7 ms·

A good case study. I have found these two to be good categories of win: > Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. Claude definitely

A good case study. I have found these two to be good categories of win: > Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. Claude definitely makes me more productive in frameworks I know well, where I can scan and pattern-match quickly on the boilerplate parts. > Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks. I’m also more productive here, this is an enabler to explore new areas, and is also a boon at big tech companies where there are just lots of tech stacks and frameworks in use. I feel there is an interesting split forming in ability to gauge AI capabilities - it kinda requires you to be on top of a rapidly-changing firehose of techniques and frameworks. If you haven’t spent 100 hours with Claude Code / Claude 4.0 you likely don’t have an accurate picture of its capabilities. “Enables non-coders to vibe code their way into trouble” might be the median scenario on X, but it’s not so relevant to what expert coders will experience if they put the time in.

bicx 1y ago
This is a good takeaway. I use Claude Code as my main approach for making changes to a codebase, and I’ve been doing so every day for months. I have a solid system I follow through trial and error, and overall it’s been a massive boon to my productivity and willingness to attempt larger experiments. One thing I love doing is developing a strong underlying data structure, schema, and internal API, then essentially having CC often one-shot a great UI for internal tools. Being able to think at a higher level beyond grunt work and framework nuances is a game-changer for my career of 16 years.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  This is more of a reflection of how our profession has not meaningfully advanced. OP talks about boilerplate. You talk about grunt work. We now have AI to do these things for us. But why do such things need to exist in the first place? Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment? Why haven't we collectively emphasized the creation of new tools to reduce boilerplate and grunt work?
  - abathologist 1y ago
    This is the glaring fallacy! We are turning to unreliable stochastic agents to churn out boilerplate and do toil that should just be abstracted or automated away by fully deterministic, reliably correct programs. This is, prima facie, a degenerative and wasteful way to develop software.
    - mquander 1y ago
      I guess this is probably what Lucifer said to God about why it was stupid to give humans free will.
    - jclarkcom 1y ago
      When humans are in the loop everything pretty much becomes stochastic as well. What matters more is the error rate and result correctness. I think this shifts the focus towards test cases, measurement, and outcome.
      - elzbardico 1y ago
        No. This is a fundamentally erroneous analogy. We don't generate code by a stochastic process.
        MostlyStable 1y ago
        We don't understand how human minds work anywhere close to well enough to say this.
        aargh_aargh 1y ago
        You don't? I do. A few days ago I lost some data including recent code changes. Today I'm trying to recreate the same code changes - i.e. work I've just recently worked through - and for the life of me I can't get it to work the same way again. Even though "just" that is what I set out to do in the first place - no improvements, just to do the same thing over again.
- JOnAgain 1y ago
  Can you share more?
- player1234 1y ago
  [dead]
BowBun 1y ago
> Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. I've felt this learning just this week - it's taken me having to create a small project with 10 clear repetitions, messily made from AI input. But then the magic is making 'consolidation' tasks where you can just guide it into unifying markup, styles/JS, whatever you may have on your hands. I think it was less obvious to me in my day job because in a startup with a lack of strong coding conventions, it's harder to apply these pattern-matching requests since there are fewer patterns. I can imagine in a strict, mature codebase this would be way more effective.
- rmoriz 1y ago
  In times of Rust and Typescript (just examples) coding standards are explicit. It‘s not optional anymore. All my vibe coding projects are using CI with tests including style and type checks. The agent makes mistakes but it sees the failing tests and fixes it. If you vibe code like we did Perl and PHP in 1999 you‘re gonna have a bad time.
  - baq 1y ago
    In a startup, especially early, the only thing that isn't optional is shipping. You can fix any and all issues later, first you have to ensure there is a 'later'. (That's not to say you shouldn't do it at all, but definitely focus on the business before the tech.)
    - rmoriz 1y ago
      I‘ve been with a couple of startups that shipped and not a single one was cutting corners in this area anymore. Last time I saw this was probably around 2005-2008.
      - bcrosby95 1y ago
        Cutting corners here is one of the worst decisions you can make. Especially in an environment where you don't know your end product and you're likely to rework your code over and over and over again. Piling shit on top of shit only pays off on very short time scales - like a month or two. Because once you revisit that shit code all your time savings are out the window. If you have to revisit it more than once you probably slowed yourself down already.
nine_k 1y ago
Yes. The author essentially asked Claude to port a driver from Linux 2.4 to Linux 6.8. Very certainly there must be sufficient amounts of training material, and web-searchable material, that describes such tasks. The author provided his own expertise where Claude could not find a good analogue in the training corpus, that is, the few actually non-trivial bits of porting. "Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills" is a great way to formulate it. If your own skills in the area are near-zero, multiplying them by a large factor may still yield a near-zero result. (And negative productivity.)
- rmoriz 1y ago
