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A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

550 points by kmelve 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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furyofantares 1y ago
I've come around on something like this. I start by putting a little effort into a prompt and into providing context, but not a ton - and see where Claude Code gets with it. It might even get what I asked for working in terms of features, but it's garbage code. This is a vibe session, not caring about the code at all, or hardly at all. I notice what worked and what didn't, what was good and what was garbage -- and also how my own opinion of what should be done changed. I have Claude Code help me update the initial prompt, help me update what should have been in the initial context, maybe add some of the bits that looked good to the initial context as well, and then write it all to a file. Then I revert everything else and start with a totally blank context, except that file. In this session I care about the code, I review it, I am vigilant to not let any slop through. I've been trying for the second session to be the one that's gonna work -- but I'm open to another round or two of this iteration.
- soperj 1y ago
  and do you find this takes longer or shorter than just doing it yourself from scratch?
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    Not OP, I don't care if it's the same amount of time because I can do it drunk/while doing other things. Not sure why how long does it take is the be all end all for some people.
  - shinecantbeseen 1y ago
    I’m with you. Sometimes it really just feels like we’re just tacking on the cognitive load of managing the drunk senior in addition to the problem of hand instead of just dealing with the problem at hand.
    - sfjailbird 1y ago
      A hundred times more time is spent reading a given piece of code, than it took writing it, in the lifetime of that program. OK I made up the statistic, but the core idea is true, and it's something that is rarely considered in this debate. At least with code you wrote, you can probably recognize it later when you need to maintain it or just figure out what it does.
      - adastra22 1y ago
        Most code is never read, to be honest.
        furyofantares 1y ago
        In the olden days I read the code I wrote probably 2-3 times while in the process of reading it, and then almost always once in full just before submitting it.
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    Quite a bit shorter. Plus I can do the a good chunk of the work (first iteration) in contexts where I couldn't before, where I require less focus, and it uses less of my energy. I think I can also end up with a better result, and having learned more myself. It's just better in a whole host of directions all at once. I don't end up intimately familiar with the solution however. Which I think is still a major cost.
swframe2 1y ago
Preventing garbage just requires that you take into account the cognitive limits of the agent. For example ... 1) Don't ask for large / complex change. Ask for a plan but ask it to implement the plan in small steps and ask the model to test each step before starting the next. 2) For really complex steps, ask the model to write code to visualize the problem and solution. 3) If the model fails on a given step, ask it to add logging to the code, save the logs, run the tests and the review the logs to determine what went wrong. Do this repeatedly until the step works well. 4) Ask the model to look at your existing code and determine how it was designed to implement a task. Some times the model will put all of the changes in one file but your code has a cleaner design the model doesn't take into account. I've seen other people blog about their tricks and tips. I do still see garbage results but not as high as 95%.
- jason_zig 1y ago
  I've seen people post this same advice and I agree with you that it works but you would think they would absorb this common strategy and integrate it as part of the underlying product at this point...
  - tombot 1y ago
    Claude Code at least now lets you use its best model for planning mode and its cheapest model for coding mode.
    - candiddevmike 1y ago
      The consulting world parallels here are funny
      - baq 1y ago
        Humans are agents after all
  - noosphr 1y ago
    The people who build the models don't understand how to use the models. It's like asking people who design CPUs to build data-centers. I've interviewed with three tier one AI labs and _no-one_ I talked to had any idea where the business value of their models came in. Meanwhile Chinese labs are releasing open source models that do what you need. At this point I've build local agentic tools that are better than anything Claude and OAI have as paid offerings, including the $2,000 tier. Of course they cost between a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per query so until hardware gets better they will stay happily behind corporate moats and be used by the people blessed to burn money like paper.
kbuchanan 1y ago
For me, working mostly in Planning Mode skips much of the initial misfires, and often leads to correct outcomes for the first edit.
- mierz00 1y ago
  Recently I’ve been taking a step back and getting ChatGPT 5 to ask me questions to create a spec. I refine that spec and then give that to planning mode and then go from there. I’ve found if I jump straight into planning mode I miss some critical aspects of what ever it is I am building.
axus 1y ago
I like his point about more objectivity and zero ego. You don't have to worry about hurting an AI's feelings or your own when you throw away code.
- awesome_dude 1y ago
  But I still find myself needing (strongly) to let Claude know when it's made a breakthrough that would have been hard work on my own.
  - groby_b 1y ago
    Curious: Do you also laud your compiler for particularly good optimizations?
    - awesome_dude 1y ago
      There's a couple of things there 1. I don't see the output of the compiler, as in, all I get is an executable blob. It could be inspected, but I don't think that I ever have in my 20+ year career. Maybe I lie and I've rocked up with a Hex editor once or twice, out of pure curiousity, but I've never got past looking for strings that I recognise. 2. When I use Claude, I am using it to do things that I can do, by hand, myself. I am reviewing the code as I go along, and I know what I want it to do because it's what I would be writing myself if I didn't have Claude (or Gemini for that matter). So, no, I have never congratulated the compiler (or interpreter, linker, assembler, or even the CPU). Finally, I view the AI as a pairing partner, sometimes it's better than me, sometimes it's not, and I have to be "in the game" in order to make sure I don't end up with a vibe coded mess. edit: This is from yesterday (Claude had just fixed a bug for me - all I did was paste the block of code that the bug was in, and say "x behaviour but getting y behaviour instead) perfect, thanks Edit You're welcome! That was a tricky bug - using rowCount instead of colCount in the index calculation is the kind of subtle error that can be really hard to spot. It's especially sneaky because row 0 worked correctly by accident, making it seem like the logic was mostly right. Glad we got it sorted out! Your Gaps redeal should now work properly with all the 2s (and other correctly placed cards) staying in their proper positions across all rows.
lordnacho 1y ago
I'm using Claude all the time now. It works, and I'm amazed it worked so easily for me. Here's what it looks like: 1) Summarize what I think my project currently does 2) Summarize what I think it should do 3) Give a couple of hints about how to do it 4) Watch it iterate a write-compile-test loop until it thinks it's ready I haven't added any files or instructions anywhere, I just do that loop above. I know of people who put their Claude in YOLO mode on multiple sessions, but for the moment I'm just sitting there watching it. Example: "So at the moment, we're connecting to a websocket and subscribing to data, and it works fine, all the parsing tests are working, all good. But I want to connect over multiple sockets and just take whichever one receives the message first, and discard subsequent copies. Maybe you need a module that remembers what sequence number it has seen?" Claude will then praise my insightful guidance and start making edits. At some point, it will do something silly, and I will say: "Why are you doing this with a bunch of Arc<RwLock> things? Let's share state by sharing messages!" Claude will then apologize profusely and give reasons why I'm so wise, and then build the module in an async way. I just keep an eye on what it tries, and it's completely changed how I code. For instance, I don't need to be fully concentrated anymore. I can be sitting in a meeting while I tell Claude what to do. Or I can be close to falling asleep, but still be productive.
- abraxas 1y ago
  I tried to follow the same pattern on a backend project written in Python/FastAPI and this has been mostly a heartache. It gets kind of close but then it seems to periodically go off the rails, lose its mind and write utter shit. Like braindead code that has no chance of working. I don't know if this is a question of the language or what but I just have no good luck with its consistency. And I did invest time into defining various CLAUDE.md files. To no avail.
  - lordnacho 1y ago
    Has this got anything to do with using a stronger typed language? I've heard that reported, not sure whether it's true since my python scripts tend to be short. Does it end in a forever loop for you? I used to have this problem with other models.
block_dagger 1y ago
The author doesn't make it clear why they switched from Cursor to Claude. Curious about what they can do with Claude that can't be done with Cursor. I use both a lot and find Cursor to be superior for the very large codebases I work in.
