13 ms·

What makes Claude Code so damn good

469 points by samuelstros 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
LaGrange 1y ago
[flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, and especially not putdowns. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully. If not, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    I appreciate the vague negative takes on tools like this where it feels like there is so much hype it's impossible to have a different opinion. "It's bad" is perfectly substantiative in my opinion; this person tried it, didn't like it, and doesn't have much more to say because of that, but it's still a useful perspective. Is this why HN is so dang pro-AI? the negative comments, even small ones, are moderated away? explains a lot TBH
    - h4ch1 1y ago
      I think this comment would be a little better by specifying WHY it's bad instead of just a "it's bad" like it's a Twitter thread.
      - LaGrange 1y ago
        The subject is pretty exhausted. The reason I post "it's bad" because, honestly, expending on it just feels like a waste of time and energy. The point is demonstrating that this _isn't_ a consensus, and not much more than that. Edit: bonus points if this gets me banned.
        dang 1y ago
        (We don't ban people for posting like this!) If it felt like a waste of time and energy to post something substantive, rather than the GP comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44998577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44998577), then you should have just posted nothing. That comment was obviously neither substantive nor thoughtful. This is hardly a borderline call! We want substantive, thoughtful comments from people who do have the time and energy to contribute them. Btw, to avoid a misunderstanding that sometimes shows up: it's fine for comments to be critical; that is, it's possible to be substantive, thoughtful, and critical all at the same time. For example, I skimmed through your account's most recent comments and saw several of that kind, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299479 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42882357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42882357. If your GP comment had been like that, it would have been fine; you don't have to like Claude Code (or whatever the $thing is).
    - exe34 1y ago
      that wasn't a negative comment though. a negative comment would explain what they didn't like about it. this was the digital equivalent of flytipping.
    - danielbln 1y ago
      There is no value in a single poster saying "it's bad". I don't know this person, there is zero context on why I should care that this user thinks it's bad. Unless they state why they think it's bad, it adds nothing to the conversation and is just noise
    - dang 1y ago
      HN is by no means "pro-AI". It's sharply divided, and (as always with these things) each side assumes the other side is dominant.
      - FergusArgyll 1y ago
        "After viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the Beirut massacre, both pro-Israeli and pro-Arab partisans rated these programs, and those responsible for them, as being biased against their side." https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hwang.pdf https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hwang.pdf
        deleted 1y ago
dingnuts 1y ago
[flagged]
- ebzlo 1y ago
  Yes technically it is RAG, but a lot of the community is associating RAG with vector search specifically.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    it does? why? the term RAG as I understand it leaves the methodology for retrieval vague so that different techniques can be used depending on the, er, context.. which makes a lot more sense to me
    - koakuma-chan 1y ago
      > why? Hype. There's nothing wrong with using, e.g., full-text search for RAG.
- BoorishBears 1y ago
  If you want to be really stringent, RAG originally referred to going from user query to retrieving information directly based on the query then passing it to an LLM: With CC the LLM is taking the raw user query then crafting its own searches But realistically lots of RAG systems have LLM calls interleaved for various reasons, so what they probably mean it not doing the usual chunking + embeddings thing.
  - theptip 1y ago
    Yeah, TFA clearly explains their point. They mean RAG=vector search, and contrast this with tool calling (eg Grep).
- nuwandavek 1y ago
  (blogpost author here) You're right! I did make the distinction in an earlier draft, but decided to use "RAG" interchangeably with vector search, as it is popularly known today in code-gen systems. I'd probably go back to the previous version too. But I do think there is a qualitative different between getting candidates and adding them to context before generating (retrieval augmented generation) vs the LLM searching for context till it is satisfied.
alex1138 1y ago
What do people think of Google's Gemini (Pro?) compared to Claude for code? I really like a lot of what Google produces, but they can't seem to keep a product that they don't shut down and they can be pretty ham-fisted, both with corporate control (Chrome and corrupt practices) and censorship
- KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
  It sucks.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
    Lol downvoted, come on anyone who has used gemini and claude code knows there's no comparison... gimme a break.
    - bitpush 1y ago
      You're getting down voted because of the curt "it sucks" which shows a level of shallowness in your understanding. Nothing in the world is simply outright garbage. Even the seemingly worst products exist for a reason and is used for a variety of use cases. So, take a step back and reevaluate whether your reply could have been better. Because, it simply "just sucks"
    - polotics 1y ago
      can you detail the differences you see that substantiate your judgement?
- ezfe 1y ago
  Gemini frequently didn't write code for me for no explicable reason, and just talked about a hypothetical solution. Seems like a tooling issue though.
  - djmips 1y ago
    Sounds almost human!
siva7 1y ago
It's more interesting to compare what gemini cli and codex cli did wrong? (though i haven't used both of them for weeks to months)
syntaxing 1y ago
I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong. I was using Sonnet 4 with GitHub Copilot. Recently a week ago switched to Claude Code. I find GitHub Copilot solves problem and bugs way better than Claude Code. For some reason, Claude Code seems very lazy. Has anyone experience something similar?
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  I haven’t tried other LLMs but have a fair amount of experience with Claude Code, and there definitely times when you have to be explicit about the route you want it to take and tell it to not take shortcuts. It’s not consistent, though. I haven’t figured out what they are but it feels like there are circumstances where it’s more prone to doing ugly hacky things.
- StephenAshmore 1y ago
  It may be a configuration thing. I've found quite the opposite. Github Copilot using Sonnet 4 will not manage context very well, quite frequently resorting to running terminal commands to search for code even when I gave it the exact file it's looking for in the copilot context. Claude code, for me, is usually much smarter when it comes to reading code and then applying changes across a lot of files. I also have it integrated into the IDE so it can make visual changes in the editor similar to GitHub Copilot.
  - syntaxing 1y ago
    I do agree with you, Github Copilot uses more tokens like you mentioned with redundant searches. But at the end of the day, it solves the problem. Not sure if the cost out weights the benefit though compared to Claude Claude. Going to try Claude Code more and see if I'm prompting it incorrectly.
- libraryofbabel 1y ago
  The consensus is the opposite: most people find copilot does less well than Claude with both using sonnet 4. Without discounting your experience, you’ll need to give us more detail about what exactly you were trying to do (what problem, what prompt) and what you mean by “lazy” if you want any meaningful advice though.
diego_sandoval 1y ago
It shocks me when people say that LLMs don't make them more productive, because my experience has been the complete opposite, especially with Claude Code. Either I'm worse than then at programming, to the point that I find an LLM useful and they don't, or they don't know how to use LLMs for coding.
- dsiegel2275 1y ago
  Agreed. I only started using Claude Code about a week and a half ago and I'm blown away by how productive I can be with it.
  - pawelduda 1y ago
    I've had occasions where a relatively short prompt solved me an entire day of debugging and fixing things, because it was tech stack I barely knew. Most impressive part was when CC knew the changes may take some time to be applied and just used `sleep 60; check logs;` 2-3 times and then started checking elsewhere if something's stuck. It was, CC cleaned it up and a minute later someone pinged me that the it works.
- ta12653421 1y ago
  Productivity boost is unbelieveable! If you handle it right, its a boon - its like having 3 junior devs at hand. And I'm talking about using the web interface. I guess most people are not paying and cant therefore apply the project-space (which is one of the best features), which unleashes its full magic. Even if I'm currently without a job, I'm still paying because it helps me.
  - ta12653421 1y ago
    LOL why do I get downvoted for explaining my experience? :-D
    - fourthark 1y ago
      So describe your experience without being a booster
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
I think it’s just that the base model is good at real world coding tasks - as opposed to the types of coding tasks in the common benchmarks. If you use GitHub Copilot - which has its own system level prompts - you can hotswap between models, and Claude outperforms OpenAI’s and Google’s models by such a large margin that the others are functionally useless in comparison.
- ec109685 1y ago