  You can still ask, generate a list of things to learn etc. basically generate a streamlined course based on all tutorials, readmes and source code available when the model was trained. You can call your tutor 24/7 as long as you got tokens.
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    ChatGPT even has a specific "Study mode" where it refrains from telling you the answer directly and kinda guides you to figure it out yourself.
  - seba_dos1 1y ago
    You have to keep guard at each step to notice the inconsistencies and call your tutor's mistakes out though, or you'll inevitably learn some garbage. This is a use case that certainly "feels" like it's boosting your learning (it sure does to me), but I'd like to read an actual study on whether it really does before reaching any conclusions. It seems to me that LLMs help the most at the initial step of getting into some rabbit hole - when you're getting familiar with the jargon, so you can start reading some proper resources without being confused too much. The sooner you manage to move there, the better.
    - rmoriz 1y ago
      You overestimate hallucinations in known settings. If you ask to show source code, it‘s easy to check the sources (of a framework, language, local code)
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
We have members on my team that definitely feel empowered to wade into new territory, but they make so much misdirected code with LLMs, even when we make everyone use Claude 4 thinking agents. It seems to me that if you have been pattern matching the majority of your coding career, then you have a LLM agent pattern match on top of that, it results in a lot of headaches for people who haven't been doing that on a team. I think LLM agents are supremely faster at pattern matching than humans, but are not as good at it in general.
- baq 1y ago
  > they make so much misdirected code with LLMs just points to the fact that they've no idea what they're doing and would produce different, pointless code by hand, though much slower. this is the paradigm shift - you need a much bigger sieve to filter out the many more orders of magnitude of crap that inexperienced operators of LLMs create.
  - matwood 1y ago
    It'll be interesting if tools like Claude will end up being used to highlight the people who have no clue what they are doing.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      I think you can do this already. If you do not know the underlying concepts, or have no idea about how you have to architecture your project and so forth, then you will have problems with LLMs. So I think many if not most people who have problems with LLMs, it is most likely due to their lack of knowledge and/or their expectation that you can just simply write two sentences and it will figure out what you want and how you want it. You cannot outsource thinking to LLMs, at least not yet, if ever. You have to be part of the whole process. You need to have knowledge. If you have no idea what it is doing or what you want it to do, you are going to have a difficult time.
      - skydhash 1y ago
mattfrommars 1y ago
Do you get to use Claude Code through your employer to have the opportunity to spend 100 hours with it? Or do you do this on your own persona project?
marcus_holmes 1y ago
>> Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks. Also new languages - our team uses Ruby, and Ruby is easy to read, so I can skip learning the syntax and get the LLM to write the code. I have to make all the decisions, and guide it, but I don't need to learn Ruby to write acceptable-level code [0]. I get to be immediately productive in an unfamiliar environment, which is great. [0] acceptable-level as defined by the rest of the team - they're checking my PRs.
- AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  >>> Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks. > Also new languages - our team uses Ruby, and Ruby is easy to read, so I can skip learning the syntax and get the LLM to write the code. If Ruby is "easy to read" and assuming you know a similar programming language (such as Perl or Python), how difficult is it to learn Ruby and be able to write the code yourself? > ... but I don't need to learn Ruby to write acceptable-level code [0]. Since the team you work with uses Ruby, why do you not need to learn it? > [0] acceptable-level as defined by the rest of the team - they're checking my PRs. Ah. Now I get it. Instead of learning the lingua franca and being able to verify your own work, "the rest of the team" has to make sure your PR's will not obviously fail. Here's a thought - has it crossed your mind that team members needing to determine if your PR's are acceptable is "a bad thing", in that it may indicate a lack of trust of the changes you have been introducing? Furthermore, does this situation qualify as "immediately productive" for the team or only yourself? EDIT: If you are not a software engineer by trade and instead a stakeholder wanting to formally specify desired system changes to the engineering team, an approach to consider is authoring RSpec[0] specs to define feature/integration specifications instead of PR's. This would enable you to codify functional requirements such that their satisfaction is provable, assist the engineering team's understanding of what must be done in the context of existing behavior, identify conflicting system requirements (if any) before engineering effort is expended, provide a suite of functional regression tests, and serve as executable documentation for team members. 0 - https://rspec.info/features/6-1/rspec-rails/feature-specs/feature-spec/ https://rspec.info/features/6-1/rspec-rails/feature-specs/fe...
  - nchmy 1y ago
tonkinai 1y ago
It’s less about AI vs boilerplate and more about having good tests. if the code works and you can move fast, who cares who typed it.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Code working is a very high bar. And the only way close for most projects is formal verification.
not_that_d 1y ago
For me is not so. It makes me way faster in languages that I don't know, but makes me slower on the ones I know because a lot of times, it creates code that will fail eventually. Then I need to expend extra time following everything it did so I can "fix" the problem.
