5 ms·

Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

52 points by lnbharath 10mo ago

lnbharath 10mo ago
Author here. I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline. Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY. So I spent the weekend digging into the DX decisions that make Claude Code delightful.
- MasterScrat 10mo ago
  How much AI did you use to write up this article? It tripped up my "fake AI-written article" detector a few times despite being interesting enough to read to the end
  - lnbharath 10mo ago
    used claude to polish the draft and tighten sentences. the thinking, analysis, and examples are all mine and based on personal experiences. spent the weekend reflecting on my past experiences with claude code and actually digging into why claude code feels the way it does. curious to know what tripped your detector.
    - verall 10mo ago
      Lots of things - typical llm em-dash situations although using dash. Lists of 3s after a colon where the 3 items aren't great. Short sentences for "impact" that sounds kind of like a high school essay i.e. "God level engineer...Zero ego." I cannot at all understand writing an essay and then having an llm "tighten up the sentences" which instead just makes it sound like slop generated from a list of bullets
    - ler_ 10mo ago
      Adding to this: too many negatives before making a point, which AI text is prone to do in order to give surface level emphasis to random points in an argument. For example: "I sat there for a second. It didn't lose the thread. It didn't panic. It prioritized like a real engineer would." Then there is the fact that the paragraph ends in just about the same way, which also activates one's AI-voice-detector, so to speak: "This wasn't autocomplete. This was collaboration." In my opinion, to write is to think. And to write is also to express oneself, not only to create a "communication object," let's put it that way. I would rather read an imperfect human voice than a machine's attempts to fix it. I think it's worth to face the frustration that comes with writing, because the end goal of refining your own argument and your delivery is that much sweeter. Let your human voice shine through.
  - geophph 10mo ago
    “Here’s the thing” “The best part?”
    - bentcorner 10mo ago
      "It's not just X, it's Y" I find it really hard to read articles that use AI slop aphorisms. Please use your own words, it matters.
      - Rikudou 10mo ago
        What if I no good in English? Jokes aside, my English is passable and I'm fine with it when writing comments but I'm very aware that some of it doesn't sound native due to me, well, not being native speaker. I use AI to make it sound more fluent when writing for my blog.
        exe34 10mo ago
        As long as your bullet points+prompt are shorter than the output, couldn't you post that instead? The only time I think an LLM might be ethically acceptable for something a human has to read is if you ask it to make it shorter.
        Rikudou 10mo ago
        I write the full article in my Czenglish (English influenced by Czech sentence structure). Then I let it rewrite it in proper English. So it's me doing the writing and GPT making it sound more English.
        mcphage 10mo ago
        > What if I no good in English? It would still sound more human coming from you.
      - geophph 10mo ago
        Yeah it’s hard to keep interest when there’s no voice, just the same AI feel that you see everywhere else.
- erichocean 10mo ago
  Do you have any sources you've found that document Claude Code's UI in detail? I'm really curious about what they've built, as a UI designer.
  - lnbharath 10mo ago
    Anthropic has some docs at docs.anthropic.com but honestly most of what I learned came from just using it and poking around. the slash commands have help text built in. shrivu shankar has a good breakdown of the features too if you're looking for a more structured overview
    - erichocean 10mo ago
      Thanks!
- amtamt 10mo ago
  > I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline. Feels more like peer pressure induced post, than evaluating a tool critically for pros and cons. > Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY. Definitely gives the "vibe" of social media's infinite scroll induced dopamine rush. Overall, this post just seems to be enforcing the idea that "fuzzy understanding of business domain will be enough to get a mature product using some AI, and the AI will somehow magically figure out most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain". Thing is that figuring out "most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain" is where most of the blood and sweat goes.