- RomanPushkin 1y ago
  It's easy: Cursor are resellers, they optimize your token usage, so they can make a profit. Claude is the final point, and they offer tokens for the cheapest price possible.
  - block_dagger 1y ago
    I use Cursor in MAX mode because my employer pays for the tokens. I probably should have mentioned that in my OP. It makes a huge difference.
    - maigret 1y ago
      Can you elaborate on “huge”?
- meerab 1y ago
  Personal opinion: Claude code is more user friendly than cursor with its CLI like interface. The file modifications are easy to view and it automatically runs psql, cd, ls , grep command. Output of the commands is shown in more user friendly fashion. Agents and MCPs are easy to organized and used.
  - block_dagger 1y ago
    I feel just the opposite. I think Cursor's output is actually in the realm of "beautiful." It's well formatted and shows the user snippets of code and reasoning that helps the user learn. Claude is stuck in a terminal window, so reduced to monospaced bullet lines. Its verbose mode spits out lines of file listings and other context irrelevant to the user.
albingroen 1y ago
So we’re supposed to start paying $1k-$1,5k on top of already crazy salaries just to maybe get a productivity boost on trivial to semi trivial issues? I know my boss would not be keen on that at least.
- albingroen 1y ago
  And remember. This is on subsadised prices.
  - dajonker 1y ago
    Exactly, makes it feel almost like an advertorial for Anthropic, who likely need most customers to pay 1000 bucks a month to break even.
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  I can't use $20 of credit (gpt-5 thinking via intellij's pro AI subscription) a month right now with plenty of usage so I'm surprised at the $1k figure. Is Claude that much more expensive? (a quick Google suggests yes actually). Having said the above some level of AI spending is the new reality. Your workplace pays for internet right? Probably a really expensive fast corporate grade connection? Well they now also need to pay for an AI subscription. That's just the current reality.
  - oblio 1y ago
    The fast corporate internet connection is probably 1000$ for 100 developers or more...
  - everforward 1y ago
    I don't know what Intellij's AI integration is like, but my brief Claude Code experience is that it really chews through tokens. I think it's a combination of putting a lot of background info into the context, along with a lot of "planning" sort of queries that are fairly invisible to the end user but help with building that background for the ultimate query. Aider felt similar when I tried it in architect mode; my prompt would be very short and then I'd chew through thousands of tokens while it planned and thought and found relevant code snippets and etc.
dakiol 1y ago
To all the engineers using claude code: how do you submit your (well, claude’s) to review? Say, you have a big feature/epic to implement. Typically (pre-ai) times you would split it in chunks and submit each chunk as PR to be reviewed. You don’t want to submit dozens of file changes because nobody would review it. Now with llms, one can easily explain the whole feature to the machine and they would output the whole code just fine. What do you do? You divide it manually for review submission? One chunk after another? It’s way easier to let the agent code the whole thing if your prompt is good enough than to give instructions bit by bit only because your colleagues cannot review a PR with 50 file changes.
- Yoric 1y ago
  I regularly write big MRs, then cut them into 5+ (sometimes 10+) smaller MRs. What does Claude Code change here?
  - dakiol 1y ago
    The split seems artificial now. Before, an average engineer would produce code sequentially, chunk after chunk. Each chunk submitted only after the previous one was reviewed and approved. Today, one could submit the whole thing for review. Also, if machines can write it, why not let machines review it too? Seems weird not to do so.
    - Disposal8433 1y ago
      Will the LLM take responsibility for the bugs and bad code introduced by the review? If it does and I'm free, then go for it.
    - Yoric 1y ago
      Not sure I follow. The limitation has never been about the developer being able to write a complex feature in one MR. It has always been about the other developer not being able to review a complex MR. So far, nothing I've seen convinces me that machines can (yet) write or review code autonomously (although they can certainly be useful as assistants). Maybe some day.
rester324 1y ago
> If I were to give advice from an engineer's perspective, if you're a technical leader considering AI adoption: >> Let your engineers adopt and test different AI solutions: AI-assisted coding is a skill that you have to practice to learn. I am sorry, but this is so out of touch with reality. Maybe in the US most companies are willing to allocate you 1000 or 1500 USD/month/engineer, but I am sure that in many countries outside of the US not even a single line (or other type of) manager will allocate you such a budget. I know for a fact that in countries like Japan you even need to present your arguments for a pizza party :D So that's all you need to know about AI adoption and what's driving it
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  Depends on the culture. I worked at a place that did $100 million in sales a year and if the cost was less than $5k for something we needed, management said just fuckin do it, don't even ask. I also worked at a place that did $2 billion a year and they required multi-level approval for MS project pro licenses. All depends. Edit: Why is this downvoted? Different corp cultures have different ideas about what is worthwhile. Some places value innovation and experimentation and some places don't.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  I love how you are getting downvoted, probably by people who have never set foot outside the USA.
ale 1y ago
It’s about time these types of articles actually include the types of tasks being “orchestrated” (as the author writes) that aren’t just plain refactoring chores or React boilerplate. Sanity has quite a backlog of long-requested features and the message here is that these agents are supposedly parallelizing a lot of the work. What kind of staff engineer has “80% of their code” written by a “junior developer who doesn't learn“?
- bakugo 1y ago
  Actually providing examples of real tasks given to the AI and the subsequent results would break the illusion and give people opportunities to question the hype. Can't have that. We'll just keep getting submission after submission talking about how amazing Claude Code is with zero real world examples.
  - johnfn 1y ago
    Really, zero real world examples? What about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166
  - vincent_builds 1y ago
    Author here. It's fair enough. I didn't give real-world examples; that's partially down to what I typically work on. I usually work in brownfield backend logic in closed-source applications that don't showcase well. Two recent production features: 1. *Quota crossing detection system* - Complex business logic for billing infrastructure - Detects when usage crosses configurable thresholds across multiple metric types - Time: 4 days parallel work vs ~10 days focused without AI The 3-attempt pattern was clear here: - Attempt 1: DB trigger approach - wouldn't scale for our requirements - Attempt 2: SQL detection but wrong interfaces, misunderstood counter vs gauge metrics - Attempt 3: Correct abstraction after explaining how values are stored and consumed 2. *Sentry monitoring wrapper for cron jobs* - Reusable component wrapping all cron jobs with monitoring - Time: 1 day parallel vs 2 days focused Nothing glamorous, but they are real-world examples of changes I've deployed to production quicker because of Claude.
- 1y ago
resonious 1y ago
Interesting that this guy uses AI for the initial implementation. I do the opposite. I always build the foundation. That way I know how things work fundamentally. Then I ask agents to do boilerplate tasks. They're really good at following suit, but very bad at architecture.
- f311a 1y ago
  Yeah, LLMs are pretty bad at planning maintainable architecture. They don’t refactor it when code is evolving and probably can’t do it due to context limitations.
meerab 1y ago
I have barely written any code since my switch to Claude Code! It's the best thing since sliced bread! Here's what works for me: - Detailed claude.md containing overall information about the project. - Anytime Claude chooses a different route that's not my preferred route - ask my preference to be saved in global memory. - Detailed planning documentation for each feature - Describe high-level functionality. - As I develop the feature, add documentation with database schema, sample records, sample JSON responses, API endpoints used, test scripts. - MCP, MCP, MCP! Playwright is a game changer The more context you give upfront, the less back-and-forth you need. It's been absolutely transformative for my productivity. Thank you Claude Code team!
- ethanwillis 1y ago
  Personally, I give Claude a fully specified program as my prompt so that it gives me back a working program 100% of the time. Really simple workflow!
  - Zee2 1y ago
    Ah, I’ve tried that one, but I must be doing something wrong. I give it a fully specified working program, and often times it gives me back one that only works 50% of the time!
- f311a 1y ago
  What you’re working on? In my industry it fails half of the time and comes up with absolute nonsense. The data just don’t exist for our problems, it can only work when you guide it and ask for a few functions at max.
  - meerab 1y ago
    I am working on VideoToBe.com - and my stack is NextJS, Postgresql and FastAPI. Claude code is amazing at producing code for this stack. It does excellent job at outputting ffmpeg, curl commands, linux shell script etc. I have written detailed project plan and feature plan in MarkDown - and Claude has no trouble understanding the instructions. I am curious - what is your usecase?