- peteforde 1y ago
  My daily experience suggests that this happens primarily when the developer isn't as good as they assume that they are at expressing the ideas in their head into a structure that the LLM can run with. That's not intended to be a jab, just an opportunity for reflection.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    But the moment I got the idea in my head, is the moment I got the code for it. The time spent is moslty checking the library semantics, or if there’s not some function already written for a specific bit. There’s also checking if you’re not violating some contract somewhere. A lot of people have the try and see if it works approach. That can be insanely wasteful in any moderately complex system. The scientist way is to have a model that reduce the system to a few parameters. Then you’ll see that a lot of libraries are mostly surface works and slighlty modified version of the same thing.
mettamage 1y ago
I don’t have a lot of experience with your first point. I do I have a lot of experience with your second point. And I would say that you hit the nail on the head
faangguyindia 1y ago
those who use claude code, what you think are its best features which you cannot live without and makes your life so much easier? I am using claude code but I am not sure what stuff i should look into.
wer232essf 1y ago
[flagged]
stevex 1y ago
I had an Amiga disk image (*.adf) that I wanted to extract the files from. There are probably tools to do this but I was just starting with Claude Code, so I asked it to write a tool to extract the files by implementing the filesystem. It took a few prompts but I know enough about FFS (the Amiga filesystem) to guide it, and it created exactly the tool I wanted. "force multiplier of your own skills" is a great description.
davidw 1y ago
I'm feeling quite wary of the fact that if it's a real productivity booster, it's all in the hands of one company. Perhaps some of the others will be able to compete with it, but: still all big corporations.
emilecantin 1y ago
One area where it really shines for me is personal projects. You know, the type of projects you might get to spend a couple hours on once the kids are in bed... Spending that couple hours guiding Claude do do what I want is way quicker than doing it all myself. Especially since I do have the skills to do it all myself, just not the time. It's been particularly effective around UI stuff since I've selected a popular UI library (MUI) but I don't use it in my day job; I had to keep looking up documentation but Claude just bangs it out very easily. One thing where it hasn't shone is configuring my production deployment. I had set this project up with a docker-compose, but my selected CI/CD (Gitlab) and my selected hosting provider (DigitalOcean) seemed to steer me more towards Kubernetes, which I don't know anything about. Gitlab's documentation wanted me to setup Flux (?) and at some point referred to a Helm chart (?)... All words I've heard but their documentation is useless to newcomers ("manage containers in production!": yes, that's obviously what I'm trying to do... "Getting started: run this obscure command with 5 arguments": wth is this path I need to provide? what's this parameter? etc.) I honestly can't believe how complex the recommended setup is, to ultimately run 2 containers that I already have defined in ~20 lines of docker-compose... Claude got me through it. Took it about 5-6 hours of trying stuff, build failing, trying again. And even then, it still doesn't deploy when I push. It builds, pushes the new container images, and spins up a new pod... which it then immediately kills because my older one is still running and I only want one pod running... Oh well, I'll just keep killing the old pod until I have some more energy to throw at it to try and fix it. TL;DR: it's much better at some things than others.
- j45 1y ago
  Totally. Being able to start shipping from the first commit using something like Picocss and just add features helps gets things out of the design stage, but shipping features individually. Some folks seem to like Docker Swarm before kubernetes as well and I've found it's not bad for personal projects for sure. AI will always return the average of it's corpus given the chance (or not clear direction in the prompt). I usually let my opinions rip and say to avoid building myself a stack temple to my greatness. It often comes back with a nice lean stack. I usually avoid or minimize Javascript libraries for their brittleness, and the complexity can eat up more of the AI's context and awareness to map the abstractions vs something it knows incredibly well. Python is great, but web stuff is still emerging, FastAPI is handy though, and putting something like Pico/HTMX/alpine.js on the front seems reasonable. Laravel is also really hard to overlook sometimes when working with LLMs on quick things, there's so much working code out there that it can really get a ton done for an entire production environment with all of the built in tools. Happy to learn about what other folks are using and liking.
player1234 1y ago
[dead]
ashsriv 1y ago
this is a fantastic summary of how LLMs can be used in general. I have found chatgpt/gemini to be useful in following scenarios 1. ELI5 with examples on any technical paper. This summarises papers and explains to me in a way i can understand. 2. At my work, we have to make a lot of proposals, so I have a project created where I put public documents that I can share for proposals and then share the Statement of Work, and it creates a technical document in my format which is about 70% right. I can add/modify the remaining 30% 3. > Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. - This is massive when I want to start a new code base. I spend so much time in my head architecting that tools like these help create a boiler plate and structure. 4. Many times, I have stupid ideas but not enough time to waste coding those stupid ideas. The tools help me right terrible codes for my stupid ideas!! :)