fluidcruft 10mo ago
I sort of agree with this about cognitive load. I'm somewhat new (started dipping my toes around July) but use Claude code heavily now. I did spend a lot of time playing with configuring it at first and creating agents etc. But I have a weird setup where I have three computers that I work on and at one point I realized vanilla Claude Code had adopted the things I was doing as defaults (and improved on them). So I have sort of declared a configuration bankruptcy and just use the recommended things. The only things I still do are things that help both Claude and I keep track of things (md files describing decisions and context of files). [I still haven't figured out MCP or how/why to use them or why to bother. You run servers. I guess. It's too complex for my smol brain to understand]
- lnbharath 10mo ago
  I definitely relate with your sentiment and I like your term "configuration bankruptcy" on MCP, the mental model that clicked for me is "giving claude access to tools it can call" so that instead of copy pasting from your database or API, claude can just... query it playwright MCP for me is godsend
  - Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 10mo ago
    I thought skills were supposed to help with “giving claude access to tools it can call”. When would one use MCP over skills?
    - lnbharath 10mo ago
      skills are basically markdown files that teach claude how to do something. they live in your repo and load on demand. MCP is for when you need claude to actually interact with external systems like querying a database, hitting an API, etc...
      - tstrimple 10mo ago
        I've not explicitly used skills or MCP, but have had zero issues with Claude calling apis via curl as an example. I'm not sure what the MCP server or skill is actually enabling at this point. If I wanted CC to talk to SQL Server, I'd have it open a nix-env with the tools needed to talk to the database. One of my primary initial claude.md entries has to do with us running on NixOS and that temporarily installing tools is trivial and it should do things in the NixOS way whenever possible. Since then it has just worked with practically everything I've thrown at it. Very rarely do I see it trying to use a tool that isn't installed anymore. CC even uses my local vaultwarden where I have a collection of credentials shared with it. All driven through claude.md.
ThouYS 10mo ago
what on earth is a DX?
- royal_ts 10mo ago
  Developer Experience
- ycuser2 10mo ago
  Developer Experience (as in UX - User Experience)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
phplovesong 10mo ago
SlopDX.
charlesabarnes 10mo ago
What scares me about Claude Code (and ai developer tools in general) is that a small model update could change how I interact with the tool entirely. There's no freezing the communication style that I need to use for good results.
- Workaccount2 10mo ago
  I suspect that this is already a big reason why we get so many conflicting signals on "the best coding model". People tune into the style of the model they use the most, and hit snags and friction when they take another model for a spin. Most iOS users report that Android is a disaster of an operating system, with layers and layers of user frustration. In reality, they actually are just totally in tune with how iOS does stuff. I can only imagine we have something similar going on here.
  - fluidcruft 10mo ago
    My impression is people build very fragile Rube Goldberg devices on top of the models and those things break. That's not to say anything is wrong about the Rube Goldberg machines! They're very interesting and do new things (and they help me understand how things work). I'm just saying that there's probably a significant misattribution about where the fragility exists. https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
GiorgioG 10mo ago
If only LLMs didn’t just make shit up regularly.
- erichocean 10mo ago
  If a coding agent was released that never made anything up, how much would that change things for you?
  - geophph 10mo ago
    I’d save a lot of time from not choosing to smugly telling the AI how wrong it was just for my own reassurances that at least for now I’m still more useful than it is.
- ltbarcly3 10mo ago
  They both make stuff up and make very obvious mis-interpretations of evidence. If you take the output of an LLM, and ask another LLM to check it, this dramatically reduces this. Even if you do it with the same LLM but without the existing context. I was able to write a detailed analysis of a rule system by doing this with 3 steps, claude -> chatgpt -> gemini3. It caught all the mistakes, including overstatements and vague statements. It wasn't perfect, but even after one review the # of mistakes or stupid statements was almost 0.
buster 10mo ago
I've not used Claude Claude yet, but why would it be bad if it gains features that people use? Did people ever complain about Photoshop to have too many features demanding some cognitive load? Excel? Practically every IDE out there? There is a reason people use those tools instead of the plain text editor or paint. It's for power users and people will become power users of AI as well. Some will forever stick to chatgpt and some will use an ever increasing ecosystem of tools.
- ch2026 10mo ago
  because devs will have no clue how their systems work, the only ones who do will be LLMs, gatekept behind an ever-increasing cost-per-usage.
