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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 t

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]
  - adregan 1y ago
    The is not the xkcd I thought it would be. This is the xkcd that Claude code makes me think of: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ I don’t feel Claude code helps one iota with the issue in 1319. If anything, it has increased the prevalence of “ongoing development” as I auto mate more things and create more problems to solve. However, I have fixed up and added features to 10 year old scripts that I never considered worth the trade off to work on. It makes the cost of automation cheaper.
- einpoklum 1y ago
  It's not a dream come true to have a bunch of GPUs crunching at full power to achieve your minor automation, with the company making them available losing massive amounts of money on it: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ ... while also exposing the contents of your computer to surveillence.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    Well, yes there is that. I'd like to say I'm praising the paradigm shift more than anything else (and this is to some degree achievable with smaller, open and sometimes local agentic models), but yes, there are definitely nasty externalities (though burning VC cash is not high up that list for me). I hope some externalities can be be optimized away. But a fair comment.
  - pinoy420 1y ago
    [dead]
  - arrowsmith 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - stitched2gethr 1y ago
    Well me plus a $1200 / year subscription is still much cheaper than 2 of me.
    - __loam 1y ago
      The point is that it costs more than $1200, you're just not the one paying all the costs. It seems like there are a ton of people on HN who are absolutely pumped to be totally dependent on a tool that must rugpull them eventually to continue existing as a business. It feels like an incredible shame that the craft is now starting to become totally dependent on tools like this, where you're calling out to the cloud to do even the most basic programming task.
- jppittma 1y ago
  Here's the hope that the demand for software continues to increase as developer productivity rises, and that increases in developer productivity are partially captured in higher salaries.
risyachka 1y ago
Its all great until >> I thought I would see a pretty drastic change in terms of Pull Requests, Commits and Line of Code merged in the last 6 weeks. I don’t think that holds water though The chart basically shows same output with claude than before. Which kinda represents what I felt when using LLMs. You "feel" more productive and you definitely feel "better" because you don't do the work now, you babysit the model and feel productive. But at the end of the day the output is the same because all advantages of LLMs is nerfed by time you have to review all that, fix it, re-prompt it etc. And because you offload the "hard" part - and don't flex that thinking muscle - your skills decline pretty fast. Try using Claude or another LLM for a month and then try doing a tiny little app without it. Its not only the code part that will seem hard - but the general architecture/structuring too. And in the end the whole code base slowly (but not that slowly) degrades and in longer term results net negative. At least with current LLMs.
- holoduke 1y ago
  Not for me. I just reversed engineered a bluetooth protocol for a device which would taken me at least a few days capturing streams of data wireshark. Now i dumped entire dumps inside a llm and it gave me much more control finding the right offsets etc. It took me only a day.
  - pinoy420 1y ago
    [dead]
  - mattmanser 1y ago
    That's not really coding though is it. No point comparing apples with oranges, most of us don't program by reverse engineering using wireshark.
- justlikereddit 1y ago
  I've been exploring vibe coding lately and by far the biggest benefit is the lack of mental strain. You don't have to try to remember your code as a conceptual whole, what your technical implementation of the next hour of code was going to be like at the same time as a stubborn bug is taunting you. You just ask Mr smartybots and it deliver anything between proofreading and documentation and whatnot, with some minor fuckups occasionally
fantasizr 1y ago
I learned the hard old fashioned way how to build a imagemagick/mogrify command. Having the ai tools assist saves a crazy amount of time.
skydhash 1y ago
> If there's a CLI tool, Claude can run it. If there's not a CLI tool... ask Claude anyway, you might be surprised. No Claude Code needed for that! Just hang around r/unixporn and you'll collect enough scripts and tips to realize that mainstream OS have pushed computers from a useful tool to a consumerism toy.
- knowsuchagency 1y ago