bicx 1y ago

This is a good takeaway. I use Claude Code as my main approach for making changes to a codebase, and I’ve been doing so every day for months. I have a solid system I follow through trial and error, and overall it’s been a massive boon to my productivity and willingness to attempt larger experiments. One thing I love doing is developing a strong underlying data structure, schema, and internal API, then essentially having CC often one-shot a great UI for internal tools. Being able to think at a higher level beyond grunt work and framework nuances is a game-changer for my career of 16 years.

kccqzy 1y ago
This is more of a reflection of how our profession has not meaningfully advanced. OP talks about boilerplate. You talk about grunt work. We now have AI to do these things for us. But why do such things need to exist in the first place? Why hasn't there been a minimal-boilerplate language and framework and programming environment? Why haven't we collectively emphasized the creation of new tools to reduce boilerplate and grunt work?
- abathologist 1y ago
  This is the glaring fallacy! We are turning to unreliable stochastic agents to churn out boilerplate and do toil that should just be abstracted or automated away by fully deterministic, reliably correct programs. This is, prima facie, a degenerative and wasteful way to develop software.
  - mquander 1y ago
    I guess this is probably what Lucifer said to God about why it was stupid to give humans free will.
  - jclarkcom 1y ago
    When humans are in the loop everything pretty much becomes stochastic as well. What matters more is the error rate and result correctness. I think this shifts the focus towards test cases, measurement, and outcome.
    - elzbardico 1y ago
      No. This is a fundamentally erroneous analogy. We don't generate code by a stochastic process.
      - MostlyStable 1y ago
        We don't understand how human minds work anywhere close to well enough to say this.
      - aargh_aargh 1y ago
        You don't? I do. A few days ago I lost some data including recent code changes. Today I'm trying to recreate the same code changes - i.e. work I've just recently worked through - and for the life of me I can't get it to work the same way again. Even though "just" that is what I set out to do in the first place - no improvements, just to do the same thing over again.
JOnAgain 1y ago
Can you share more?
player1234 1y ago
[dead]