jedberg 1y ago
I'd like to share my journey with Claude (not code). I fed Claude a copy of everything I've ever written on Hacker News. Then I asked it to generate an essay that sounds like me. Out of five paragraphs I had to change one sentence. Everything else sounded exactly as I would have written it. It was scary good.
- into_ruin 1y ago
  I'm doing a project in a codebase I'm not familiar with in a language I don't really know, and Claude Code has been amazing at _explaining_ thing to me. "Who calls this function," "how is this generated," etc. etc. I'm not comfortable using it to generate code for this project, but I can absolutely see using it to generate code for a project I'm familiar with in a language I know well.
- keeda 1y ago
  Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, has gone whole hog on that idea and has a literal AI clone of himself, trained on all his writings, videos and audio interviews -- complete with AI-generated deep-fake visuals and cloned voice: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/reidhoffman_can-talking-with-an-ai-generated-version-activity-7188916775692947456-Dw6q/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/reidhoffman_can-talking-with-... I've watched a handful of videos with this "digital twin", and I don't know how much post-processing has gone into them, but it is scary accurate. And this was a year+ ago.
asdev 1y ago
Guy said a whole lot of nothing. Said he's improved productivity, but also said AI falls short in all the common ways people have noticed. Also guarantee no one is building core functionality delegating to Claude Code.
- aronowb14 1y ago
  Agreed. I think this Anthropic article is a realistic take on what’s possible (focus on prototyping) https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135ad8871e7658.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135a...
- muzani 1y ago
  This whole article is a really odd take. Maybe it's upvoted so much because it's from a "staff engineer". Most people are getting much better rates than 95% failure and almost nobody is spending over $1000 a month. If it was anyone else saying the same thing, they'd be laughed out of the room.
BobbyTables2 1y ago
The author will be in upper management before they know it!
nh43215rgb 1y ago
$1000-1500/month for ai paid by employer... that's quite nice. I wonder how much would it cost to run couple of claude code instance to run 24/7 indefinitely. If company's got resources they might as well try that against their issues.
RomanPushkin 1y ago
There is one thing I would highly recommend to anyone using Claude or any other agents: logging. I can't emphasize it more, if you have logging you can take the whole log file, dump it into AI, outline the problem and likely you're getting solution or would advance to the next step. Logging is everything.
nikcub 1y ago
> budget for $1000-1500/month for a senior engineer going all-in on AI development. Is this another case of someone using API keys and not knowing about the claude MAX plans? It's $100 or $200 a month, if you're not pure yolo brute-force vibe coding $100 plan works. https://www.anthropic.com/max https://www.anthropic.com/max
- reissbaker 1y ago
  Yeah $1k-1.5k seems absurdly high. The $200/month 20x variant of the Max plan covers an insane amount of usage, and the rate limits reset every five hours. Hard to imagine needing it so badly that you're blowing through that rate limit multiple times a day, every day... And if you are, I think switching to per-token payment would probably cost a lot more than $1k.
- rolls-reus 1y ago
  The MAX plan is a consumer plan, it’s not available with Teams or Enterprise. They introduced a premium team plan ($150) with Claude code access but not sure how much usage that bundles.
- vincent_builds 1y ago
  Author here, quick clarification on pricing: the $1000-1500/month is for Teams/Enterprise with higher rate limits, not the consumer MAX plans. Consumer MAX ($200/month) works for lighter usage but hits limits quickly with parallel agents and large codebases. For context: that's 1-2% of a senior engineer's fully loaded cost. The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain (we're seeing 2-3x on specific tasks). You're right that many devs can start with MAX plans. The higher tier becomes necessary when running multiple parallel contexts and doing systematic exploration (the "3-attempt pattern" burns tokens fast). I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was value for money. I've always been a cost-conscious engineer who weighs cost/value, and with Claude, I am seeing the return.
  - imron 1y ago
    > The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain What if what feels like a productivity gain is actually a productivity loss? https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... (see link in the article to a study showing developers thought AI gave them a 20% gain in productivity, but measuring this showed they instead had a 20% loss)
tkgally 1y ago
Anthropic just posted an interview with Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code. He also offers some ideas on how to use it. “The future of agentic coding with Claude Code” https://youtu.be/iF9iV4xponk https://youtu.be/iF9iV4xponk
sigmonsays 1y ago
every god damn time AI hallucinates a solution that is not real (in ChatGPT) I havn't put a huge effort into learning to write prompts but in short, it seems easier to write the code myself than determine prompts. If you don't know every detail ahead of time and ask a slightly off question, the entire result will be garbage.
josefrichter 1y ago
I'm almost sure that we all ended up at the same set of rules and steps how to get the best out of Claude - mine are almost identical, others' I know as well :-)
namesbc 1y ago
Spending $1500 per-month is a crazy wasteful amount of money
- the_hoffa 1y ago
  That's 18k a year, or about equal or cheaper than "outsourcing", minus the tax and legal ramifications. I agree it's wasteful, but from a long-form view of what spending looks like (or at least should/used to look like). Those who see 1.5k/month as "saving" money typically only care about next quarter. As the old adage goes: a thousand dollars saved this month is 100 thousand spent next year.
jpollock 1y ago
Avoiding the boilerplate is part of the job as a software developer. Abstracting the boilerplate is how you make things easier for future you. Giving it to an AI to generate just makes the boilerplate more of a problem when there's a change that needs to be made to _all_ the instances of it. Even worse if the boilerplate isn't consistent between copies in the codebase.
- conradfr 1y ago
  What's weird for me is that most frameworks and tools usually include generators for boilerplate code anyway so not sure why wasting tokens/money on that is valuable.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  Yeah. I'm increasingly starting to think this LLM stuff is simply the first time many programmers have been able to not write boilerplate. They didn't learn to build abstractions so essentially live on whatever platform someone else has built for them. AI is simply that new platform. I'm lazy af. I have not been manually typing up boilerplate for the past 15 years. I use computers to do repetitive tasks. LLMs are good at some of them, but it's just another tool in the box for me. For some it seems like their first and only one. What I can't understand is how people are ok with all that typing that you still have to do just going into /dev/null while only some translation of what you wrote ends up in the codebase. That one makes me even less likely to want to type. At least if I'm writing source code I know it's going into the repository directly.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    The one thing I’m always suspicious about is the actual mastery (programming language and computer usage) involved. You never see anyon describe the context of what they’ve been doing pre-llm.
syspec 1y ago
Does this work for others when working in other domains? When creating a Swift application, I can't imagine creating 20 agents and letting them go to town. Same for the backend of such an application if it's in say, Java+Springboot
- fragmede 1y ago
  I've been using Claude with Swift for macOS and iOS apps. What problems do you forsee where you don't think it would work out to create 20 agents for Swift?
drudolph914 1y ago
to throw my hat into the ring, I am in no way shy about using the AI tooling and I like using it, but I am happy we're finally seeing people talk about AI that matches with my personal reality with the tools. for the record, I've been bullish on the tooling from the beginning My dev-tooling AI journey has been chatGPT -> vscode + copilot -> early cursor adopter -> early claude + cursor adopter -> cursor agent with claude -> and now claude code I've also spent a lot of time trying out self-hosted LLMs such as couple version of Qwen coder 2.5/3 32B, as well as deepseek 30B - and talking to them through the vscode continue.dev extension My personal feelings are that the AI coding/tooling industry has seen a major plateau in usefulness as soon as agents became apart of the tooling. The reality is coding is a highly precise task, and LLMs down to the very core of the model architecture are not precise in the way coding needs them to be. and it's not that I don't think we won't one day see coding agents, but I think it will take a deep and complete bottom up kind of change and an possibly an entirely new model architecture to get us to what people imagine a coding agent is I've accepted to just use claude w/ cursor and to be done with experimenting. the agent tooling just slows my engineering team down I think the worst part about this dev tooling space is the comment sections on these kinds of articles is completely useless. it's either AI hype bots just saying non-sense, or the most mid an obvious takes that you here everywhere else. I've genuinely have become frustrated with all this vague advice and how the AI dev community talks about this domain space. there is no science, data, or reason as to why these things fail or how to improve it I think anyone who tries to take this domain space seriously knows that there's limit to all this tooling, we're probably not going to see anything group breaking for a while, and there doesn't exist a person, outside the AI researchers at the the big AI companies, that could tell ya how to actually improve the performance of a coding agent I think that famous vibe-code reddit post said it best "what's the point of using these tools if I still need a software engineer to actually build it when I'm done prototyping"