  Anthropic has opportunities to optimize their models / prompts during reinforcement learning, so the advice from the article to stay close to what works in Claude code is valid and probably has more applicability for Anthropic models than applying the same techniques to others. With a subscription plan, Anthropic is highly incentivized to be efficient in their loops beyond just making it a better experience for users.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- badestrand 1y ago
  I read all the praise about Claude Code, tried it for a month and was very disappointed. For me it doesn't work any better than Cursor's sidebar and has worse UX on top. I wonder if I am doing something wrong because it just makes lots of stupid mistakes when coding for me, in two different code bases.
  - mnvrth 1y ago
    I'll suggest giving it another shot. It really is a game changer (I can't tell what you're doing wrong, but in a few people I've seen it has been about doing a psychological switch. I wrote about it a bit here - https://mnvr.in/beginners-mind https://mnvr.in/beginners-mind, sharing in case it helps you see how you might approach it differently)
- paool 1y ago
  It's not just the base model Try using opus with cline in vs code. Then use Claude code. I don't know the best way to quantify the differences, but I know I get more done in CC.
sdsd 1y ago
Oof, this comes at a hard moment in my Claude Code usage. I'm trying to have it help me debug some Elastic issues on Security Onion but after a few minutes it spits out a zillion lines of obfuscated JS and says: Error: kill EPERM at process.kill (node:internal/process/per_thread:226:13) at Ba2 (file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19791) at file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19664 at Array.forEach (<anonymous>) at file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19635 at Array.forEach (<anonymous>) at Aa2 (file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19607) at file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19538 at ChildProcess.W (file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:20023) at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:519:28) { errno: -1, code: 'EPERM', syscall: 'kill' } I'm guessing one of the scripts it runs kills Node.js processes, and that inadvertantly kills Claude as well. Or maybe it feels bad that it can't solve my problem and commits suicide. In any case, I wish it would stay alive and help me lol.
- sixtyj 1y ago
  Jump to another LLM helps me to find what happened. *This is not a official advice :)
- idontwantthis 1y ago
  I have had zero good results with any LLM and elastic search. Everything it spits out is a hallucination because there aren’t very many examples of anything complete and in context on the internet.
- fuckyah 1y ago
  [dead]
- triyambakam 1y ago
  I would try upgrading or wiping away your current install and re-installing it. There might be some cached files somewhere that are in a bad state. At least that's what fixed it for me when I recently came across something similar.
gervwyk 1y ago
We’re considering building a coding agent for Lowdefy[1], a framework that lets you build web apps with YAML config. For those who’ve built coding agents: do you think LLMs are better suited for generating structured config vs. raw code? My theory is that agents producing valid YAML/JSON schemas could be more reliable than code generation. The output is constrained, easier to validate, and when it breaks, you can actually debug it. I keep seeing people creating apps with vibe coder tools but then get stuck when they need to modify the generated code. Curious if others think config-based approaches are more practical for AI-assisted development. [1] https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy
- ec109685 1y ago
  I wouldn’t get hung up on one shotting anything. Output to a format that can be machine verified, ideally in a format there is plenty of industry examples for. Then add a grader step to your agentic loop that is triggered after the files are modified. Give feedback to the model if there any errors and it will fix them.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 1y ago
  How do you specify callbacks? Config files should be mature programming languages, not Yaml/Json files.
  - gervwyk 1y ago
    Callback: Blocks (React components) can register events with action chains (a sequential list of async functions) that will be called when the event is triggered. So it is defined in the react component. This abstraction of blocks, events, actions, operations and requests are the only abstraction required in the schema to build fully functional web apps. Might sound crazy but we built full web apps in just yaml.. Been doing this for about 5 years now and it helps us scale to build many web apps, fast, that are easy to maintain. We at Resonancy[1] have found many benefits in doing so. I should write more about this. [1] - https://resonancy.io https://resonancy.io
_1tem 1y ago
CC is so damn good I want to use its agent loop in my agent loop. I'm planning to build a browser agent for some specialized tasks and I'm literally just bundling a docker image with Claude Code and a headless browser and the Playwright MCP server.
- apwell23 1y ago
  cool
HacklesRaised 1y ago
Delusional asshats trying to draft the grift?
the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
Unfortunately, Claude Code is not open source, but there are some tools to better figure out how it is working. If you are really interested in how it works, I strongly recommend looking at Claude Trace: https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-trace https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-trac... It dumps out a JSON file as well as a very nicely formatted HTML file that shows you every single tool and all the prompts that were used for a session.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code You can see the system prompts too. It's all how the base model has been trained to break tasks into discrete steps and work through them patiently, with some robustness to failure cases.
  - the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
    > https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code That repository does not contain the code. It's just used for the issue tracker and some example hooks.
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      It's a javascript app that gets installed on your local system...
      - the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
        I'm aware of how it works since I have been spending a lot of time over the last two months working with Claude's internals. If you have spent some time with it, you know that it is a transpiled and minified mess that is annoyingly hard to detangle. I'm very happy that claude-trace (and claude-bridge [1]) exists because it makes it much easier to work with the internals of Claude than if you have to decompile it yourself. [1]: https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-bridge https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-brid...
athrowaway3z 1y ago
> "THIS IS IMPORTANT" is still State of the Art Had a similar problems until I saw the advice "Dont say what it shouldn't but focus on what it should". i.e. make sure when it reaches for the 'thing', it has the alternative in context. Haven't had those problems since then.
- amelius 1y ago
  I mean, if advice like this worked, then why wouldn't Anthropic let the LLM say it, for instance?
  - donperignon 1y ago
    Because it’s embarrassing, and probably nobody understands why this works, depending on such heuristics that can completely change in the next model is really bad…
    - amelius 1y ago
      I'd say exactly because behavior might change you have to include proper instructions for each model. And depending on people in forums to provide these instructions is of course not great.
sergiotapia 1y ago
Is Claude Code better than Amp?
radleta 1y ago
I’d be curious to know what MCPs you’ve found useful with CC. Thoughts?
- nuwandavek 1y ago
  (blogpost author here) I actually found none of them useful. I think MCP is an incomplete idea. Tools and the system prompt cannot be so cleanly separated (at least not yet). Just slapping on tools hurts performance more than it helps. I've now gone back to just using vanilla CC with a really really rich claude.md file.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  One area of improvement is being able to plug the github issues. I run into bugs which are not documented in documentation or anywhere except github issues. Is it legal to search github issues using LLM? if yes how?
on_the_train 1y ago
The lengths people will go through to avoid to code is astonishing
- apwell23 1y ago
  writing code is not the fun part of coding. I only realized that after using claude code.
  - monkaiju 1y ago
    Hard disagree
    - dragonfax 1y ago
      HARD AGREE (to your disagree)
  - phyzome 1y ago
    Well, I suppose we might have found one of the discriminators in why some people love LLMs and some hate them...
  - recursive 1y ago
    This explains a lot.
yumraj 1y ago
I made insane progress with CC over last several weeks, but lately have noticed progress stalling. I’m in the middle of some refactoring/bug fixing/optimization but it’s constantly running into issues, making half baked changes, not able to fix regressions etc. Still trying to figure out how to make do a better job. Might have to break it into smaller chunks or something. Been pretty frustrating couple of weeks. If anyone has pointers, I’m all ears!!
- fuckyah 1y ago
  [dead]
- imiric 1y ago
  > If anyone has pointers, I’m all ears!! Give programming a try, you might like it.
  - yumraj 1y ago
    Yeah, have been doing that for 30 years. Next…
- jampa 1y ago
  I felt that, too. It turns out I was getting 'too comfortable' while using CC. The best way is to treat CC like a junior engineer and overexplain things before letting it do anything. With time, you start to trust CC, but you shouldn't do that because it is still the same LLM when you started. Another thing is that before, you were in a greenfield project, so Claude didn't need any context to do new things. Now, your codebase is larger, so you need to point out to Claude where it should find more information. You need to spoon-feed the relevant files with "@" where you want it to look up things and make changes. If you feel Claude is lazy, force it to use more thinking budget "think" < "think hard" < "think harder" < "ultrathink.". Sometimes I like to throw "ultrathink" and do something else while it codes. [1] [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices#:~:text=These%20specific%20phrases%20are%20mapped%20directly https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...