BowBun 1y ago

> Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. I've felt this learning just this week - it's taken me having to create a small project with 10 clear repetitions, messily made from AI input. But then the magic is making 'consolidation' tasks where you can just guide it into unifying markup, styles/JS, whatever you may have on your hands. I think it was less obvious to me in my day job because in a startup with a lack of strong coding conventions, it's harder to apply these pattern-matching requests since there are fewer patterns. I can imagine in a strict, mature codebase this would be way more effective.

rmoriz 1y ago
In times of Rust and Typescript (just examples) coding standards are explicit. It‘s not optional anymore. All my vibe coding projects are using CI with tests including style and type checks. The agent makes mistakes but it sees the failing tests and fixes it. If you vibe code like we did Perl and PHP in 1999 you‘re gonna have a bad time.
- baq 1y ago
  In a startup, especially early, the only thing that isn't optional is shipping. You can fix any and all issues later, first you have to ensure there is a 'later'. (That's not to say you shouldn't do it at all, but definitely focus on the business before the tech.)
  - rmoriz 1y ago
    I‘ve been with a couple of startups that shipped and not a single one was cutting corners in this area anymore. Last time I saw this was probably around 2005-2008.
    - bcrosby95 1y ago
      Cutting corners here is one of the worst decisions you can make. Especially in an environment where you don't know your end product and you're likely to rework your code over and over and over again. Piling shit on top of shit only pays off on very short time scales - like a month or two. Because once you revisit that shit code all your time savings are out the window. If you have to revisit it more than once you probably slowed yourself down already.

nine_k 1y ago

Yes. The author essentially asked Claude to port a driver from Linux 2.4 to Linux 6.8. Very certainly there must be sufficient amounts of training material, and web-searchable material, that describes such tasks. The author provided his own expertise where Claude could not find a good analogue in the training corpus, that is, the few actually non-trivial bits of porting. "Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills" is a great way to formulate it. If your own skills in the area are near-zero, multiplying them by a large factor may still yield a near-zero result. (And negative productivity.)

rmoriz 1y ago
You can still ask, generate a list of things to learn etc. basically generate a streamlined course based on all tutorials, readmes and source code available when the model was trained. You can call your tutor 24/7 as long as you got tokens.
- theshrike79 1y ago
  ChatGPT even has a specific "Study mode" where it refrains from telling you the answer directly and kinda guides you to figure it out yourself.
- seba_dos1 1y ago
  You have to keep guard at each step to notice the inconsistencies and call your tutor's mistakes out though, or you'll inevitably learn some garbage. This is a use case that certainly "feels" like it's boosting your learning (it sure does to me), but I'd like to read an actual study on whether it really does before reaching any conclusions. It seems to me that LLMs help the most at the initial step of getting into some rabbit hole - when you're getting familiar with the jargon, so you can start reading some proper resources without being confused too much. The sooner you manage to move there, the better.
  - rmoriz 1y ago
    You overestimate hallucinations in known settings. If you ask to show source code, it‘s easy to check the sources (of a framework, language, local code)

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago

We have members on my team that definitely feel empowered to wade into new territory, but they make so much misdirected code with LLMs, even when we make everyone use Claude 4 thinking agents. It seems to me that if you have been pattern matching the majority of your coding career, then you have a LLM agent pattern match on top of that, it results in a lot of headaches for people who haven't been doing that on a team. I think LLM agents are supremely faster at pattern matching than humans, but are not as good at it in general.