cjonas 1y ago
Once thing I've noticed is the difference in code quality by language. I'm constantly disappointed by the output of python code. I have to correct it to follow even the most basic software development principles (DRY, etc). Typescript on the other hand, seems to do much better on first pass. Still not always beautiful code, but much more application ready. My hypothesis is that this is due to the billions LOC of Jupyter Notebook it was probably trained on :/
- rcfox 1y ago
  With Typescript, I find it pretty eager to just try `(foo as any).bar` when it gets the initial typing wrong. It also likes to redefine types in every file they're used instead of importing. It will fix those if you catch them, but I haven't been able to figure out a prompt that prevents this in the first place.
- __mharrison__ 1y ago
  There's a LOT of bad/newbie Python code floating around. I find that if I'm specific, it does a good job. (I'm also passing in my code/notebooks as context, so one would assume that it is attempting to mirror my style.)
pseudosavant 1y ago
This has been my experience too. I’m just not quite as far along as the author. Detachment from the code has been excellent for me. Just started a v2 rewrite of something I’d never had done in the past. Mostly because it would have taken me too much time to try it out if I wrote it all by hand.
makk 1y ago
I don’t understand the use of MCP described in the post. Claude code can access pretty much all those third party services in the shell, using curl or gh and so on. And in at least one case using MCP can cause trouble: the linear MCP server truncates long issues, in my experience, whereas curling the API does not. What am I missing?
- musbemus 1y ago
  You're exactly right. To be honest, in pretty much every case I've seen, indicating usage of a read-only resource directly in the prompt always outperforms using the MCP for it. Should really only be using MCP if you need MCP-specific functionality imo (elicitation, sampling)
saltserv 1y ago
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rhubarbtree 1y ago
Does anyone have a link to a video that uses Claude Code to produce clean robust code that solves a non trivial problem (ie not tic tac toe or a landing page) more quickly than a human programmer can write? I don’t want a “demo”, I want a livestream from an independent programmer unaffiliated with any AI company and thus not incentivised to hype. I want the code to have subsequently been deployed in production and demonstrably robust, without additional work outside of the livestream. The livestream should include code review, test creation, testing, PR creation. It should not be on a greenfield project, because nearly all coding is not. I want to use Claude and I want to be more productive, but my experience to date is that for writing code beyond autocomplete AI is not good enough and leads to low quality code that can’t be maintained, or else requires so much hand holding that it is actually less efficient than a good programmer. There are lots of incentives for marketing at the grassroots level. I am totally open to changing my mind but I need evidence.
- lysecret 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166
- thecupisblue 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - izacus 1y ago
    People live stream their work all the time, it's really not unreasonable to ask for an example/tutorial on how to use the technology in the real world.
    - Kiro 1y ago
      The people live streaming their work is a minuscule percentage of all programmers. And you can ask but the incentive to make such a video is not there unless you're selling an AI product yourself, which reduces the sample even more.
    - 1y ago
willtemperley 1y ago
Maybe I’m contrarian but I design and write most of my code and let LLMs do the reviews. Why? First I know my problem space better than the LLM. Second, the best way to express coding intention is with code. The models often have excellent suggestions on improvements I wouldn’t have thought of. I suspect the probability of providing a good answer has been increased significantly by narrowing the scope. Another technique is to say “do this like <some good project> does it” but I suspect that might be close to copyright theft.
jbs789 1y ago
I often find that Claude introduces a level of complexity that is not necessary in my cases. I suspect this is a function of the training data (large repos or novel solutions). That said, I do sometimes find inspiration for new techniques in its answers. I just haven't heard others express the same over-engineering problem and wonder if this is a general observation or only shows up b/c my requests are quite simple. (I have found that prompting it for the simplest or most efficient solution seems to help - sometimes taking 20+ lines down to 2-3, often more understandable.) P.S. I tend to work with data and a web app for processes related to a small business, while not a formally trained developer.
- chamomeal 1y ago
  Seems like LLMs really suffer from the "eh I'll just write it myself" mindset. Yesterday on a react app using react-query (library to manage caching and re-fetching of data) claude code wanted to update the cache manually, instead of just using a bit of state that was already in scope in the exact same component! For me, stuff like that is the same weird uncanny valley that you used to see in AI text, and see now in AI video. It just does such inhuman things. A senior developer would NEVER think to manually mutate the cache, because it's such desperate hack. A junior dev wouldn't even realize it's an option.
spicyusername 1y ago
I guess we're just going to be in the age of this conversation topic until everyone gets tired of talking about it. Every one of these discussions boils down to the following: - LLMs are not good at writing code on their own unless it's extremely simple or boilerplate - LLMs can be good at helping you debug existing code - LLMs can be good at brainstorming solutions to new problems - The code that is written by LLMs always needs to be heavily monitored for correctness, style, and design, and then typically edited down, often to at least half its original size - LLMs utility is high enough that it is now going to be a standard tool in the toolbox of every software engineer, but it is definitely not replacing anyone at current capability. - New software engineers are going to suffer the most because they know how to edit the responses the least, but this was true when they wrote their own code with stack overflow. - At senior level, sometimes using LLMs is going to save you a ton of time and sometimes it's going to waste your time. Net-net, it's probably positive, but there are definitely some horrible days where you spend too long going back and forth, when you should have just tried to solve the problem yourself.
- deleted 1y ago
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- MontyCarloHall 1y ago
  It's almost as if you could recapitulate each of these discussions using an LLM!
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  > but this was true when they wrote their own code with stack overflow. Searching for solutions and integrating examples found requires effort that develops into a skill. You would rarely get solutions that would just fit into the codebase from SO. If I give a task to you and you produce a correct solution on the initial review I now know I can trust you to deal with this kind of problem in the future. Especially after a few reviews. If you just vibed through the problem the LLM might have given you the correct solution - but there is no guarantee that it will do it again in the future. Just because you spent less effort on search/official docs/integration into the codebase you learned less about everything surrounding it. So using LLMs as a junior you are just breaking my trust, and we both know you are not a competent reviewer of LLM code - why am I even dealing with you when I'll get LLM outputs faster myself ? This was my experience so far.
pastage 1y ago
That is 150MWh per month in AI for a staff engineer. If we are doing a straight dollar to kWh conversion, plus/minus an order of magnitude.
nzach 1y ago
One thing that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about is the relatively new model config "Opus Plan Mode: Use Opus 4.1 in plan mode, Sonnet 4 otherwise". In my opinion this should be the default config. Increasing the quality of the plans gives you a much better experience using Claude Code.
xentronium 1y ago
> The shift to Claude Code? That took just hours of use for me to become productive. > This isn't failure; it's the process! > The biggest challenge? AI can't retain learning between sessions ai slop
guthib_net 1y ago
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alessandru 1y ago
did this guy read that other paper about ai usage making people stupid? how long until he falls from staff engineer back down to senior or something less?
- BhavdeepSethi 1y ago
  It's funny that the MIT paper HN is trending higher than this post, so it propped up before I read this article.