- swader999 1y ago
1zael 1y ago
I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers. I've got an existential worry that I'm going to have a SEV incident that will trigger a house of falling cards, but until then I'm constantly leveraging Claude for fixing security vulnerabilities, implementing test-driven-development, and planning out the software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap. I hope this story becomes more and more common as time passes.
- lajisam 1y ago
  “Implementing test-driven development, and planning out software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap” can you give some concrete examples of how CC helped you here?
  - 1zael 1y ago
    Yeah, so I continuously maintain a claude.md file with the feature roadmap for my product (which changes every week but acts as a source of truth). I feed that into a claude software architecture agent that I created, which reviews proposed changes for my current feature build against the longer-term roadmap to ensure I don't 1\ create tech debt with my current approach and 2\ identify opportunities to parallelize work that could help with multiple upcoming features at once. I have also a code reviewer agent in CC that writes all my unit and integration tests, which feeds into my CI/CD pipeline. I use the "/security" command that Claude recently released to review my code for security vulnerabilities while also leveraging a red team agent that tests my codebase for vulnerabilities to patch. I'm starting to integrate Claude into Linear so I can assign Linear tickets to Claude to start working on while I tackle core stuff. Hope that helps!
- foobarbecue 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Mallowram 1y ago
    [dead]
conception 1y ago
Ive seen context forge has a way to use hooks to keep CC going after context condensing. Are there any other patterns or tools people are using with CC to keep it on task, with current context until it has a validated completion of its task? I feel like we have all these tools separately but nothing brings it all together and also isn’t crazy buggy.
- kroaton 1y ago
  Load up the context with your information + task list (broken down into phases). Have Sonnet implement phase one tasks and mark phase 1 as done. Go into planning mode, have Opus review the work (you should ideally also review it at this point). Double press escape and go back to the point in the conversation where you loaded up the context with your information + task list. Tell it to do phase 2. Repeat until you run out of usage.
  - kroaton 1y ago
    From time to time, go into Opus planning mode, have it review your entire codebase and tell it to go file by file and look for bugs, security issues, logical problems, etc. Have it make a list. Then load up the context + task list...
  - conception 1y ago
    Yes, i can manage CC through a task list but there’s nothing technically stopping all your steps from happening automatically. That tool just doesn’t exist yet as far as I can tell but it’s not a very advanced tool to build. I’m surprised no one has put those steps together. Also if the task runs out of context it will get progressively worse rather than refresh its own context from time to time.
- rolls-reus 1y ago
  What’s context forge?
  - conception 1y ago
    https://github.com/webdevtodayjason/context-forge https://github.com/webdevtodayjason/context-forge
whoknowsidont 1y ago
It's not that good, most developers are just really that subpar lol.
roflyear 1y ago
Claude Code is hilarious because often it'll say stuff that's basically "that's too hard, here's a bandaid fix" and implement it lol
ahmedhawas123 1y ago
Thanks for sharing this. At a time where this is a rush towards multi-agent systems, this is helpful to see how an LLM-first organization is going after it. Lots of the design aspects here are things I experiment with day to day so it's good to see others use it as well A few takeaways for me from this (1) Long prompts are good - and don't forget basic things like explaining in the prompt what the tool is, how to help the user, etc (2) Tool calling is basic af; you need more context (when to use, when not to use, etc) (3) Using messages as the state of the memory for the system is OK; i've thought about fancy ways (e.g., persisting dataframes, parsing variables between steps, etc, but seems like as context windows grow, messages should be ok)
- nuwandavek 1y ago
  (author of the blogpost here) Yeah, you can extract a LOT of performance from the basics and don't have to do any complicated setup for ~99% of use cases. Keep the loop simple, have clear tools (it is ok if tools overlap in function). Clarity and simplicity >>> everything else.
  - samuelstros 1y ago
    does a framework like vercel's ai sdk help, or is handling the loop + tool calling so straightforward that a framework is overcomplicating things? for context, i want to build a claude code like agent in a WYSIWYG markdown app. that's how i stumbled on your blog post :)
    - ahmedhawas123 1y ago
      Function / tool calling is actually super simple. I'd honestly recommend either doing it through a single LLM provider (e.g., OpenAI or Gemini) without a hard framework first, and then moving to one of the simpler frameworks if you feel the need to (e.g., LangChain). Frameworks like LangGraph and others can get really complicated really quickly.
    - nuwandavek 1y ago
      There may be other reasons to use ai sdk, but I'd highly recommend starting with a simple loop + port most relevant tools from Claude Code before using any framework. Nice, do share a link, would love to check out your agent!
marmalade2413 1y ago
I would be remis if after reading this I didn't point people towards talk box ( https://github.com/rich-iannone/talk-box https://github.com/rich-iannone/talk-box) from one of the creators of great tables.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
erelong 1y ago
> The main takeaway, again, is to keep things simple. if true this seems like a bloated approach but tbh I wouldn't claim to know totally how to use Claude like the author here... I find you can get a lot of mileage out of "regular" prompts, I'd call them? Just asking for what you need one prompt at a time? I still can't visualize how any of the complexity on top of that like discussed in the article adds anything to carefully crafted prompts one at a time I also still can't really visualize how claude works compared to simple prompts one at a time. Like, wouldn't it be more efficient to generate a prompt and then check it by looping through the appendix sections ("Main Claude Code System Prompt" and "All Claude Code Tools"), or is that basically what the LLM does somewhat mysteriously (it just works)? So like "give me while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" is the entirety of the prompt... then if you need to you can loop through the appendix section? Otherwise isn't that a massive over-use of tokens, and the requests might even be ignored because they're too complex? The control flow eludes me a bit here. I otherwise get the impression that the LLM does not use the appendix sections correctly by adding them to prompts (like, couldn't it just ignore them at times)? It would seem like you'd get more accurate responses by separating that from whatever you're prompting and then checking the prompt through looping over the appendix sections. Does that make any sense? I'm visualizing coding an entire program as prompting discrete pieces of it. I have not needed elaborate .md files to do that, you just ask for "how to do a while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" for example. It's possible my prompts are much simpler for my uses, but I still haven't seen any write-ups on how people are constructing elaborate programs in some other way. Like how are people stringing prompts together to create whole programs? (I guess is one question I have that comes to mind) I guess maybe I need to find a prompt-by-prompt breakdown of some people building things to get a clearer picture of how LLMs are being used
- zackify 1y ago
  How you see and use it is the same way I do. So interested to hear other replies
  - zackify 1y ago
    Wow. Auto correct. I meant “interested”
ftyuiiooool 1y ago
Qetyuuioooooddfhj
itbeho 1y ago
I use Claude code with Elixir and Phoenix. It's been mostly great but after a short time into a project it seems to break something unrelated to the task at hand.
- mike1o1 1y ago
  If you haven’t yet, you should try out usage_rules mix package. I mostly use Ash, which has great support for usage rules and it’s a night and day difference in effectiveness. Tidewave is also really nice as an MCP as it lets the agent query hexdocs or your schema directly. https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html
  - itbeho 1y ago
    Thank you! I'll definitely check that out.
    - arcanemachiner 1y ago
      Also check out the AGENTS.MD file that's been added to Phoenix 1.8. Make sure you read it first though... I believe it expected Req to be present as a dependency when generating code that makes HTTP requests.
system2 1y ago
As expected, many graybeard gatekeepers are telling others not to use LLM for any type of coding or assistance.
kristianp 1y ago
Just fyi, at the end of the article there is a link to minusx.com which has an expired certificate. This server could not prove that it is minusx.com; its security certificate expired 553 days ago
- nuwandavek 1y ago
  Oops, fixed it, thanks!
BobSonOfBob 1y ago
KISS always win. Great breakdown article. Thanks!
brokegrammer 1y ago
I don't get it. The title says "What makes Claude Code so damn good", which implies that they will show how Claude Code is better than other tools, or just better in general. But they go about repeating the Claude Code documentation using different wording. Am I missing something here? Or is this just Anthropic shilling?