- charlesabarnes 10mo ago
  It is a very significant consideration for every one of those tools. The introduction of the "ribbon" in Excel was moderately controversial in 2007. The default tools made available in Photoshop is why it remains on top to this day.
- lnbharath 10mo ago
  good question. the difference with AI tools is the interface isn't stable in the same way photoshop or excel is. with traditional software you learn it once and muscle memory carries you. with LLM tools the model itself changes, the optimal prompting style shifts, features interact with model behavior in unpredictable ways. so the cognitive load compounds differently. not saying features are bad, just that the tradeoffs are different
ltbarcly3 10mo ago
"With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you." Well, not to me or the people I respect. It's getting very good, but it's like having a recent college grad who obsessively reads documentation. Someone with low skill but very high knowledge, often knowledge they are mixing up or not quite getting right. I think if Claude is already 'better' at coding than you, maybe think about going back to college to be a lawyer or something. For the rest of us, lets just hope that Claude hits some natural limit before it gets better than us too. If it doesn't hit some limit I think we have a year or two.
- dawnerd 10mo ago
  Yet when I try it, it feels like a developer fresh out of a coding bootcamp with no real experience. There’s no real reasoning, problem solving is still brute forced. It still rewrites rather than modifies. The context is way too limiting and it gets lost in its own “thinking”
  - ltbarcly3 10mo ago
    The problem solving is very very not brute force. I have seen it make detailed analysis. Often if a problem stumps me it also stumps Claude, no surprise there. But if I give it a ticket I haven't looked at yet, it is often able to find the exact problem via careful 'reasoning' and fix it in 1/100th the time it would take me.
  - coffeefirst 10mo ago
    Except I’ve coached a lot of those people and there’s usually a method to their madness. You can sit down, help them back up to where they went off the rails, and it all makes sense. Robot code is bonkers.
- salomonk_mur 10mo ago
  I had it One-shot the full architecture for a fairly advanced distributed system for a client. It then one shot the actual code design (following absolutely all our our internal requirements on auth, stack to use, security, code styling, documentation, etc). It then one shot (and we code reviewed everything thoroughly) each of the 5 micro services needed. It one shot the infrastructure to use and created the terraform file to put it up anywhere. It deployed it. It caught some of the errors it had made by itself after load-testing, and corrected them. It created the load test itself (following patterns from previews projects we had). It did all of this in a week. With human supervision on each step, but in a fucking week. We gave it all the context it needed and one-shotted everything. It is more than god-level. If you are not getting these increases in productivity, you are using it wrong.
SatvikBeri 10mo ago
For what it's worth, I've been using a fairly minimal setup (24 lines of CLAUDE.md, no MCPs, skills, or custom slash commands) since 3.7 and I've only noticed Claude Code getting significantly better on each model release.
- fuckinpuppers 10mo ago
  Share it!
  - SatvikBeri 10mo ago
    I posted my CLAUDE.md here, there's really not much to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262674
skydhash 10mo ago
> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego. > Claude was halfway through refactoring a complex auth flow[...] Then I realized: I'd forgotten to mention that one of those files was also used by a cron job. That is the kind of research you do before you go to refactoring. > Claude Code freed them from "the anxiety of the first step in programming constantly." Is there a first step in programming? If there is, that would be thinking because you ought to get a good solution in mind before even typing the first line of code. ... The whole article feels like someone roleplaying as software developer. Not that there's a barrier or a license to be one, but just that whole piece seems like as accurate as hackers portrayal in movies.
- konart 10mo ago
  >Is there a first step in programming? If there is, that would be thinking I'd argue that a first step (regardless of field) is either a necessity or curiosity. Thinking comes later. (And to be honest I can't really think of it as a "step", simply because this is a process).
- gedy 10mo ago
  I use Claude and not crapping on it or the boosters, but most of the people who I've encountered in real life who really gush about it, are either semi-technical, and who struggle in some way when coding. Non technical CEO of small startup I was at, manager who didn't go to college, etc. It's a cool tool! Just am tired of being treated like anti AI because I don't outsource my brain to it, or gush over their DIY UI demos.