550 points by kmelve 1y ago

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furyofantares 1y ago

I've come around on something like this. I start by putting a little effort into a prompt and into providing context, but not a ton - and see where Claude Code gets with it. It might even get what I asked for working in terms of features, but it's garbage code. This is a vibe session, not caring about the code at all, or hardly at all. I notice what worked and what didn't, what was good and what was garbage -- and also how my own opinion of what should be done changed. I have Claude Code help me update the initial prompt, help me update what should have been in the initial context, maybe add some of the bits that looked good to the initial context as well, and then write it all to a file. Then I revert everything else and start with a totally blank context, except that file. In this session I care about the code, I review it, I am vigilant to not let any slop through. I've been trying for the second session to be the one that's gonna work -- but I'm open to another round or two of this iteration.

soperj 1y ago
and do you find this takes longer or shorter than just doing it yourself from scratch?
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  Not OP, I don't care if it's the same amount of time because I can do it drunk/while doing other things. Not sure why how long does it take is the be all end all for some people.
- shinecantbeseen 1y ago
  I’m with you. Sometimes it really just feels like we’re just tacking on the cognitive load of managing the drunk senior in addition to the problem of hand instead of just dealing with the problem at hand.
  - sfjailbird 1y ago
    A hundred times more time is spent reading a given piece of code, than it took writing it, in the lifetime of that program. OK I made up the statistic, but the core idea is true, and it's something that is rarely considered in this debate. At least with code you wrote, you can probably recognize it later when you need to maintain it or just figure out what it does.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      Most code is never read, to be honest.
      - furyofantares 1y ago
        In the olden days I read the code I wrote probably 2-3 times while in the process of reading it, and then almost always once in full just before submitting it.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  Quite a bit shorter. Plus I can do the a good chunk of the work (first iteration) in contexts where I couldn't before, where I require less focus, and it uses less of my energy. I think I can also end up with a better result, and having learned more myself. It's just better in a whole host of directions all at once. I don't end up intimately familiar with the solution however. Which I think is still a major cost.

swframe2 1y ago

Preventing garbage just requires that you take into account the cognitive limits of the agent. For example ... 1) Don't ask for large / complex change. Ask for a plan but ask it to implement the plan in small steps and ask the model to test each step before starting the next. 2) For really complex steps, ask the model to write code to visualize the problem and solution. 3) If the model fails on a given step, ask it to add logging to the code, save the logs, run the tests and the review the logs to determine what went wrong. Do this repeatedly until the step works well. 4) Ask the model to look at your existing code and determine how it was designed to implement a task. Some times the model will put all of the changes in one file but your code has a cleaner design the model doesn't take into account. I've seen other people blog about their tricks and tips. I do still see garbage results but not as high as 95%.

jason_zig 1y ago
I've seen people post this same advice and I agree with you that it works but you would think they would absorb this common strategy and integrate it as part of the underlying product at this point...
- tombot 1y ago
  Claude Code at least now lets you use its best model for planning mode and its cheapest model for coding mode.
  - candiddevmike 1y ago
    The consulting world parallels here are funny
    - baq 1y ago
      Humans are agents after all
- noosphr 1y ago
  The people who build the models don't understand how to use the models. It's like asking people who design CPUs to build data-centers. I've interviewed with three tier one AI labs and _no-one_ I talked to had any idea where the business value of their models came in. Meanwhile Chinese labs are releasing open source models that do what you need. At this point I've build local agentic tools that are better than anything Claude and OAI have as paid offerings, including the $2,000 tier. Of course they cost between a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per query so until hardware gets better they will stay happily behind corporate moats and be used by the people blessed to burn money like paper.

kbuchanan 1y ago

For me, working mostly in Planning Mode skips much of the initial misfires, and often leads to correct outcomes for the first edit.

mierz00 1y ago
Recently I’ve been taking a step back and getting ChatGPT 5 to ask me questions to create a spec. I refine that spec and then give that to planning mode and then go from there. I’ve found if I jump straight into planning mode I miss some critical aspects of what ever it is I am building.

axus 1y ago

I like his point about more objectivity and zero ego. You don't have to worry about hurting an AI's feelings or your own when you throw away code.

awesome_dude 1y ago
But I still find myself needing (strongly) to let Claude know when it's made a breakthrough that would have been hard work on my own.
- groby_b 1y ago
  Curious: Do you also laud your compiler for particularly good optimizations?
  - awesome_dude 1y ago
    There's a couple of things there 1. I don't see the output of the compiler, as in, all I get is an executable blob. It could be inspected, but I don't think that I ever have in my 20+ year career. Maybe I lie and I've rocked up with a Hex editor once or twice, out of pure curiousity, but I've never got past looking for strings that I recognise. 2. When I use Claude, I am using it to do things that I can do, by hand, myself. I am reviewing the code as I go along, and I know what I want it to do because it's what I would be writing myself if I didn't have Claude (or Gemini for that matter). So, no, I have never congratulated the compiler (or interpreter, linker, assembler, or even the CPU). Finally, I view the AI as a pairing partner, sometimes it's better than me, sometimes it's not, and I have to be "in the game" in order to make sure I don't end up with a vibe coded mess. edit: This is from yesterday (Claude had just fixed a bug for me - all I did was paste the block of code that the bug was in, and say "x behaviour but getting y behaviour instead) perfect, thanks Edit You're welcome! That was a tricky bug - using rowCount instead of colCount in the index calculation is the kind of subtle error that can be really hard to spot. It's especially sneaky because row 0 worked correctly by accident, making it seem like the logic was mostly right. Glad we got it sorted out! Your Gaps redeal should now work properly with all the 2s (and other correctly placed cards) staying in their proper positions across all rows.

lordnacho 1y ago

I'm using Claude all the time now. It works, and I'm amazed it worked so easily for me. Here's what it looks like: 1) Summarize what I think my project currently does 2) Summarize what I think it should do 3) Give a couple of hints about how to do it 4) Watch it iterate a write-compile-test loop until it thinks it's ready I haven't added any files or instructions anywhere, I just do that loop above. I know of people who put their Claude in YOLO mode on multiple sessions, but for the moment I'm just sitting there watching it. Example: "So at the moment, we're connecting to a websocket and subscribing to data, and it works fine, all the parsing tests are working, all good. But I want to connect over multiple sockets and just take whichever one receives the message first, and discard subsequent copies. Maybe you need a module that remembers what sequence number it has seen?" Claude will then praise my insightful guidance and start making edits. At some point, it will do something silly, and I will say: "Why are you doing this with a bunch of Arc<RwLock> things? Let's share state by sharing messages!" Claude will then apologize profusely and give reasons why I'm so wise, and then build the module in an async way. I just keep an eye on what it tries, and it's completely changed how I code. For instance, I don't need to be fully concentrated anymore. I can be sitting in a meeting while I tell Claude what to do. Or I can be close to falling asleep, but still be productive.

abraxas 1y ago
I tried to follow the same pattern on a backend project written in Python/FastAPI and this has been mostly a heartache. It gets kind of close but then it seems to periodically go off the rails, lose its mind and write utter shit. Like braindead code that has no chance of working. I don't know if this is a question of the language or what but I just have no good luck with its consistency. And I did invest time into defining various CLAUDE.md files. To no avail.
- lordnacho 1y ago
  Has this got anything to do with using a stronger typed language? I've heard that reported, not sure whether it's true since my python scripts tend to be short. Does it end in a forever loop for you? I used to have this problem with other models.

block_dagger 1y ago

The author doesn't make it clear why they switched from Cursor to Claude. Curious about what they can do with Claude that can't be done with Cursor. I use both a lot and find Cursor to be superior for the very large codebases I work in.