- nuwandavek 1y ago
  (blogpost author here) Haha, that's totally fair. I've read a whole bunch of posts comparing CC to other tools, or with a dump of the the architecture. This post was mainly for people who've used CC extensively, know for a fact that it is better and wonder how to ship such an experience in their own apps.
  - brokegrammer 1y ago
    I've used Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot is Vscode and I don't "know" that Claude Code is better apart from the fact that it runs in the terminal, which makes it a little faster but less ergonomic than tools running inside the editor. All of the context tricks can be done with Copilot instructions as well, so I simply can't see how Claude Code is superior.
    - techwiz137 1y ago
      For code generation, nothing so far beats Opus. More likely than not it generated working code and fixed bugs that Gemini 2.5 pro couldn't solve or even Gemini Code Assist. Gemini Code Assist is better than 2.5 pro, but has way more limits per prompt and often truncates output.
      - baq 1y ago
        I found Anthropic’s models untrustworthy with SQL (e.g. confused AND and OR operator precedence - or simply forgot to add parens, multiple times), Gemini 2.5 pro has no such issues and identified Claude’s mistakes correctly.
      - 1y ago
nojs 1y ago
I’ve noticed that custom subagents in CC often perform noticeably worse than the main agent, even when told to use Opus and despite extreme prompt tuning. This seems to concur with the “keep it flat” logic here. But why should this be the case?
- nuwandavek 1y ago
  (blogpost author here) I've noticed this too. My top guess for any such thing would be that this type of sub-agent routing is outside the training distribution. Its possible that this gets better overnight with a model update. The second reason is that sub-agents make it very hard to debug - was the issue with the router prompt or the agent prompt? Flat tools and loop make this a non-issue without loss of any real capability.
whazor 1y ago
I think the key success to the success of Claude Code is unix. Claude can run commands to search code, test compilation, and perform various other operations. Unix is great because its commands are well-documented, and the training data is abundant with examples.
revskill 1y ago
Smart tool use.
gauravvppnd 1y ago
Honestly, Claude’s code feels so good because it’s clean, logical, and easy to follow. It doesn’t just work—it makes sense when you read it, which saves a ton of time when debugging or building on top of it.
0xpgm 1y ago
So, what great new products or startups have these amazing coding agents helped create so far (and not on the AI supply side). Anywhere to check?
- anonzzzies 1y ago
  You really should not check that... I saw some dude on reddit saying that you can build your own saas in 20 days and launch and sell it. I checked out some of his; Claude Code can do that in a few hours. So can I without AI as I have a batteries included framework ready that has all the plumbing done. But Claude can do those from scratch in hours. So 1 day with me doing some testing and fixing. That is not a product or a startup: it's a grift. But glory to him for getting it done anyway. Not many people launch and then actually make a few bucks.
  - noduerme 1y ago
    >> launch and sell it What AI can definitely not do is launch or sell anything. I can write some arbitrary SaaS in a few hours with my own framework, too - and know it's much more secure than anything written by AI. I also know how to launch it. (I'm not so good at the "selling" part). But if anyone can do all of this - including the launching the selling - then they would not be selling themselves on Reddit or Youtube. Once you see someone explaining to you how to get rich quickly, you must assume that they have failed or else they would not be wasting their time trying to sell you something. And from that you should deduce that it's not wise to take their advice.
    - anonzzzies 1y ago
      > What AI can definitely not do is launch or sell anything. Sure but he was particularly talking about the technical side of things. > (I'm not so good at the "selling" part). In person I am, but this new fangled 'influencer' selling or what not I do not understand and cannot do (yet) (i'm in my 50s so I can still learn). > But if anyone can do all of this - including the launching the selling - then they would not be selling themselves on Reddit or Youtube Yeah but most don't actually name the url of the product and he does. So that's a difference.
anonzzzies 1y ago
What's the best current cli (with a non interactive option) that is on par with Claude code but can work with other llms like ollama, openrouter etc? I tried stuff like aider but it cannot discover files, the open source gemini one but it was terrible; what is a good one that maybe is the same as CC if you plug in Opus?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- elbear 1y ago
  See if this is it. I haven't used it yet, just know about it: https://github.com/block/goose https://github.com/block/goose
faangguyindia 1y ago
I am curious if any good existing solution exist for this tool: `Tool name: WebFetch Tool description: - Fetches content from a specified URL and processes it using an AI model - Takes a URL and a prompt as input - Fetches the URL content, converts HTML to markdown - Processes the content with the prompt using a small, fast model - Returns the model's response about the content - Use this tool when you need to retrieve and analyze web content` I came up with this one: `import asyncio from playwright.async_api import async_playwright from readability import Document from markdownify import markdownify as md async def web_fetch_robust(url: str, prompt: str) -> str: """ Fetches content from a URL using a headless browser to handle JS-heavy sites, processes it, and returns a summary. """ try: async with async_playwright() as p: # Launch a headless browser (Chromium is a good default) browser = await p.chromium.launch() page = await browser.new_page() # --- Avoiding Blocks --- # Set a realistic User-Agent to mimic a real browser await page.set_extra_http_headers({ 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36' }) # Navigate to the URL await page.goto(url, wait_until='networkidle', timeout=15000) # wait_until='networkidle' is key # --- Extracting Content --- # Get the fully rendered HTML content html_content = await page.content() await browser.close() # --- Processing for Token Minimization --- # 1. Extract main content using Readability.js doc = Document(html_content) main_content_html = doc.summary() # 2. Convert to clean Markdown markdown_content = md(main_content_html, strip=['a', 'img']) # Strip links/images to save tokens # 3. Use the small, fast model to process the clean content # summary = small_model.process(prompt, markdown_content) # Placeholder for your model call # For demonstration, we'll just return a message summary = f"A summary of the JS-rendered content from {url} would be generated here." return summary except Exception as e: return f"Error fetching or processing URL with headless browser: {e}" # To run this async function # result = asyncio.run(web_fetch_robust("https://example.com https://example.com", "Summarize this.")) # print(result) `
noduerme 1y ago
Claude Code has definitely attracted me as in, I would like to try it on a new project. But just speaking as a lone coder, it absolutely terrifies me to give something access to my whole system and CLI. I have one main laptop and everything is on it. All my repos and API keys and SSH keys, my carefully tuned dev environment...I have no idea what it might read or upload, let alone what it might try to execute. I'm tempted enough to try it that I might set up a completely walled-off virtual machine for the purpose, but then I don't know how much benefit I'd get from it. Do you just let it run rampant on your system and do whatever it thinks it should, installing whatever it wants and sucking all your config files into the cloud or what?
- furyofantares 1y ago
  By default you have to approve every command it runs. I think most people end up allowing certain tools through unconditionally, like grep, but which is technical not bullet proof but feels pretty safe. The agent program also has some guardrails to prevent the model from working outside of the working directory you launched it from, that is also not bulletproof but in practice works pretty well. You could set up a docker image and run it in that if you wanted.
12ian34 1y ago
claude code is a nightmare compared to cursor. terminal is not an appropriate UX unless you want to do stuff from your phone in a pinch. the main thing they got right is selling the idea of vibing to skeptical engineers by making it a CLI. i think it has more sensible defaults than cursor though which is another reason folks like it out of the box. cursor with a planner/executor system prompt works much nicer and is way less destructive. cc more for vibing IMO
rob_c 1y ago
Context window length with further fine tuning and a good system prompt... Nothing too much different other than anthro correctly banked on larger context windows (and stability with training/eval) is the key to massive improvements.
lightedman 1y ago
And it still fails at basic HTML. Go back to school Anthropic.
ath3nd 1y ago
The hype from hype fanboys? /s In all seriousness, at the times of LLMs I am not surprised to see an article that can basically be summarized into: "This product is good because it's good and I am not gonna compare it to others because why do you expect critical thinking in the era of LLMs"
Danborg 1y ago
The reliance on “IMPORTANT” and “NEVER” tags feels like a necessary evil that points to current model limitations. It works, but it’s not elegant. I’m curious how this will evolve as models become more steerable.
AceJohnny2 1y ago
late stupid question, perhaps, but is there any meaning to emphasis in the prompts? Like, FTA: > - IMPORTANT: DO NOT ADD ***ANY*** COMMENTS unless asked > - VERY IMPORTANT: You MUST avoid using search commands like `find` and `grep`. Does using caps, or the stars, really carry meaning through the tokenization process?