  - skydhash 10mo ago
    Yeah it’s just a LLM, able to do text transformations based on what latent factors it has captured in the training stage. But programming is not text manipulation, just like writing is not only putting words on paper and music is not merely producing sounds. Anyone can sat before a piano and start hitting keys. And someone can rig up some apparatus that highlight which keys to hit at precise times in order to play Moonlight Sonata. But no one will call those people pianist. Sure a good pianist can use such apparatus to learn to play a piece. But he may also not buy such thing and just use a music sheet.
tmoravec 10mo ago
> In a monorepo, just loading the project consumes ~20k tokens I don't work on a monorepo, and as an example, what I would consider a mid-size service in my mid-size company is 7M tokens. I can't but ask: do all people who are so enthusiastic about AI for coding only work on trivial projects?
- pjm331 10mo ago
  I’m not clear what “just loading the project” even means here - if that’s how many tokens are consumed by system prompt plus Claude.md and MCP tools well that has nothing to do with the size of the project
- raincole 10mo ago
  I'm quite sure "loading the project" isn't putting every single line of code into the context. Probably just a huge CLAUDE.md or something. Either that or this author is completely out of touch with reality.
- ltbarcly3 10mo ago
  You obviously don't have any idea how any of this actually works.
  - tmoravec 10mo ago
    What do you think "loading the project" means when discussing context?
- lnbharath 10mo ago
  should have been clearer here. by "loading the project" I meant the initial context claude builds like CLAUDE.md, directory structure, etc... not literally putting every line of code into context. 7M tokens would obviously not fit in a 200k window
- peacebeard 10mo ago
  I dunno if I’d fall myself “enthusiastic” but I successfully use AI on a large production monorepo. The onus is on the user to break down the problem into llm-sized bites. How to do this effectively is a skill that takes time to develop. You’re not crazy: if you go in and ask it to do things in broad strokes it won’t work.
codegladiator 10mo ago
> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego. Who keeps forgetting variable names and function calling conventions it used 4 seconds ago while using 136 GBs of ram for the cli causing you to frequently force quit the whole terminal. Its not even human level.
- Trasmatta 10mo ago
  And then hallucinating APIs that don't exist, breaking all the unit tests and giving up saying they're an "implementation detail", and over engineering a horrific class that makes Enterprise Fizzbuzz look reasonable
- exe34 10mo ago
  I've been running claude code on a 13 year old potato and it's never used 136GB of RAM - possibly because I only have 8GB.
  - codegladiator 10mo ago
    Its vram or something makes the OS completely busy even I have only 32 gb ram. task manager shows 100+ gbs forcing to terminate
    - exe34 10mo ago
      is that vram on your GPU? I don't think claude code uses that.
      - codegladiator 10mo ago
        Not on GPU, I think it's just paged memory. You are right claude-code isn't running the model locally. Today I've had to kill it 5 times till now. edit: https://ibb.co/Fbn8Q3pb https://ibb.co/Fbn8Q3pb that's the 6th
        lostmsu 10mo ago
koolba 10mo ago
> What happened next: Claude installed every CLI, prompted me to login once, then went into autopilot. Configured each service. Ran commands. Checked logs. Auto-corrected errors. Got the app running in minutes. > In another instance, a GitHub workflow was failing. Claude asked if it could SSH into my Hetzner instance to investigate. I said yes. It connected, looked up the config, restarted the Docker instances causing issues, and renewed some certificates as a hygiene step - which I never asked it to do. This type of thing scares the crap out of me and I’m flabbergasted that anyone wold give an LLM unrestricted shell access to a server.
- jabedude 10mo ago
  I've also noticed Claude "running away" and doing a bunch of work I never asked it to do.