baq 1y ago
> they make so much misdirected code with LLMs just points to the fact that they've no idea what they're doing and would produce different, pointless code by hand, though much slower. this is the paradigm shift - you need a much bigger sieve to filter out the many more orders of magnitude of crap that inexperienced operators of LLMs create.
- matwood 1y ago
  It'll be interesting if tools like Claude will end up being used to highlight the people who have no clue what they are doing.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    I think you can do this already. If you do not know the underlying concepts, or have no idea about how you have to architecture your project and so forth, then you will have problems with LLMs. So I think many if not most people who have problems with LLMs, it is most likely due to their lack of knowledge and/or their expectation that you can just simply write two sentences and it will figure out what you want and how you want it. You cannot outsource thinking to LLMs, at least not yet, if ever. You have to be part of the whole process. You need to have knowledge. If you have no idea what it is doing or what you want it to do, you are going to have a difficult time.
    - skydhash 1y ago

mattfrommars 1y ago

Do you get to use Claude Code through your employer to have the opportunity to spend 100 hours with it? Or do you do this on your own persona project?

marcus_holmes 1y ago

>> Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks. Also new languages - our team uses Ruby, and Ruby is easy to read, so I can skip learning the syntax and get the LLM to write the code. I have to make all the decisions, and guide it, but I don't need to learn Ruby to write acceptable-level code [0]. I get to be immediately productive in an unfamiliar environment, which is great. [0] acceptable-level as defined by the rest of the team - they're checking my PRs.

AdieuToLogic 1y ago
>>> Use these tools for rapid onboarding onto new frameworks. > Also new languages - our team uses Ruby, and Ruby is easy to read, so I can skip learning the syntax and get the LLM to write the code. If Ruby is "easy to read" and assuming you know a similar programming language (such as Perl or Python), how difficult is it to learn Ruby and be able to write the code yourself? > ... but I don't need to learn Ruby to write acceptable-level code [0]. Since the team you work with uses Ruby, why do you not need to learn it? > [0] acceptable-level as defined by the rest of the team - they're checking my PRs. Ah. Now I get it. Instead of learning the lingua franca and being able to verify your own work, "the rest of the team" has to make sure your PR's will not obviously fail. Here's a thought - has it crossed your mind that team members needing to determine if your PR's are acceptable is "a bad thing", in that it may indicate a lack of trust of the changes you have been introducing? Furthermore, does this situation qualify as "immediately productive" for the team or only yourself? EDIT: If you are not a software engineer by trade and instead a stakeholder wanting to formally specify desired system changes to the engineering team, an approach to consider is authoring RSpec[0] specs to define feature/integration specifications instead of PR's. This would enable you to codify functional requirements such that their satisfaction is provable, assist the engineering team's understanding of what must be done in the context of existing behavior, identify conflicting system requirements (if any) before engineering effort is expended, provide a suite of functional regression tests, and serve as executable documentation for team members. 0 - https://rspec.info/features/6-1/rspec-rails/feature-specs/feature-spec/ https://rspec.info/features/6-1/rspec-rails/feature-specs/fe...
- nchmy 1y ago

tonkinai 1y ago

It’s less about AI vs boilerplate and more about having good tests. if the code works and you can move fast, who cares who typed it.

skydhash 1y ago
Code working is a very high bar. And the only way close for most projects is formal verification.

not_that_d 1y ago

For me is not so. It makes me way faster in languages that I don't know, but makes me slower on the ones I know because a lot of times, it creates code that will fail eventually. Then I need to expend extra time following everything it did so I can "fix" the problem.

peteforde 1y ago
My daily experience suggests that this happens primarily when the developer isn't as good as they assume that they are at expressing the ideas in their head into a structure that the LLM can run with. That's not intended to be a jab, just an opportunity for reflection.
- skydhash 1y ago
  But the moment I got the idea in my head, is the moment I got the code for it. The time spent is moslty checking the library semantics, or if there’s not some function already written for a specific bit. There’s also checking if you’re not violating some contract somewhere. A lot of people have the try and see if it works approach. That can be insanely wasteful in any moderately complex system. The scientist way is to have a model that reduce the system to a few parameters. Then you’ll see that a lot of libraries are mostly surface works and slighlty modified version of the same thing.