  That's like saying "you don't need a car, just hang around this bicycle shop long enough and you'll realize you can exercise your way around the town!"
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  The point is not that a tool maybe exists. The point is: You don't have to care if the tool exists and you don't have to collect anything. Just ask Claude code and it does what you want. At least that's how I read the comment.
- elAhmo 1y ago
  Simple task of unzipping with tar is cryptic enough that collecting unix scripts from random people is definitely something people don't want to do in 2025.
  - dv_dt 1y ago
    Script? I havent used anything more complex than "tar xzf file" in a decade
    - SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
      Remembering one thing is easy, remembering all the things is not. With an agentic CLI I don't need to remember anything, other than if it looks safe or not.
      - skydhash 1y ago
        No one remember all the things. It's usually ctrl+r (history search) or write it down in some script or alias.
globular-toast 1y ago
Do you have a decent backup system? Or do you make use of sandboxes?
npilk 1y ago
Completely agree. Another use case is a static site generator. I just write posts with whatever syntax I want and tell Claude Code to make it into a blog post in the same format. For example, I can just write in the post “add image image.jpeg here” and it will add it - much easier than messing around with Markdown or Hugo.
EFreethought 1y ago
> It can, in fact, control your entire computer. Honestly, that sounds like malware.
- illusive4080 1y ago
  No because _you_ are in control. Not the AI.
  - EFreethought 1y ago
    Maybe you do today. Will that always be the case? People running Windows do not have as much control over their systems as they should. What does enshittification look like for AI? Why should I trust any of these AI vendors?
- iammrpayments 1y ago
  I also don’t understand how everybody is installing these packages with npm -g and not worrying about anything
bravesoul2 1y ago
I got it to diagnose why my Linux PC was crashing. It did a lot of journalctl grepping on my behalf and was glad for its help. Think it may have helped fix it but will see.
- ehnto 1y ago
  I was having a kernel panic on boot, I would work around it by loading the previous kernel. Turns out I had just ran out of space on my boot partition, but in my initial attemps to debug and fix I had gotten into a broken package state. I handed it the reigns just out of morbid curiosity, and because I couldn't be bothered continuing for the night, but to my surprise (and with my guidance step by step) it did figure it all out. It found unused kernels, after uninstalling them didn't remove them, it deleted them with rm. It then helped resolve the broken package state and eventually I was back in a clean working state. Importantly though, it did not know it hadn't actually cleaned up the boot partition initially. I had to insist that it had not in fact just freed up space, and that it would need to remove them.
weitendorf 1y ago
You probably want to give Claude a computer. I'm not sure you always want to give it your computer unless you're in the loop. We have Linux instances running an IDE running in cloud vms that we can access through the browser at https://brilliant.mplode.dev https://brilliant.mplode.dev. Personally I think this is closer to the ideal UX for operating an agent (our environment doesn't install agents by default yet, but you should be able to just install them manually). You don't have to do anything to set up terminal access or ssh except sign in and wait for your initial instance to start, and once you have any instance provisioned it automatically pauses and resumes based on whether your browser has it open. It's literally Claude + A personal Linux instance + an IDE that you can just open from a link Pretty soon I should be able run as many of these at a time as I can afford, and control all of their permissions/filesystems/whatever with JWTs and containers. If it gets messed up or needs my attention I open it with the IDE as my UI and can just dive in and fix it. I don't need a regular Linux desktop environment or UI or anything. Just render things in panes of the IDE or launch a container serving a webapp doing what I want and open it instead of the IDE. Haven't ever felt this excited about tech progress
d4rkp4ttern 1y ago
Beyond just running CLI commands, you can have CC interact with those, e.g I built this little tool that gives CC a Tmux-cli command (a convenience wrapper around Tmux) that lets it interact with CLI applications and monitor them etc: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools For example this lets CC spawn another CC instance and give it a task (way better than the built-in spawn-and-let-go black box), or interact with CLI scripts that expect user input, or use debuggers like Pdb for token-efficient debugging and code-understanding, etc.