469 points by samuelstros 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

LaGrange 1y ago

[flagged]

dang 1y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, and especially not putdowns. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully. If not, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dingnuts 1y ago
  I appreciate the vague negative takes on tools like this where it feels like there is so much hype it's impossible to have a different opinion. "It's bad" is perfectly substantiative in my opinion; this person tried it, didn't like it, and doesn't have much more to say because of that, but it's still a useful perspective. Is this why HN is so dang pro-AI? the negative comments, even small ones, are moderated away? explains a lot TBH
  - h4ch1 1y ago
    I think this comment would be a little better by specifying WHY it's bad instead of just a "it's bad" like it's a Twitter thread.
    - LaGrange 1y ago
      The subject is pretty exhausted. The reason I post "it's bad" because, honestly, expending on it just feels like a waste of time and energy. The point is demonstrating that this _isn't_ a consensus, and not much more than that. Edit: bonus points if this gets me banned.
      - dang 1y ago
        (We don't ban people for posting like this!) If it felt like a waste of time and energy to post something substantive, rather than the GP comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44998577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44998577), then you should have just posted nothing. That comment was obviously neither substantive nor thoughtful. This is hardly a borderline call! We want substantive, thoughtful comments from people who do have the time and energy to contribute them. Btw, to avoid a misunderstanding that sometimes shows up: it's fine for comments to be critical; that is, it's possible to be substantive, thoughtful, and critical all at the same time. For example, I skimmed through your account's most recent comments and saw several of that kind, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44299479 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42882357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42882357. If your GP comment had been like that, it would have been fine; you don't have to like Claude Code (or whatever the $thing is).
  - exe34 1y ago
    that wasn't a negative comment though. a negative comment would explain what they didn't like about it. this was the digital equivalent of flytipping.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    There is no value in a single poster saying "it's bad". I don't know this person, there is zero context on why I should care that this user thinks it's bad. Unless they state why they think it's bad, it adds nothing to the conversation and is just noise
  - dang 1y ago
    HN is by no means "pro-AI". It's sharply divided, and (as always with these things) each side assumes the other side is dominant.
    - FergusArgyll 1y ago
      "After viewing identical samples of major network television coverage of the Beirut massacre, both pro-Israeli and pro-Arab partisans rated these programs, and those responsible for them, as being biased against their side." https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hwang.pdf https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hwang.pdf
      - deleted 1y ago

dingnuts 1y ago

[flagged]

ebzlo 1y ago
Yes technically it is RAG, but a lot of the community is associating RAG with vector search specifically.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  it does? why? the term RAG as I understand it leaves the methodology for retrieval vague so that different techniques can be used depending on the, er, context.. which makes a lot more sense to me
  - koakuma-chan 1y ago
    > why? Hype. There's nothing wrong with using, e.g., full-text search for RAG.
BoorishBears 1y ago
If you want to be really stringent, RAG originally referred to going from user query to retrieving information directly based on the query then passing it to an LLM: With CC the LLM is taking the raw user query then crafting its own searches But realistically lots of RAG systems have LLM calls interleaved for various reasons, so what they probably mean it not doing the usual chunking + embeddings thing.
- theptip 1y ago
  Yeah, TFA clearly explains their point. They mean RAG=vector search, and contrast this with tool calling (eg Grep).
nuwandavek 1y ago
(blogpost author here) You're right! I did make the distinction in an earlier draft, but decided to use "RAG" interchangeably with vector search, as it is popularly known today in code-gen systems. I'd probably go back to the previous version too. But I do think there is a qualitative different between getting candidates and adding them to context before generating (retrieval augmented generation) vs the LLM searching for context till it is satisfied.

alex1138 1y ago

What do people think of Google's Gemini (Pro?) compared to Claude for code? I really like a lot of what Google produces, but they can't seem to keep a product that they don't shut down and they can be pretty ham-fisted, both with corporate control (Chrome and corrupt practices) and censorship

KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
It sucks.
- KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
  Lol downvoted, come on anyone who has used gemini and claude code knows there's no comparison... gimme a break.
  - bitpush 1y ago
    You're getting down voted because of the curt "it sucks" which shows a level of shallowness in your understanding. Nothing in the world is simply outright garbage. Even the seemingly worst products exist for a reason and is used for a variety of use cases. So, take a step back and reevaluate whether your reply could have been better. Because, it simply "just sucks"
  - polotics 1y ago
    can you detail the differences you see that substantiate your judgement?
ezfe 1y ago
Gemini frequently didn't write code for me for no explicable reason, and just talked about a hypothetical solution. Seems like a tooling issue though.
- djmips 1y ago
  Sounds almost human!

siva7 1y ago

It's more interesting to compare what gemini cli and codex cli did wrong? (though i haven't used both of them for weeks to months)

syntaxing 1y ago

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong. I was using Sonnet 4 with GitHub Copilot. Recently a week ago switched to Claude Code. I find GitHub Copilot solves problem and bugs way better than Claude Code. For some reason, Claude Code seems very lazy. Has anyone experience something similar?

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
I haven’t tried other LLMs but have a fair amount of experience with Claude Code, and there definitely times when you have to be explicit about the route you want it to take and tell it to not take shortcuts. It’s not consistent, though. I haven’t figured out what they are but it feels like there are circumstances where it’s more prone to doing ugly hacky things.
StephenAshmore 1y ago
It may be a configuration thing. I've found quite the opposite. Github Copilot using Sonnet 4 will not manage context very well, quite frequently resorting to running terminal commands to search for code even when I gave it the exact file it's looking for in the copilot context. Claude code, for me, is usually much smarter when it comes to reading code and then applying changes across a lot of files. I also have it integrated into the IDE so it can make visual changes in the editor similar to GitHub Copilot.
- syntaxing 1y ago
  I do agree with you, Github Copilot uses more tokens like you mentioned with redundant searches. But at the end of the day, it solves the problem. Not sure if the cost out weights the benefit though compared to Claude Claude. Going to try Claude Code more and see if I'm prompting it incorrectly.
libraryofbabel 1y ago
The consensus is the opposite: most people find copilot does less well than Claude with both using sonnet 4. Without discounting your experience, you’ll need to give us more detail about what exactly you were trying to do (what problem, what prompt) and what you mean by “lazy” if you want any meaningful advice though.

diego_sandoval 1y ago

It shocks me when people say that LLMs don't make them more productive, because my experience has been the complete opposite, especially with Claude Code. Either I'm worse than then at programming, to the point that I find an LLM useful and they don't, or they don't know how to use LLMs for coding.

dsiegel2275 1y ago
Agreed. I only started using Claude Code about a week and a half ago and I'm blown away by how productive I can be with it.
- pawelduda 1y ago
  I've had occasions where a relatively short prompt solved me an entire day of debugging and fixing things, because it was tech stack I barely knew. Most impressive part was when CC knew the changes may take some time to be applied and just used `sleep 60; check logs;` 2-3 times and then started checking elsewhere if something's stuck. It was, CC cleaned it up and a minute later someone pinged me that the it works.
ta12653421 1y ago
Productivity boost is unbelieveable! If you handle it right, its a boon - its like having 3 junior devs at hand. And I'm talking about using the web interface. I guess most people are not paying and cant therefore apply the project-space (which is one of the best features), which unleashes its full magic. Even if I'm currently without a job, I'm still paying because it helps me.
- ta12653421 1y ago
  LOL why do I get downvoted for explaining my experience? :-D
  - fourthark 1y ago
    So describe your experience without being a booster

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

I think it’s just that the base model is good at real world coding tasks - as opposed to the types of coding tasks in the common benchmarks. If you use GitHub Copilot - which has its own system level prompts - you can hotswap between models, and Claude outperforms OpenAI’s and Google’s models by such a large margin that the others are functionally useless in comparison.

