. Not looking at the code 2. YOLO everything 3. Paste errors back into the model verbatim That said, I describe what I do as vibe coding, but I introduce code review bots into the mix. I also roadmap a plan with deep research before hand and require comprehensive unit and behavioural tests from the model.
- 1y ago

Lucasoato 1y ago

> I couldn't imagine paying >100$/month for a dev tool in the past, but I'm seriously considering upgrading to the Max plans. Sadly, my experience with the Max plan has been extremely poor. It’s not even comparable, I’ve been vastly experimenting with claude code in the last weeks, spending more than 80$ per day, it’s amazing. The problem is that in the Max plan you’re not the one managing the context length, and this ruins the model ability to keep things memory. Of course this is expected, the longer the context the more expensive to run, but it’s so frustrating to fail in a coding task because it’s so obvious the model lost a crucial part of the context.

loandbehold 1y ago
What do you mean you are not managing context length? Context length is same, 200K tokens.

maxjustus 1y ago

One thing I’ve started doing is using Gemini cli as a sidecar for Claude Code to load in a huge amount of context around a set of changes to get a second opinion - it’s been pretty handy for that particular use case due to its context size advantage

nmfisher 1y ago

I found Gemini CLI to be totally useless too. Last week I tried Claude Code with GLM4.5 (via z.ai API), though, and it was genuinely on par with Sonnet.

lukaslalinsky 1y ago
Thank you for the recommendation. I've been testing this on an open source project and it's indeed good. Not as good as Sonnet 4, but good enough. And the pricing is very reasonable. Don't know if I'd trust it to work on private code, but for public code it's a great option.

kelnos 1y ago

My experience has been similar, over perhaps 4-6 weeks of Claude Code. My first few days were a bit rough, and I was tempted to give up and proclaim that all my skeptic's opinions were correct and that it was useless. But there is indeed a learning curve to using it. After a month I'm still learning, but I can get it to give me useful output that I'm happy committing to my projects, after reviewing it line by line. Agreed that context and chunking are the key to making it productive. The times when I've tried to tell it (in a single prompt) everything I want it to do, were not successful. The code was garbage, and a lot of it just didn't do what I wanted it to do. And when there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, CC has trouble making targeted changes to fix issues one by one. Much better is to build each small chunk, and verify that it fully works, before moving on to the next. You also have to call its bullshit: sometimes it will try to solve a problem in a way you know is wrong, so you have to stop it and tell it to do it in another way. I suppose I shouldn't call it "bullshit"; if we're going to use the analogy of CC being like an inexperienced junior engineer, then that's just the kind of thing that happens when you pair with a junior. I still often do find that I give it a task, and when it's done, realize that I could have finished it much faster. But sometimes the task is tedious, and I'm fine with it taking a little longer if I don't have to do it myself. And sometimes it truly does take care of it faster than I would have been able to. In the case of tech that I'm learning myself (React, Tailwindcss, the former of which I dabbled with 10 years ago, but my knowledge is completely out of date), CC has been incredibly useful when I don't really know how to do something. I'm fine letting CC do it, and then I read the code and learn something myself, instead of having to pore over various tutorials of varying quality in order to figure it out on my own. So I think I'm convinced, and I'll continue to make CC more and more a part of my workflow. I'm currently on the Pro plan, and have hit the usage limits a couple times. I'm still a little shy about upgrading to Max and spending $100/mo on a dev tool... not sure if I'll get over that or not.

bsder 1y ago

> I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. And, yet, when I asked it to correct a CMake error in a fully open source codebase (broken dependency declaration), it couldn't work it out. It even started hallucinating version numbers and dependencies that were so obviously broken that at least it was obvious to me that it wasn't helping. This has been, and continues to be, my experience with AI coding. Every time I hit something that I really, really want the AI to do and get right (like correcting my build system errors), it fails and fails miserably. It seems like everybody who sings the praises of AI coding all have one thing in common--Javascript. Make of that what you will.

lukaslalinsky 1y ago
This is typically the outcome, when you have it look at a generic problem and fix it, especially if the problem depends on external information (like specific version numbers, etc). You have to either tell it where to look it up, or ask it to ask you questions how things need to be resolved. I personally use it to work on native code, C++ (with CMake), Zig, some Python. Works fine.
- bsder 1y ago
  Except the whole point of using AI is to be able to actively route around gigantic dumpster fires of fail like CMake. The bug was the CMake-specific formulation and incantation of a Git tag. Something that should be in the documentation that it ingested. If AI can't even fix something this simple, what's the point?

enobrev 1y ago

I have a similar amount of engineering experience, was highly skeptical, and I've come to similar conclusions with Claude Code after spending two weeks on a greenfield project (TS api, react-native client, TS/React admin panel). As I've improved planning and context management, the results have been fairly consistent. As long as I can keep a task within the context window, it does a decent job almost every time. And occasionally I have to have it brute-force its way to green lint/typecheck/tests. That's been one of the biggest speed bumps. I've found that gemini is great at the occasional detailed code-review to help find glaring issues or things that were missed, but having it implement anything has been severely lacking. I have to literally tell it not to do anything because it will gladly just start writing files on a whim. I generally use the opus model to write detailed plans, sonnet to implement, and then opus and gemini to review and plan refactors. I'm impressed. The progress is SLOW. I'd have gotten to the stage I'm at in 1/3 to 1/2 the time, likely with fewer tests and significantly less process documentation. But the results are otherwise fairly great. And the learning process has kept me motivated to keep this old side-project moving. I was switching between two accounts for a week while testing, but in the end upgraded to the $100/month plan and I think I've been rate-limited once since. I don't know if I'll be using this for every-day professional work, but I think it's a great tool for a few categories of work.

luxuryballs 1y ago

check out openrouter.ai you can pay for credits that get used per prompt instead of forking out a fixed lump sum and it rotates keys so you can avoid being throttled, you can even use the same credits on any model in their index

mywacaday 1y ago

I completed my degree over 20 years ago and due to dot com bust and the path I took never coded as a full time role, some smallbits of dev and scripting but nothing where I would call myself a developer. I've had loads of ideas down through the years but never had the time work to complete them or learn the language/stack to complete them. Over the last 3 weeks I've been working on something small that should be ready for a beta release by the end of August. The ability to sit down and work on a feature or bug when I only have a spare 30 mins and be immediately productive without having to get in the zone is a game changer for me. Also while I can read and understand the code writing it would be at least 10 times slower for me. This is a small codebase that will have less than 5k lines and is not complicated so github copilot is working well for me in this case. I could see me paying for higher tiers given the productivity gains. The only issue I can see is that we might end up with a society where those that can afford the best subscriptions have more free time, get more done, make more money and are more successful in general. Even current base level subscriptions are too expensive for huge percentage of the global population.

bamboozled 1y ago

The more I use it the more I realise my first two weeks and the amazement I felt were an illusion. I’m not going to tell you it’s not useful, it is. But then shine wears off pretty fast and when it does, you’re basically left with a faster way to type. At least in my experience. It’s amazing , but it’s dumb.

narrator 1y ago

Gemini is not that good right now. GLM-4.5, which just came out, is pretty decent and very cheap. I use these with the RooCode plugin for VSCode that connects to it via OpenRouter. $10 of credits lasts a day of coding for me where as Claude would run that out in an hour.

SV_BubbleTime 1y 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. I had a similar thought about the Turing Test… It as science fiction for decades… then it passed silently in the night and we barely noticed.