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]
- adregan 1y ago
  The is not the xkcd I thought it would be. This is the xkcd that Claude code makes me think of: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ I don’t feel Claude code helps one iota with the issue in 1319. If anything, it has increased the prevalence of “ongoing development” as I auto mate more things and create more problems to solve. However, I have fixed up and added features to 10 year old scripts that I never considered worth the trade off to work on. It makes the cost of automation cheaper.
einpoklum 1y ago
It's not a dream come true to have a bunch of GPUs crunching at full power to achieve your minor automation, with the company making them available losing massive amounts of money on it: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ ... while also exposing the contents of your computer to surveillence.
- danielbln 1y ago
  Well, yes there is that. I'd like to say I'm praising the paradigm shift more than anything else (and this is to some degree achievable with smaller, open and sometimes local agentic models), but yes, there are definitely nasty externalities (though burning VC cash is not high up that list for me). I hope some externalities can be be optimized away. But a fair comment.
- pinoy420 1y ago
  [dead]
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  [flagged]
- stitched2gethr 1y ago
  Well me plus a $1200 / year subscription is still much cheaper than 2 of me.
  - __loam 1y ago
    The point is that it costs more than $1200, you're just not the one paying all the costs. It seems like there are a ton of people on HN who are absolutely pumped to be totally dependent on a tool that must rugpull them eventually to continue existing as a business. It feels like an incredible shame that the craft is now starting to become totally dependent on tools like this, where you're calling out to the cloud to do even the most basic programming task.
jppittma 1y ago
Here's the hope that the demand for software continues to increase as developer productivity rises, and that increases in developer productivity are partially captured in higher salaries.

risyachka 1y ago

Its all great until >> I thought I would see a pretty drastic change in terms of Pull Requests, Commits and Line of Code merged in the last 6 weeks. I don’t think that holds water though The chart basically shows same output with claude than before. Which kinda represents what I felt when using LLMs. You "feel" more productive and you definitely feel "better" because you don't do the work now, you babysit the model and feel productive. But at the end of the day the output is the same because all advantages of LLMs is nerfed by time you have to review all that, fix it, re-prompt it etc. And because you offload the "hard" part - and don't flex that thinking muscle - your skills decline pretty fast. Try using Claude or another LLM for a month and then try doing a tiny little app without it. Its not only the code part that will seem hard - but the general architecture/structuring too. And in the end the whole code base slowly (but not that slowly) degrades and in longer term results net negative. At least with current LLMs.

holoduke 1y ago
Not for me. I just reversed engineered a bluetooth protocol for a device which would taken me at least a few days capturing streams of data wireshark. Now i dumped entire dumps inside a llm and it gave me much more control finding the right offsets etc. It took me only a day.
- pinoy420 1y ago
  [dead]
- mattmanser 1y ago
  That's not really coding though is it. No point comparing apples with oranges, most of us don't program by reverse engineering using wireshark.
justlikereddit 1y ago
I've been exploring vibe coding lately and by far the biggest benefit is the lack of mental strain. You don't have to try to remember your code as a conceptual whole, what your technical implementation of the next hour of code was going to be like at the same time as a stubborn bug is taunting you. You just ask Mr smartybots and it deliver anything between proofreading and documentation and whatnot, with some minor fuckups occasionally

fantasizr 1y ago

I learned the hard old fashioned way how to build a imagemagick/mogrify command. Having the ai tools assist saves a crazy amount of time.

skydhash 1y ago

> If there's a CLI tool, Claude can run it. If there's not a CLI tool... ask Claude anyway, you might be surprised. No Claude Code needed for that! Just hang around r/unixporn and you'll collect enough scripts and tips to realize that mainstream OS have pushed computers from a useful tool to a consumerism toy.