RomanPushkin 1y ago
It's easy: Cursor are resellers, they optimize your token usage, so they can make a profit. Claude is the final point, and they offer tokens for the cheapest price possible.
- block_dagger 1y ago
  I use Cursor in MAX mode because my employer pays for the tokens. I probably should have mentioned that in my OP. It makes a huge difference.
  - maigret 1y ago
    Can you elaborate on “huge”?
meerab 1y ago
Personal opinion: Claude code is more user friendly than cursor with its CLI like interface. The file modifications are easy to view and it automatically runs psql, cd, ls , grep command. Output of the commands is shown in more user friendly fashion. Agents and MCPs are easy to organized and used.
- block_dagger 1y ago
  I feel just the opposite. I think Cursor's output is actually in the realm of "beautiful." It's well formatted and shows the user snippets of code and reasoning that helps the user learn. Claude is stuck in a terminal window, so reduced to monospaced bullet lines. Its verbose mode spits out lines of file listings and other context irrelevant to the user.

albingroen 1y ago

So we’re supposed to start paying $1k-$1,5k on top of already crazy salaries just to maybe get a productivity boost on trivial to semi trivial issues? I know my boss would not be keen on that at least.

albingroen 1y ago
And remember. This is on subsadised prices.
- dajonker 1y ago
  Exactly, makes it feel almost like an advertorial for Anthropic, who likely need most customers to pay 1000 bucks a month to break even.
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
I can't use $20 of credit (gpt-5 thinking via intellij's pro AI subscription) a month right now with plenty of usage so I'm surprised at the $1k figure. Is Claude that much more expensive? (a quick Google suggests yes actually). Having said the above some level of AI spending is the new reality. Your workplace pays for internet right? Probably a really expensive fast corporate grade connection? Well they now also need to pay for an AI subscription. That's just the current reality.
- oblio 1y ago
  The fast corporate internet connection is probably 1000$ for 100 developers or more...
- everforward 1y ago
  I don't know what Intellij's AI integration is like, but my brief Claude Code experience is that it really chews through tokens. I think it's a combination of putting a lot of background info into the context, along with a lot of "planning" sort of queries that are fairly invisible to the end user but help with building that background for the ultimate query. Aider felt similar when I tried it in architect mode; my prompt would be very short and then I'd chew through thousands of tokens while it planned and thought and found relevant code snippets and etc.

dakiol 1y ago

To all the engineers using claude code: how do you submit your (well, claude’s) to review? Say, you have a big feature/epic to implement. Typically (pre-ai) times you would split it in chunks and submit each chunk as PR to be reviewed. You don’t want to submit dozens of file changes because nobody would review it. Now with llms, one can easily explain the whole feature to the machine and they would output the whole code just fine. What do you do? You divide it manually for review submission? One chunk after another? It’s way easier to let the agent code the whole thing if your prompt is good enough than to give instructions bit by bit only because your colleagues cannot review a PR with 50 file changes.

Yoric 1y ago
I regularly write big MRs, then cut them into 5+ (sometimes 10+) smaller MRs. What does Claude Code change here?
- dakiol 1y ago
  The split seems artificial now. Before, an average engineer would produce code sequentially, chunk after chunk. Each chunk submitted only after the previous one was reviewed and approved. Today, one could submit the whole thing for review. Also, if machines can write it, why not let machines review it too? Seems weird not to do so.
  - Disposal8433 1y ago
    Will the LLM take responsibility for the bugs and bad code introduced by the review? If it does and I'm free, then go for it.
  - Yoric 1y ago
    Not sure I follow. The limitation has never been about the developer being able to write a complex feature in one MR. It has always been about the other developer not being able to review a complex MR. So far, nothing I've seen convinces me that machines can (yet) write or review code autonomously (although they can certainly be useful as assistants). Maybe some day.

rester324 1y ago

> If I were to give advice from an engineer's perspective, if you're a technical leader considering AI adoption: >> Let your engineers adopt and test different AI solutions: AI-assisted coding is a skill that you have to practice to learn. I am sorry, but this is so out of touch with reality. Maybe in the US most companies are willing to allocate you 1000 or 1500 USD/month/engineer, but I am sure that in many countries outside of the US not even a single line (or other type of) manager will allocate you such a budget. I know for a fact that in countries like Japan you even need to present your arguments for a pizza party :D So that's all you need to know about AI adoption and what's driving it

bongodongobob 1y ago
Depends on the culture. I worked at a place that did $100 million in sales a year and if the cost was less than $5k for something we needed, management said just fuckin do it, don't even ask. I also worked at a place that did $2 billion a year and they required multi-level approval for MS project pro licenses. All depends. Edit: Why is this downvoted? Different corp cultures have different ideas about what is worthwhile. Some places value innovation and experimentation and some places don't.
LtWorf 1y ago
I love how you are getting downvoted, probably by people who have never set foot outside the USA.

ale 1y ago

It’s about time these types of articles actually include the types of tasks being “orchestrated” (as the author writes) that aren’t just plain refactoring chores or React boilerplate. Sanity has quite a backlog of long-requested features and the message here is that these agents are supposedly parallelizing a lot of the work. What kind of staff engineer has “80% of their code” written by a “junior developer who doesn't learn“?

bakugo 1y ago
Actually providing examples of real tasks given to the AI and the subsequent results would break the illusion and give people opportunities to question the hype. Can't have that. We'll just keep getting submission after submission talking about how amazing Claude Code is with zero real world examples.
- johnfn 1y ago
  Really, zero real world examples? What about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166
- vincent_builds 1y ago
  Author here. It's fair enough. I didn't give real-world examples; that's partially down to what I typically work on. I usually work in brownfield backend logic in closed-source applications that don't showcase well. Two recent production features: 1. *Quota crossing detection system* - Complex business logic for billing infrastructure - Detects when usage crosses configurable thresholds across multiple metric types - Time: 4 days parallel work vs ~10 days focused without AI The 3-attempt pattern was clear here: - Attempt 1: DB trigger approach - wouldn't scale for our requirements - Attempt 2: SQL detection but wrong interfaces, misunderstood counter vs gauge metrics - Attempt 3: Correct abstraction after explaining how values are stored and consumed 2. *Sentry monitoring wrapper for cron jobs* - Reusable component wrapping all cron jobs with monitoring - Time: 1 day parallel vs 2 days focused Nothing glamorous, but they are real-world examples of changes I've deployed to production quicker because of Claude.
1y ago

resonious 1y ago

Interesting that this guy uses AI for the initial implementation. I do the opposite. I always build the foundation. That way I know how things work fundamentally. Then I ask agents to do boilerplate tasks. They're really good at following suit, but very bad at architecture.

f311a 1y ago
Yeah, LLMs are pretty bad at planning maintainable architecture. They don’t refactor it when code is evolving and probably can’t do it due to context limitations.

meerab 1y ago

I have barely written any code since my switch to Claude Code! It's the best thing since sliced bread! Here's what works for me: - Detailed claude.md containing overall information about the project. - Anytime Claude chooses a different route that's not my preferred route - ask my preference to be saved in global memory. - Detailed planning documentation for each feature - Describe high-level functionality. - As I develop the feature, add documentation with database schema, sample records, sample JSON responses, API endpoints used, test scripts. - MCP, MCP, MCP! Playwright is a game changer The more context you give upfront, the less back-and-forth you need. It's been absolutely transformative for my productivity. Thank you Claude Code team!

ethanwillis 1y ago
Personally, I give Claude a fully specified program as my prompt so that it gives me back a working program 100% of the time. Really simple workflow!
- Zee2 1y ago
  Ah, I’ve tried that one, but I must be doing something wrong. I give it a fully specified working program, and often times it gives me back one that only works 50% of the time!
f311a 1y ago
What you’re working on? In my industry it fails half of the time and comes up with absolute nonsense. The data just don’t exist for our problems, it can only work when you guide it and ask for a few functions at max.
- meerab 1y ago
  I am working on VideoToBe.com - and my stack is NextJS, Postgresql and FastAPI. Claude code is amazing at producing code for this stack. It does excellent job at outputting ffmpeg, curl commands, linux shell script etc. I have written detailed project plan and feature plan in MarkDown - and Claude has no trouble understanding the instructions. I am curious - what is your usecase?