ec109685 1y ago
Anthropic has opportunities to optimize their models / prompts during reinforcement learning, so the advice from the article to stay close to what works in Claude code is valid and probably has more applicability for Anthropic models than applying the same techniques to others. With a subscription plan, Anthropic is highly incentivized to be efficient in their loops beyond just making it a better experience for users.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
badestrand 1y ago
I read all the praise about Claude Code, tried it for a month and was very disappointed. For me it doesn't work any better than Cursor's sidebar and has worse UX on top. I wonder if I am doing something wrong because it just makes lots of stupid mistakes when coding for me, in two different code bases.
- mnvrth 1y ago
  I'll suggest giving it another shot. It really is a game changer (I can't tell what you're doing wrong, but in a few people I've seen it has been about doing a psychological switch. I wrote about it a bit here - https://mnvr.in/beginners-mind https://mnvr.in/beginners-mind, sharing in case it helps you see how you might approach it differently)
paool 1y ago
It's not just the base model Try using opus with cline in vs code. Then use Claude code. I don't know the best way to quantify the differences, but I know I get more done in CC.

sdsd 1y ago

Oof, this comes at a hard moment in my Claude Code usage. I'm trying to have it help me debug some Elastic issues on Security Onion but after a few minutes it spits out a zillion lines of obfuscated JS and says: Error: kill EPERM at process.kill (node:internal/process/per_thread:226:13) at Ba2 (file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19791) at file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19664 at Array.forEach (<anonymous>) at file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19635 at Array.forEach (<anonymous>) at Aa2 (file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19607) at file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19538 at ChildProcess.W (file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:20023) at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:519:28) { errno: -1, code: 'EPERM', syscall: 'kill' } I'm guessing one of the scripts it runs kills Node.js processes, and that inadvertantly kills Claude as well. Or maybe it feels bad that it can't solve my problem and commits suicide. In any case, I wish it would stay alive and help me lol.

sixtyj 1y ago
Jump to another LLM helps me to find what happened. *This is not a official advice :)
idontwantthis 1y ago
I have had zero good results with any LLM and elastic search. Everything it spits out is a hallucination because there aren’t very many examples of anything complete and in context on the internet.
fuckyah 1y ago
[dead]
triyambakam 1y ago
I would try upgrading or wiping away your current install and re-installing it. There might be some cached files somewhere that are in a bad state. At least that's what fixed it for me when I recently came across something similar.

gervwyk 1y ago

We’re considering building a coding agent for Lowdefy[1], a framework that lets you build web apps with YAML config. For those who’ve built coding agents: do you think LLMs are better suited for generating structured config vs. raw code? My theory is that agents producing valid YAML/JSON schemas could be more reliable than code generation. The output is constrained, easier to validate, and when it breaks, you can actually debug it. I keep seeing people creating apps with vibe coder tools but then get stuck when they need to modify the generated code. Curious if others think config-based approaches are more practical for AI-assisted development. [1] https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

ec109685 1y ago
I wouldn’t get hung up on one shotting anything. Output to a format that can be machine verified, ideally in a format there is plenty of industry examples for. Then add a grader step to your agentic loop that is triggered after the files are modified. Give feedback to the model if there any errors and it will fix them.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
amelius 1y ago
How do you specify callbacks? Config files should be mature programming languages, not Yaml/Json files.
- gervwyk 1y ago
  Callback: Blocks (React components) can register events with action chains (a sequential list of async functions) that will be called when the event is triggered. So it is defined in the react component. This abstraction of blocks, events, actions, operations and requests are the only abstraction required in the schema to build fully functional web apps. Might sound crazy but we built full web apps in just yaml.. Been doing this for about 5 years now and it helps us scale to build many web apps, fast, that are easy to maintain. We at Resonancy[1] have found many benefits in doing so. I should write more about this. [1] - https://resonancy.io https://resonancy.io

_1tem 1y ago

CC is so damn good I want to use its agent loop in my agent loop. I'm planning to build a browser agent for some specialized tasks and I'm literally just bundling a docker image with Claude Code and a headless browser and the Playwright MCP server.

apwell23 1y ago
cool

HacklesRaised 1y ago

Delusional asshats trying to draft the grift?

the_mitsuhiko 1y ago

Unfortunately, Claude Code is not open source, but there are some tools to better figure out how it is working. If you are really interested in how it works, I strongly recommend looking at Claude Trace: https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-trace https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-trac... It dumps out a JSON file as well as a very nicely formatted HTML file that shows you every single tool and all the prompts that were used for a session.

CuriouslyC 1y ago
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code You can see the system prompts too. It's all how the base model has been trained to break tasks into discrete steps and work through them patiently, with some robustness to failure cases.
- the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
  > https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code That repository does not contain the code. It's just used for the issue tracker and some example hooks.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    It's a javascript app that gets installed on your local system...
    - the_mitsuhiko 1y ago
      I'm aware of how it works since I have been spending a lot of time over the last two months working with Claude's internals. If you have spent some time with it, you know that it is a transpiled and minified mess that is annoyingly hard to detangle. I'm very happy that claude-trace (and claude-bridge [1]) exists because it makes it much easier to work with the internals of Claude than if you have to decompile it yourself. [1]: https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-bridge https://github.com/badlogic/lemmy/tree/main/apps/claude-brid...

athrowaway3z 1y ago

> "THIS IS IMPORTANT" is still State of the Art Had a similar problems until I saw the advice "Dont say what it shouldn't but focus on what it should". i.e. make sure when it reaches for the 'thing', it has the alternative in context. Haven't had those problems since then.

amelius 1y ago
I mean, if advice like this worked, then why wouldn't Anthropic let the LLM say it, for instance?
- donperignon 1y ago
  Because it’s embarrassing, and probably nobody understands why this works, depending on such heuristics that can completely change in the next model is really bad…
  - amelius 1y ago
    I'd say exactly because behavior might change you have to include proper instructions for each model. And depending on people in forums to provide these instructions is of course not great.

sergiotapia 1y ago

Is Claude Code better than Amp?

radleta 1y ago

I’d be curious to know what MCPs you’ve found useful with CC. Thoughts?

nuwandavek 1y ago
(blogpost author here) I actually found none of them useful. I think MCP is an incomplete idea. Tools and the system prompt cannot be so cleanly separated (at least not yet). Just slapping on tools hurts performance more than it helps. I've now gone back to just using vanilla CC with a really really rich claude.md file.
faangguyindia 1y ago
One area of improvement is being able to plug the github issues. I run into bugs which are not documented in documentation or anywhere except github issues. Is it legal to search github issues using LLM? if yes how?

on_the_train 1y ago

The lengths people will go through to avoid to code is astonishing

apwell23 1y ago
writing code is not the fun part of coding. I only realized that after using claude code.
- monkaiju 1y ago
  Hard disagree
  - dragonfax 1y ago
    HARD AGREE (to your disagree)
- phyzome 1y ago
  Well, I suppose we might have found one of the discriminators in why some people love LLMs and some hate them...
- recursive 1y ago
  This explains a lot.

yumraj 1y ago

I made insane progress with CC over last several weeks, but lately have noticed progress stalling. I’m in the middle of some refactoring/bug fixing/optimization but it’s constantly running into issues, making half baked changes, not able to fix regressions etc. Still trying to figure out how to make do a better job. Might have to break it into smaller chunks or something. Been pretty frustrating couple of weeks. If anyone has pointers, I’m all ears!!

fuckyah 1y ago
[dead]
imiric 1y ago
> If anyone has pointers, I’m all ears!! Give programming a try, you might like it.
- yumraj 1y ago
  Yeah, have been doing that for 30 years. Next…
jampa 1y ago
I felt that, too. It turns out I was getting 'too comfortable' while using CC. The best way is to treat CC like a junior engineer and overexplain things before letting it do anything. With time, you start to trust CC, but you shouldn't do that because it is still the same LLM when you started. Another thing is that before, you were in a greenfield project, so Claude didn't need any context to do new things. Now, your codebase is larger, so you need to point out to Claude where it should find more information. You need to spoon-feed the relevant files with "@" where you want it to look up things and make changes. If you feel Claude is lazy, force it to use more thinking budget "think" < "think hard" < "think harder" < "ultrathink.". Sometimes I like to throw "ultrathink" and do something else while it codes. [1] [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices#:~:text=These%20specific%20phrases%20are%20mapped%20directly https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...
swader999 1y ago