knowsuchagency 1y ago
That's like saying "you don't need a car, just hang around this bicycle shop long enough and you'll realize you can exercise your way around the town!"
jstummbillig 1y ago
The point is not that a tool maybe exists. The point is: You don't have to care if the tool exists and you don't have to collect anything. Just ask Claude code and it does what you want. At least that's how I read the comment.
elAhmo 1y ago
Simple task of unzipping with tar is cryptic enough that collecting unix scripts from random people is definitely something people don't want to do in 2025.
- dv_dt 1y ago
  Script? I havent used anything more complex than "tar xzf file" in a decade
  - SparkyMcUnicorn 1y ago
    Remembering one thing is easy, remembering all the things is not. With an agentic CLI I don't need to remember anything, other than if it looks safe or not.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      No one remember all the things. It's usually ctrl+r (history search) or write it down in some script or alias.

globular-toast 1y ago

Do you have a decent backup system? Or do you make use of sandboxes?

npilk 1y ago

Completely agree. Another use case is a static site generator. I just write posts with whatever syntax I want and tell Claude Code to make it into a blog post in the same format. For example, I can just write in the post “add image image.jpeg here” and it will add it - much easier than messing around with Markdown or Hugo.

EFreethought 1y ago

> It can, in fact, control your entire computer. Honestly, that sounds like malware.

illusive4080 1y ago
No because _you_ are in control. Not the AI.
- EFreethought 1y ago
  Maybe you do today. Will that always be the case? People running Windows do not have as much control over their systems as they should. What does enshittification look like for AI? Why should I trust any of these AI vendors?
iammrpayments 1y ago
I also don’t understand how everybody is installing these packages with npm -g and not worrying about anything

bravesoul2 1y ago

I got it to diagnose why my Linux PC was crashing. It did a lot of journalctl grepping on my behalf and was glad for its help. Think it may have helped fix it but will see.

ehnto 1y ago
I was having a kernel panic on boot, I would work around it by loading the previous kernel. Turns out I had just ran out of space on my boot partition, but in my initial attemps to debug and fix I had gotten into a broken package state. I handed it the reigns just out of morbid curiosity, and because I couldn't be bothered continuing for the night, but to my surprise (and with my guidance step by step) it did figure it all out. It found unused kernels, after uninstalling them didn't remove them, it deleted them with rm. It then helped resolve the broken package state and eventually I was back in a clean working state. Importantly though, it did not know it hadn't actually cleaned up the boot partition initially. I had to insist that it had not in fact just freed up space, and that it would need to remove them.

weitendorf 1y ago

You probably want to give Claude a computer. I'm not sure you always want to give it your computer unless you're in the loop. We have Linux instances running an IDE running in cloud vms that we can access through the browser at https://brilliant.mplode.dev https://brilliant.mplode.dev. Personally I think this is closer to the ideal UX for operating an agent (our environment doesn't install agents by default yet, but you should be able to just install them manually). You don't have to do anything to set up terminal access or ssh except sign in and wait for your initial instance to start, and once you have any instance provisioned it automatically pauses and resumes based on whether your browser has it open. It's literally Claude + A personal Linux instance + an IDE that you can just open from a link Pretty soon I should be able run as many of these at a time as I can afford, and control all of their permissions/filesystems/whatever with JWTs and containers. If it gets messed up or needs my attention I open it with the IDE as my UI and can just dive in and fix it. I don't need a regular Linux desktop environment or UI or anything. Just render things in panes of the IDE or launch a container serving a webapp doing what I want and open it instead of the IDE. Haven't ever felt this excited about tech progress

d4rkp4ttern 1y ago

Beyond just running CLI commands, you can have CC interact with those, e.g I built this little tool that gives CC a Tmux-cli command (a convenience wrapper around Tmux) that lets it interact with CLI applications and monitor them etc: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools For example this lets CC spawn another CC instance and give it a task (way better than the built-in spawn-and-let-go black box), or interact with CLI scripts that expect user input, or use debuggers like Pdb for token-efficient debugging and code-understanding, etc.