jedberg 1y ago

I'd like to share my journey with Claude (not code). I fed Claude a copy of everything I've ever written on Hacker News. Then I asked it to generate an essay that sounds like me. Out of five paragraphs I had to change one sentence. Everything else sounded exactly as I would have written it. It was scary good.

into_ruin 1y ago
I'm doing a project in a codebase I'm not familiar with in a language I don't really know, and Claude Code has been amazing at _explaining_ thing to me. "Who calls this function," "how is this generated," etc. etc. I'm not comfortable using it to generate code for this project, but I can absolutely see using it to generate code for a project I'm familiar with in a language I know well.
keeda 1y ago
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, has gone whole hog on that idea and has a literal AI clone of himself, trained on all his writings, videos and audio interviews -- complete with AI-generated deep-fake visuals and cloned voice: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/reidhoffman_can-talking-with-an-ai-generated-version-activity-7188916775692947456-Dw6q/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/reidhoffman_can-talking-with-... I've watched a handful of videos with this "digital twin", and I don't know how much post-processing has gone into them, but it is scary accurate. And this was a year+ ago.

asdev 1y ago

Guy said a whole lot of nothing. Said he's improved productivity, but also said AI falls short in all the common ways people have noticed. Also guarantee no one is building core functionality delegating to Claude Code.

aronowb14 1y ago
Agreed. I think this Anthropic article is a realistic take on what’s possible (focus on prototyping) https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135ad8871e7658.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135a...
muzani 1y ago
This whole article is a really odd take. Maybe it's upvoted so much because it's from a "staff engineer". Most people are getting much better rates than 95% failure and almost nobody is spending over $1000 a month. If it was anyone else saying the same thing, they'd be laughed out of the room.

BobbyTables2 1y ago

The author will be in upper management before they know it!

nh43215rgb 1y ago

$1000-1500/month for ai paid by employer... that's quite nice. I wonder how much would it cost to run couple of claude code instance to run 24/7 indefinitely. If company's got resources they might as well try that against their issues.

RomanPushkin 1y ago

There is one thing I would highly recommend to anyone using Claude or any other agents: logging. I can't emphasize it more, if you have logging you can take the whole log file, dump it into AI, outline the problem and likely you're getting solution or would advance to the next step. Logging is everything.

nikcub 1y ago

> budget for $1000-1500/month for a senior engineer going all-in on AI development. Is this another case of someone using API keys and not knowing about the claude MAX plans? It's $100 or $200 a month, if you're not pure yolo brute-force vibe coding $100 plan works. https://www.anthropic.com/max https://www.anthropic.com/max

reissbaker 1y ago
Yeah $1k-1.5k seems absurdly high. The $200/month 20x variant of the Max plan covers an insane amount of usage, and the rate limits reset every five hours. Hard to imagine needing it so badly that you're blowing through that rate limit multiple times a day, every day... And if you are, I think switching to per-token payment would probably cost a lot more than $1k.
rolls-reus 1y ago
The MAX plan is a consumer plan, it’s not available with Teams or Enterprise. They introduced a premium team plan ($150) with Claude code access but not sure how much usage that bundles.
vincent_builds 1y ago
Author here, quick clarification on pricing: the $1000-1500/month is for Teams/Enterprise with higher rate limits, not the consumer MAX plans. Consumer MAX ($200/month) works for lighter usage but hits limits quickly with parallel agents and large codebases. For context: that's 1-2% of a senior engineer's fully loaded cost. The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain (we're seeing 2-3x on specific tasks). You're right that many devs can start with MAX plans. The higher tier becomes necessary when running multiple parallel contexts and doing systematic exploration (the "3-attempt pattern" burns tokens fast). I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it was value for money. I've always been a cost-conscious engineer who weighs cost/value, and with Claude, I am seeing the return.
- imron 1y ago
  > The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain What if what feels like a productivity gain is actually a productivity loss? https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware... (see link in the article to a study showing developers thought AI gave them a 20% gain in productivity, but measuring this showed they instead had a 20% loss)

tkgally 1y ago

Anthropic just posted an interview with Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code. He also offers some ideas on how to use it. “The future of agentic coding with Claude Code” https://youtu.be/iF9iV4xponk https://youtu.be/iF9iV4xponk

sigmonsays 1y ago

every god damn time AI hallucinates a solution that is not real (in ChatGPT) I havn't put a huge effort into learning to write prompts but in short, it seems easier to write the code myself than determine prompts. If you don't know every detail ahead of time and ask a slightly off question, the entire result will be garbage.

josefrichter 1y ago

I'm almost sure that we all ended up at the same set of rules and steps how to get the best out of Claude - mine are almost identical, others' I know as well :-)

namesbc 1y ago

Spending $1500 per-month is a crazy wasteful amount of money

the_hoffa 1y ago
That's 18k a year, or about equal or cheaper than "outsourcing", minus the tax and legal ramifications. I agree it's wasteful, but from a long-form view of what spending looks like (or at least should/used to look like). Those who see 1.5k/month as "saving" money typically only care about next quarter. As the old adage goes: a thousand dollars saved this month is 100 thousand spent next year.

jpollock 1y ago

Avoiding the boilerplate is part of the job as a software developer. Abstracting the boilerplate is how you make things easier for future you. Giving it to an AI to generate just makes the boilerplate more of a problem when there's a change that needs to be made to _all_ the instances of it. Even worse if the boilerplate isn't consistent between copies in the codebase.

conradfr 1y ago
What's weird for me is that most frameworks and tools usually include generators for boilerplate code anyway so not sure why wasting tokens/money on that is valuable.
globular-toast 1y ago
Yeah. I'm increasingly starting to think this LLM stuff is simply the first time many programmers have been able to not write boilerplate. They didn't learn to build abstractions so essentially live on whatever platform someone else has built for them. AI is simply that new platform. I'm lazy af. I have not been manually typing up boilerplate for the past 15 years. I use computers to do repetitive tasks. LLMs are good at some of them, but it's just another tool in the box for me. For some it seems like their first and only one. What I can't understand is how people are ok with all that typing that you still have to do just going into /dev/null while only some translation of what you wrote ends up in the codebase. That one makes me even less likely to want to type. At least if I'm writing source code I know it's going into the repository directly.
- skydhash 1y ago
  The one thing I’m always suspicious about is the actual mastery (programming language and computer usage) involved. You never see anyon describe the context of what they’ve been doing pre-llm.

syspec 1y ago

Does this work for others when working in other domains? When creating a Swift application, I can't imagine creating 20 agents and letting them go to town. Same for the backend of such an application if it's in say, Java+Springboot

fragmede 1y ago
I've been using Claude with Swift for macOS and iOS apps. What problems do you forsee where you don't think it would work out to create 20 agents for Swift?