1zael 1y ago

I've literally built the entire MVP of my startup on Claude Code and now have paying customers. I've got an existential worry that I'm going to have a SEV incident that will trigger a house of falling cards, but until then I'm constantly leveraging Claude for fixing security vulnerabilities, implementing test-driven-development, and planning out the software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap. I hope this story becomes more and more common as time passes.

lajisam 1y ago
“Implementing test-driven development, and planning out software architecture in accordance with my long-term product roadmap” can you give some concrete examples of how CC helped you here?
- 1zael 1y ago
  Yeah, so I continuously maintain a claude.md file with the feature roadmap for my product (which changes every week but acts as a source of truth). I feed that into a claude software architecture agent that I created, which reviews proposed changes for my current feature build against the longer-term roadmap to ensure I don't 1\ create tech debt with my current approach and 2\ identify opportunities to parallelize work that could help with multiple upcoming features at once. I have also a code reviewer agent in CC that writes all my unit and integration tests, which feeds into my CI/CD pipeline. I use the "/security" command that Claude recently released to review my code for security vulnerabilities while also leveraging a red team agent that tests my codebase for vulnerabilities to patch. I'm starting to integrate Claude into Linear so I can assign Linear tickets to Claude to start working on while I tackle core stuff. Hope that helps!
foobarbecue 1y ago
[flagged]
- Mallowram 1y ago
  [dead]

conception 1y ago

Ive seen context forge has a way to use hooks to keep CC going after context condensing. Are there any other patterns or tools people are using with CC to keep it on task, with current context until it has a validated completion of its task? I feel like we have all these tools separately but nothing brings it all together and also isn’t crazy buggy.

kroaton 1y ago
Load up the context with your information + task list (broken down into phases). Have Sonnet implement phase one tasks and mark phase 1 as done. Go into planning mode, have Opus review the work (you should ideally also review it at this point). Double press escape and go back to the point in the conversation where you loaded up the context with your information + task list. Tell it to do phase 2. Repeat until you run out of usage.
- kroaton 1y ago
  From time to time, go into Opus planning mode, have it review your entire codebase and tell it to go file by file and look for bugs, security issues, logical problems, etc. Have it make a list. Then load up the context + task list...
- conception 1y ago
  Yes, i can manage CC through a task list but there’s nothing technically stopping all your steps from happening automatically. That tool just doesn’t exist yet as far as I can tell but it’s not a very advanced tool to build. I’m surprised no one has put those steps together. Also if the task runs out of context it will get progressively worse rather than refresh its own context from time to time.
rolls-reus 1y ago
What’s context forge?
- conception 1y ago
  https://github.com/webdevtodayjason/context-forge https://github.com/webdevtodayjason/context-forge

whoknowsidont 1y ago

It's not that good, most developers are just really that subpar lol.

roflyear 1y ago

Claude Code is hilarious because often it'll say stuff that's basically "that's too hard, here's a bandaid fix" and implement it lol

ahmedhawas123 1y ago

Thanks for sharing this. At a time where this is a rush towards multi-agent systems, this is helpful to see how an LLM-first organization is going after it. Lots of the design aspects here are things I experiment with day to day so it's good to see others use it as well A few takeaways for me from this (1) Long prompts are good - and don't forget basic things like explaining in the prompt what the tool is, how to help the user, etc (2) Tool calling is basic af; you need more context (when to use, when not to use, etc) (3) Using messages as the state of the memory for the system is OK; i've thought about fancy ways (e.g., persisting dataframes, parsing variables between steps, etc, but seems like as context windows grow, messages should be ok)

nuwandavek 1y ago
(author of the blogpost here) Yeah, you can extract a LOT of performance from the basics and don't have to do any complicated setup for ~99% of use cases. Keep the loop simple, have clear tools (it is ok if tools overlap in function). Clarity and simplicity >>> everything else.
- samuelstros 1y ago
  does a framework like vercel's ai sdk help, or is handling the loop + tool calling so straightforward that a framework is overcomplicating things? for context, i want to build a claude code like agent in a WYSIWYG markdown app. that's how i stumbled on your blog post :)
  - ahmedhawas123 1y ago
    Function / tool calling is actually super simple. I'd honestly recommend either doing it through a single LLM provider (e.g., OpenAI or Gemini) without a hard framework first, and then moving to one of the simpler frameworks if you feel the need to (e.g., LangChain). Frameworks like LangGraph and others can get really complicated really quickly.
  - nuwandavek 1y ago
    There may be other reasons to use ai sdk, but I'd highly recommend starting with a simple loop + port most relevant tools from Claude Code before using any framework. Nice, do share a link, would love to check out your agent!

marmalade2413 1y ago

I would be remis if after reading this I didn't point people towards talk box ( https://github.com/rich-iannone/talk-box https://github.com/rich-iannone/talk-box) from one of the creators of great tables.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

erelong 1y ago

> The main takeaway, again, is to keep things simple. if true this seems like a bloated approach but tbh I wouldn't claim to know totally how to use Claude like the author here... I find you can get a lot of mileage out of "regular" prompts, I'd call them? Just asking for what you need one prompt at a time? I still can't visualize how any of the complexity on top of that like discussed in the article adds anything to carefully crafted prompts one at a time I also still can't really visualize how claude works compared to simple prompts one at a time. Like, wouldn't it be more efficient to generate a prompt and then check it by looping through the appendix sections ("Main Claude Code System Prompt" and "All Claude Code Tools"), or is that basically what the LLM does somewhat mysteriously (it just works)? So like "give me while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" is the entirety of the prompt... then if you need to you can loop through the appendix section? Otherwise isn't that a massive over-use of tokens, and the requests might even be ignored because they're too complex? The control flow eludes me a bit here. I otherwise get the impression that the LLM does not use the appendix sections correctly by adding them to prompts (like, couldn't it just ignore them at times)? It would seem like you'd get more accurate responses by separating that from whatever you're prompting and then checking the prompt through looping over the appendix sections. Does that make any sense? I'm visualizing coding an entire program as prompting discrete pieces of it. I have not needed elaborate .md files to do that, you just ask for "how to do a while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" for example. It's possible my prompts are much simpler for my uses, but I still haven't seen any write-ups on how people are constructing elaborate programs in some other way. Like how are people stringing prompts together to create whole programs? (I guess is one question I have that comes to mind) I guess maybe I need to find a prompt-by-prompt breakdown of some people building things to get a clearer picture of how LLMs are being used

zackify 1y ago
How you see and use it is the same way I do. So interested to hear other replies
- zackify 1y ago
  Wow. Auto correct. I meant “interested”

ftyuiiooool 1y ago

Qetyuuioooooddfhj

itbeho 1y ago

I use Claude code with Elixir and Phoenix. It's been mostly great but after a short time into a project it seems to break something unrelated to the task at hand.

mike1o1 1y ago
If you haven’t yet, you should try out usage_rules mix package. I mostly use Ash, which has great support for usage rules and it’s a night and day difference in effectiveness. Tidewave is also really nice as an MCP as it lets the agent query hexdocs or your schema directly. https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html
- itbeho 1y ago
  Thank you! I'll definitely check that out.
  - arcanemachiner 1y ago
    Also check out the AGENTS.MD file that's been added to Phoenix 1.8. Make sure you read it first though... I believe it expected Req to be present as a dependency when generating code that makes HTTP requests.

system2 1y ago

As expected, many graybeard gatekeepers are telling others not to use LLM for any type of coding or assistance.

kristianp 1y ago

Just fyi, at the end of the article there is a link to minusx.com which has an expired certificate. This server could not prove that it is minusx.com; its security certificate expired 553 days ago

nuwandavek 1y ago
Oops, fixed it, thanks!

