2 ms·

Yeah, as a primarily backend engineer dealing with either weird technical problems Claude can't get quite right or esoteric business domain problems Claude has

Yeah, as a primarily backend engineer dealing with either weird technical problems Claude can't get quite right or esoteric business domain problems Claude has no idea about (and indeed, it may be only a few people in one company could help with) - Claude isn't that useful. But random stuff like make a web app that automates this thing or make an admin panel with auto complete on these fields and caching data pulled from this table. It is like infinity times faster on this tedious boilerplate because some of this stuff I'd just have never done before. Or I'd have needed to get some headcount in some web dev team to do it, but I just don't need to. Not that I'd have ever actually bothered to do that anyway...

martinald 1y ago
One thing I'd recommend for weird business domain projects as a starter is getting it to create a "wiki" of markdown files of all the logic (I suspect this may have been on your to-do list anyway!). You may be pleasantly surprised at how well it does it, and then you can update your claude.md file to point to them (or even put it in there, but it is maybe overkill).
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Asking for documentation is good. I had a data structure in Java that was a bunch of nested Map<String, Object>(s) that I partially understood and asked my agent to write me some sample JSON documents and... it just did it and it was a big help for manual coding against that structure. When I can't figure out something about a library I have often loaded the git repository into my IDE and checked out the version I was using, then used the IDE to study the code. Now I do that and ask the agent questions about the code like "How do I do X?" (often it sees the part in the doumentation that I missed) or "Where is the code that does Y?" It greatly accelerates the process of understanding code.
- kaashif 1y ago
  Agreed - LLMs are great at reading and synthesising docs. At various points I've gotten pushback when I ask people to document because no-one will look at the docs, but now we have LLMs to read and link to docs for us. And traditional search still works, of course, but worse.
viccis 1y ago
I've found that it's mainly good at doing coding work that basically anyone who's memorized the content of the relevant docs could do. So I mostly only use it as glorified scaffolding, as it crashes and burns on complex stuff in big legacy codebases.

martinald 1y ago

One thing I'd recommend for weird business domain projects as a starter is getting it to create a "wiki" of markdown files of all the logic (I suspect this may have been on your to-do list anyway!). You may be pleasantly surprised at how well it does it, and then you can update your claude.md file to point to them (or even put it in there, but it is maybe overkill).

PaulHoule 1y ago
Asking for documentation is good. I had a data structure in Java that was a bunch of nested Map<String, Object>(s) that I partially understood and asked my agent to write me some sample JSON documents and... it just did it and it was a big help for manual coding against that structure. When I can't figure out something about a library I have often loaded the git repository into my IDE and checked out the version I was using, then used the IDE to study the code. Now I do that and ask the agent questions about the code like "How do I do X?" (often it sees the part in the doumentation that I missed) or "Where is the code that does Y?" It greatly accelerates the process of understanding code.
kaashif 1y ago
Agreed - LLMs are great at reading and synthesising docs. At various points I've gotten pushback when I ask people to document because no-one will look at the docs, but now we have LLMs to read and link to docs for us. And traditional search still works, of course, but worse.

viccis 1y ago

I've found that it's mainly good at doing coding work that basically anyone who's memorized the content of the relevant docs could do. So I mostly only use it as glorified scaffolding, as it crashes and burns on complex stuff in big legacy codebases.