mettamage 1y ago

I don’t have a lot of experience with your first point. I do I have a lot of experience with your second point. And I would say that you hit the nail on the head

faangguyindia 1y ago

those who use claude code, what you think are its best features which you cannot live without and makes your life so much easier? I am using claude code but I am not sure what stuff i should look into.

wer232essf 1y ago

[flagged]

stevex 1y ago

I had an Amiga disk image (*.adf) that I wanted to extract the files from. There are probably tools to do this but I was just starting with Claude Code, so I asked it to write a tool to extract the files by implementing the filesystem. It took a few prompts but I know enough about FFS (the Amiga filesystem) to guide it, and it created exactly the tool I wanted. "force multiplier of your own skills" is a great description.

davidw 1y ago

I'm feeling quite wary of the fact that if it's a real productivity booster, it's all in the hands of one company. Perhaps some of the others will be able to compete with it, but: still all big corporations.

emilecantin 1y ago

One area where it really shines for me is personal projects. You know, the type of projects you might get to spend a couple hours on once the kids are in bed... Spending that couple hours guiding Claude do do what I want is way quicker than doing it all myself. Especially since I do have the skills to do it all myself, just not the time. It's been particularly effective around UI stuff since I've selected a popular UI library (MUI) but I don't use it in my day job; I had to keep looking up documentation but Claude just bangs it out very easily. One thing where it hasn't shone is configuring my production deployment. I had set this project up with a docker-compose, but my selected CI/CD (Gitlab) and my selected hosting provider (DigitalOcean) seemed to steer me more towards Kubernetes, which I don't know anything about. Gitlab's documentation wanted me to setup Flux (?) and at some point referred to a Helm chart (?)... All words I've heard but their documentation is useless to newcomers ("manage containers in production!": yes, that's obviously what I'm trying to do... "Getting started: run this obscure command with 5 arguments": wth is this path I need to provide? what's this parameter? etc.) I honestly can't believe how complex the recommended setup is, to ultimately run 2 containers that I already have defined in ~20 lines of docker-compose... Claude got me through it. Took it about 5-6 hours of trying stuff, build failing, trying again. And even then, it still doesn't deploy when I push. It builds, pushes the new container images, and spins up a new pod... which it then immediately kills because my older one is still running and I only want one pod running... Oh well, I'll just keep killing the old pod until I have some more energy to throw at it to try and fix it. TL;DR: it's much better at some things than others.

j45 1y ago
Totally. Being able to start shipping from the first commit using something like Picocss and just add features helps gets things out of the design stage, but shipping features individually. Some folks seem to like Docker Swarm before kubernetes as well and I've found it's not bad for personal projects for sure. AI will always return the average of it's corpus given the chance (or not clear direction in the prompt). I usually let my opinions rip and say to avoid building myself a stack temple to my greatness. It often comes back with a nice lean stack. I usually avoid or minimize Javascript libraries for their brittleness, and the complexity can eat up more of the AI's context and awareness to map the abstractions vs something it knows incredibly well. Python is great, but web stuff is still emerging, FastAPI is handy though, and putting something like Pico/HTMX/alpine.js on the front seems reasonable. Laravel is also really hard to overlook sometimes when working with LLMs on quick things, there's so much working code out there that it can really get a ton done for an entire production environment with all of the built in tools. Happy to learn about what other folks are using and liking.

player1234 1y ago

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ashsriv 1y ago

this is a fantastic summary of how LLMs can be used in general. I have found chatgpt/gemini to be useful in following scenarios 1. ELI5 with examples on any technical paper. This summarises papers and explains to me in a way i can understand. 2. At my work, we have to make a lot of proposals, so I have a project created where I put public documents that I can share for proposals and then share the Statement of Work, and it creates a technical document in my format which is about 70% right. I can add/modify the remaining 30% 3. > Use these tools as a massive force multiplier of your own skills. - This is massive when I want to start a new code base. I spend so much time in my head architecting that tools like these help create a boiler plate and structure. 4. Many times, I have stupid ideas but not enough time to waste coding those stupid ideas. The tools help me right terrible codes for my stupid ideas!! :)