BobSonOfBob 1y ago

KISS always win. Great breakdown article. Thanks!

brokegrammer 1y ago

I don't get it. The title says "What makes Claude Code so damn good", which implies that they will show how Claude Code is better than other tools, or just better in general. But they go about repeating the Claude Code documentation using different wording. Am I missing something here? Or is this just Anthropic shilling?

nuwandavek 1y ago
(blogpost author here) Haha, that's totally fair. I've read a whole bunch of posts comparing CC to other tools, or with a dump of the the architecture. This post was mainly for people who've used CC extensively, know for a fact that it is better and wonder how to ship such an experience in their own apps.
- brokegrammer 1y ago
  I've used Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot is Vscode and I don't "know" that Claude Code is better apart from the fact that it runs in the terminal, which makes it a little faster but less ergonomic than tools running inside the editor. All of the context tricks can be done with Copilot instructions as well, so I simply can't see how Claude Code is superior.
  - techwiz137 1y ago
    For code generation, nothing so far beats Opus. More likely than not it generated working code and fixed bugs that Gemini 2.5 pro couldn't solve or even Gemini Code Assist. Gemini Code Assist is better than 2.5 pro, but has way more limits per prompt and often truncates output.
    - baq 1y ago
      I found Anthropic’s models untrustworthy with SQL (e.g. confused AND and OR operator precedence - or simply forgot to add parens, multiple times), Gemini 2.5 pro has no such issues and identified Claude’s mistakes correctly.
    - 1y ago

nojs 1y ago

I’ve noticed that custom subagents in CC often perform noticeably worse than the main agent, even when told to use Opus and despite extreme prompt tuning. This seems to concur with the “keep it flat” logic here. But why should this be the case?

nuwandavek 1y ago
(blogpost author here) I've noticed this too. My top guess for any such thing would be that this type of sub-agent routing is outside the training distribution. Its possible that this gets better overnight with a model update. The second reason is that sub-agents make it very hard to debug - was the issue with the router prompt or the agent prompt? Flat tools and loop make this a non-issue without loss of any real capability.

whazor 1y ago

I think the key success to the success of Claude Code is unix. Claude can run commands to search code, test compilation, and perform various other operations. Unix is great because its commands are well-documented, and the training data is abundant with examples.

revskill 1y ago

Smart tool use.

gauravvppnd 1y ago

Honestly, Claude’s code feels so good because it’s clean, logical, and easy to follow. It doesn’t just work—it makes sense when you read it, which saves a ton of time when debugging or building on top of it.

0xpgm 1y ago

So, what great new products or startups have these amazing coding agents helped create so far (and not on the AI supply side). Anywhere to check?

anonzzzies 1y ago
You really should not check that... I saw some dude on reddit saying that you can build your own saas in 20 days and launch and sell it. I checked out some of his; Claude Code can do that in a few hours. So can I without AI as I have a batteries included framework ready that has all the plumbing done. But Claude can do those from scratch in hours. So 1 day with me doing some testing and fixing. That is not a product or a startup: it's a grift. But glory to him for getting it done anyway. Not many people launch and then actually make a few bucks.
- noduerme 1y ago
  >> launch and sell it What AI can definitely not do is launch or sell anything. I can write some arbitrary SaaS in a few hours with my own framework, too - and know it's much more secure than anything written by AI. I also know how to launch it. (I'm not so good at the "selling" part). But if anyone can do all of this - including the launching the selling - then they would not be selling themselves on Reddit or Youtube. Once you see someone explaining to you how to get rich quickly, you must assume that they have failed or else they would not be wasting their time trying to sell you something. And from that you should deduce that it's not wise to take their advice.
  - anonzzzies 1y ago
    > What AI can definitely not do is launch or sell anything. Sure but he was particularly talking about the technical side of things. > (I'm not so good at the "selling" part). In person I am, but this new fangled 'influencer' selling or what not I do not understand and cannot do (yet) (i'm in my 50s so I can still learn). > But if anyone can do all of this - including the launching the selling - then they would not be selling themselves on Reddit or Youtube Yeah but most don't actually name the url of the product and he does. So that's a difference.

anonzzzies 1y ago

What's the best current cli (with a non interactive option) that is on par with Claude code but can work with other llms like ollama, openrouter etc? I tried stuff like aider but it cannot discover files, the open source gemini one but it was terrible; what is a good one that maybe is the same as CC if you plug in Opus?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
elbear 1y ago
See if this is it. I haven't used it yet, just know about it: https://github.com/block/goose https://github.com/block/goose

faangguyindia 1y ago

I am curious if any good existing solution exist for this tool: `Tool name: WebFetch Tool description: - Fetches content from a specified URL and processes it using an AI model - Takes a URL and a prompt as input - Fetches the URL content, converts HTML to markdown - Processes the content with the prompt using a small, fast model - Returns the model's response about the content - Use this tool when you need to retrieve and analyze web content` I came up with this one: `import asyncio from playwright.async_api import async_playwright from readability import Document from markdownify import markdownify as md async def web_fetch_robust(url: str, prompt: str) -> str: """ Fetches content from a URL using a headless browser to handle JS-heavy sites, processes it, and returns a summary. """ try: async with async_playwright() as p: # Launch a headless browser (Chromium is a good default) browser = await p.chromium.launch() page = await browser.new_page() # --- Avoiding Blocks --- # Set a realistic User-Agent to mimic a real browser await page.set_extra_http_headers({ 'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36' }) # Navigate to the URL await page.goto(url, wait_until='networkidle', timeout=15000) # wait_until='networkidle' is key # --- Extracting Content --- # Get the fully rendered HTML content html_content = await page.content() await browser.close() # --- Processing for Token Minimization --- # 1. Extract main content using Readability.js doc = Document(html_content) main_content_html = doc.summary() # 2. Convert to clean Markdown markdown_content = md(main_content_html, strip=['a', 'img']) # Strip links/images to save tokens # 3. Use the small, fast model to process the clean content # summary = small_model.process(prompt, markdown_content) # Placeholder for your model call # For demonstration, we'll just return a message summary = f"A summary of the JS-rendered content from {url} would be generated here." return summary except Exception as e: return f"Error fetching or processing URL with headless browser: {e}" # To run this async function # result = asyncio.run(web_fetch_robust("https://example.com https://example.com", "Summarize this.")) # print(result) `

noduerme 1y ago

Claude Code has definitely attracted me as in, I would like to try it on a new project. But just speaking as a lone coder, it absolutely terrifies me to give something access to my whole system and CLI. I have one main laptop and everything is on it. All my repos and API keys and SSH keys, my carefully tuned dev environment...I have no idea what it might read or upload, let alone what it might try to execute. I'm tempted enough to try it that I might set up a completely walled-off virtual machine for the purpose, but then I don't know how much benefit I'd get from it. Do you just let it run rampant on your system and do whatever it thinks it should, installing whatever it wants and sucking all your config files into the cloud or what?

furyofantares 1y ago
By default you have to approve every command it runs. I think most people end up allowing certain tools through unconditionally, like grep, but which is technical not bullet proof but feels pretty safe. The agent program also has some guardrails to prevent the model from working outside of the working directory you launched it from, that is also not bulletproof but in practice works pretty well. You could set up a docker image and run it in that if you wanted.

12ian34 1y ago

claude code is a nightmare compared to cursor. terminal is not an appropriate UX unless you want to do stuff from your phone in a pinch. the main thing they got right is selling the idea of vibing to skeptical engineers by making it a CLI. i think it has more sensible defaults than cursor though which is another reason folks like it out of the box. cursor with a planner/executor system prompt works much nicer and is way less destructive. cc more for vibing IMO

rob_c 1y ago

Context window length with further fine tuning and a good system prompt... Nothing too much different other than anthro correctly banked on larger context windows (and stability with training/eval) is the key to massive improvements.

lightedman 1y ago

And it still fails at basic HTML. Go back to school Anthropic.

ath3nd 1y ago

The hype from hype fanboys? /s In all seriousness, at the times of LLMs I am not surprised to see an article that can basically be summarized into: "This product is good because it's good and I am not gonna compare it to others because why do you expect critical thinking in the era of LLMs"

Danborg 1y ago

The reliance on “IMPORTANT” and “NEVER” tags feels like a necessary evil that points to current model limitations. It works, but it’s not elegant. I’m curious how this will evolve as models become more steerable.

AceJohnny2 1y ago

late stupid question, perhaps, but is there any meaning to emphasis in the prompts? Like, FTA: > - IMPORTANT: DO NOT ADD ***ANY*** COMMENTS unless asked > - VERY IMPORTANT: You MUST avoid using search commands like `find` and `grep`. Does using caps, or the stars, really carry meaning through the tokenization process?