drudolph914 1y ago

to throw my hat into the ring, I am in no way shy about using the AI tooling and I like using it, but I am happy we're finally seeing people talk about AI that matches with my personal reality with the tools. for the record, I've been bullish on the tooling from the beginning My dev-tooling AI journey has been chatGPT -> vscode + copilot -> early cursor adopter -> early claude + cursor adopter -> cursor agent with claude -> and now claude code I've also spent a lot of time trying out self-hosted LLMs such as couple version of Qwen coder 2.5/3 32B, as well as deepseek 30B - and talking to them through the vscode continue.dev extension My personal feelings are that the AI coding/tooling industry has seen a major plateau in usefulness as soon as agents became apart of the tooling. The reality is coding is a highly precise task, and LLMs down to the very core of the model architecture are not precise in the way coding needs them to be. and it's not that I don't think we won't one day see coding agents, but I think it will take a deep and complete bottom up kind of change and an possibly an entirely new model architecture to get us to what people imagine a coding agent is I've accepted to just use claude w/ cursor and to be done with experimenting. the agent tooling just slows my engineering team down I think the worst part about this dev tooling space is the comment sections on these kinds of articles is completely useless. it's either AI hype bots just saying non-sense, or the most mid an obvious takes that you here everywhere else. I've genuinely have become frustrated with all this vague advice and how the AI dev community talks about this domain space. there is no science, data, or reason as to why these things fail or how to improve it I think anyone who tries to take this domain space seriously knows that there's limit to all this tooling, we're probably not going to see anything group breaking for a while, and there doesn't exist a person, outside the AI researchers at the the big AI companies, that could tell ya how to actually improve the performance of a coding agent I think that famous vibe-code reddit post said it best "what's the point of using these tools if I still need a software engineer to actually build it when I'm done prototyping"

cjonas 1y ago

Once thing I've noticed is the difference in code quality by language. I'm constantly disappointed by the output of python code. I have to correct it to follow even the most basic software development principles (DRY, etc). Typescript on the other hand, seems to do much better on first pass. Still not always beautiful code, but much more application ready. My hypothesis is that this is due to the billions LOC of Jupyter Notebook it was probably trained on :/

rcfox 1y ago
With Typescript, I find it pretty eager to just try `(foo as any).bar` when it gets the initial typing wrong. It also likes to redefine types in every file they're used instead of importing. It will fix those if you catch them, but I haven't been able to figure out a prompt that prevents this in the first place.
__mharrison__ 1y ago
There's a LOT of bad/newbie Python code floating around. I find that if I'm specific, it does a good job. (I'm also passing in my code/notebooks as context, so one would assume that it is attempting to mirror my style.)

pseudosavant 1y ago

This has been my experience too. I’m just not quite as far along as the author. Detachment from the code has been excellent for me. Just started a v2 rewrite of something I’d never had done in the past. Mostly because it would have taken me too much time to try it out if I wrote it all by hand.

makk 1y ago

I don’t understand the use of MCP described in the post. Claude code can access pretty much all those third party services in the shell, using curl or gh and so on. And in at least one case using MCP can cause trouble: the linear MCP server truncates long issues, in my experience, whereas curling the API does not. What am I missing?

musbemus 1y ago
You're exactly right. To be honest, in pretty much every case I've seen, indicating usage of a read-only resource directly in the prompt always outperforms using the MCP for it. Should really only be using MCP if you need MCP-specific functionality imo (elicitation, sampling)

saltserv 1y ago

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rhubarbtree 1y ago

Does anyone have a link to a video that uses Claude Code to produce clean robust code that solves a non trivial problem (ie not tic tac toe or a landing page) more quickly than a human programmer can write? I don’t want a “demo”, I want a livestream from an independent programmer unaffiliated with any AI company and thus not incentivised to hype. I want the code to have subsequently been deployed in production and demonstrably robust, without additional work outside of the livestream. The livestream should include code review, test creation, testing, PR creation. It should not be on a greenfield project, because nearly all coding is not. I want to use Claude and I want to be more productive, but my experience to date is that for writing code beyond autocomplete AI is not good enough and leads to low quality code that can’t be maintained, or else requires so much hand holding that it is actually less efficient than a good programmer. There are lots of incentives for marketing at the grassroots level. I am totally open to changing my mind but I need evidence.

lysecret 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166
thecupisblue 1y ago
[flagged]
- izacus 1y ago
  People live stream their work all the time, it's really not unreasonable to ask for an example/tutorial on how to use the technology in the real world.
  - Kiro 1y ago
    The people live streaming their work is a minuscule percentage of all programmers. And you can ask but the incentive to make such a video is not there unless you're selling an AI product yourself, which reduces the sample even more.
  - 1y ago

willtemperley 1y ago

Maybe I’m contrarian but I design and write most of my code and let LLMs do the reviews. Why? First I know my problem space better than the LLM. Second, the best way to express coding intention is with code. The models often have excellent suggestions on improvements I wouldn’t have thought of. I suspect the probability of providing a good answer has been increased significantly by narrowing the scope. Another technique is to say “do this like <some good project> does it” but I suspect that might be close to copyright theft.

jbs789 1y ago

I often find that Claude introduces a level of complexity that is not necessary in my cases. I suspect this is a function of the training data (large repos or novel solutions). That said, I do sometimes find inspiration for new techniques in its answers. I just haven't heard others express the same over-engineering problem and wonder if this is a general observation or only shows up b/c my requests are quite simple. (I have found that prompting it for the simplest or most efficient solution seems to help - sometimes taking 20+ lines down to 2-3, often more understandable.) P.S. I tend to work with data and a web app for processes related to a small business, while not a formally trained developer.

chamomeal 1y ago
Seems like LLMs really suffer from the "eh I'll just write it myself" mindset. Yesterday on a react app using react-query (library to manage caching and re-fetching of data) claude code wanted to update the cache manually, instead of just using a bit of state that was already in scope in the exact same component! For me, stuff like that is the same weird uncanny valley that you used to see in AI text, and see now in AI video. It just does such inhuman things. A senior developer would NEVER think to manually mutate the cache, because it's such desperate hack. A junior dev wouldn't even realize it's an option.

spicyusername 1y ago

I guess we're just going to be in the age of this conversation topic until everyone gets tired of talking about it. Every one of these discussions boils down to the following: - LLMs are not good at writing code on their own unless it's extremely simple or boilerplate - LLMs can be good at helping you debug existing code - LLMs can be good at brainstorming solutions to new problems - The code that is written by LLMs always needs to be heavily monitored for correctness, style, and design, and then typically edited down, often to at least half its original size - LLMs utility is high enough that it is now going to be a standard tool in the toolbox of every software engineer, but it is definitely not replacing anyone at current capability. - New software engineers are going to suffer the most because they know how to edit the responses the least, but this was true when they wrote their own code with stack overflow. - At senior level, sometimes using LLMs is going to save you a ton of time and sometimes it's going to waste your time. Net-net, it's probably positive, but there are definitely some horrible days where you spend too long going back and forth, when you should have just tried to solve the problem yourself.

deleted 1y ago
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MontyCarloHall 1y ago
It's almost as if you could recapitulate each of these discussions using an LLM!
rafaelmn 1y ago
> but this was true when they wrote their own code with stack overflow. Searching for solutions and integrating examples found requires effort that develops into a skill. You would rarely get solutions that would just fit into the codebase from SO. If I give a task to you and you produce a correct solution on the initial review I now know I can trust you to deal with this kind of problem in the future. Especially after a few reviews. If you just vibed through the problem the LLM might have given you the correct solution - but there is no guarantee that it will do it again in the future. Just because you spent less effort on search/official docs/integration into the codebase you learned less about everything surrounding it. So using LLMs as a junior you are just breaking my trust, and we both know you are not a competent reviewer of LLM code - why am I even dealing with you when I'll get LLM outputs faster myself ? This was my experience so far.

pastage 1y ago

That is 150MWh per month in AI for a staff engineer. If we are doing a straight dollar to kWh conversion, plus/minus an order of magnitude.

nzach 1y ago

One thing that I haven't seen a lot of people talk about is the relatively new model config "Opus Plan Mode: Use Opus 4.1 in plan mode, Sonnet 4 otherwise". In my opinion this should be the default config. Increasing the quality of the plans gives you a much better experience using Claude Code.

xentronium 1y ago

> The shift to Claude Code? That took just hours of use for me to become productive. > This isn't failure; it's the process! > The biggest challenge? AI can't retain learning between sessions ai slop

guthib_net 1y ago

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alessandru 1y ago

did this guy read that other paper about ai usage making people stupid? how long until he falls from staff engineer back down to senior or something less?

BhavdeepSethi 1y ago
It's funny that the MIT paper HN is trending higher than this post, so it propped up before I read this article.