- candiddevmike 10mo ago
  And I'm sure just "restarting docker instances" fixed the root problem here... The maintenance costs here are going to be eye watering.
pico303 10mo ago
The example in the article of letting Claude deploy the app worries me. It has me thinking of that line, “AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about.” If the author was clueless of how to deploy the app, how do they know the app was deployed safely or securely? Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you didn’t know C++ very well. It turned out Claude knew even less about this library than I did, generating tons of code that was completely incorrect. I eventually solve my problem through research and trial and error, and it was nothing like what Claude recommended. It certainly didn’t leave me feeling confident enough to let the LLM have the level of control over my computer or project that the author is allowing it in the article. I’m not looking forward to a future spending all my time cleaning up the messes LLM’s create.
- lnbharath 10mo ago
  yeah- this is a fair concern and I should have been clearer. I wouldnt do this on anything with real data or production traffic. that hetzner instance was a side project with nothing sensitive on it. the point was more about claudes ability to reason through infrastructure problems not that everyone should hand over ssh keys. you're right to be cautious
- christophilus 10mo ago
  I agree you need to know what you’re doing. But Claude Code is definitely better than I am at some things- probably the most important of which is starting some mundane task that I would otherwise procrastinate indefinitely. It’s very good at Typescript, search, and research, but still does stupid stuff and requires review and steering. I don’t get into the same flow while using it, either, but I think that might be a matter of time. I find it allows me to spend more of my time thinking at a higher level. I could see myself learning to really enjoy that. Code review is exhausting, though, and has always been my least favorite aspect of the job. It seems my future is going to be code-review-heavy, and that is probably the biggest drawback.
  - cgearhart 10mo ago
Rikudou 10mo ago
I wish one day to be so brave to let a tool I clearly don't understand* ssh to a production server with root access**. * calling it a god-level programmer kinda gave it away they have no idea what's actually going on ** to restart docker containers you either have to be root or part of the docker group which effectively gives you root privileges
- lostmsu 10mo ago
  The consensus is that nobody should have root SSH to a production server.
tolerance 10mo ago
We are witnessing the emasculation of software developers.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
  Thesis: LLMs are a powerful tool Antithesis: LLMs are emasculating Synthesis: Programmers should be feminized
PaulHoule 10mo ago
I feel the same way about Junie. I have an "image sorter" that sucks in images from image galleries into tagging system with semantic web capabilities "Character:Mona -> Copyright:Genshin_Impact" and ML capabilities (it learns to tag the same way you do) Gen 1 of it was cued by a bookmarklet to have a webcrawler pull the gallery HTML and the images. I started having Cloudflare problems so Gen 2 worked by saving complete pages and importing the directories, that had problems so I was looking at a Gen 3 using a bookmarklet to fetch and POST the images out of the browser into the server so I tell Junie my plan and it tells me I'll have CORS trouble and "Would you consider making a browser extension?" Well I had considered that but was intimidated at the prospect, figured I'd probably have to carve out an uninterrupted weekend to study browser extensions, kick my son out of the house to go busk with his guitar instead of playing upstairs (the emotional/social bit is important) and even then have a high chance of not really getting it done and then end up taking another month to get an uninterrupted weekend. I told Junie "I've got no idea how you do that, don't you need a build system, don't you need to sign it?" and it said "No, you can just make the manifest file and a JS file and do a temporary install" so I say "make it so" and in 20 minutes I have the browser extension. It still isn't working end-to-end, but I'm now debugging it and ought to be able to get it working in a weekend with interruptions even if I didn't get any more AI help.

52 points by lnbharath 10mo ago

Author here. I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline. Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY. So I spent the weekend digging into the DX decisions that make Claude Code delightful.

MasterScrat 10mo ago
How much AI did you use to write up this article? It tripped up my "fake AI-written article" detector a few times despite being interesting enough to read to the end
- lnbharath 10mo ago
  used claude to polish the draft and tighten sentences. the thinking, analysis, and examples are all mine and based on personal experiences. spent the weekend reflecting on my past experiences with claude code and actually digging into why claude code feels the way it does. curious to know what tripped your detector.
  - verall 10mo ago
    Lots of things - typical llm em-dash situations although using dash. Lists of 3s after a colon where the 3 items aren't great. Short sentences for "impact" that sounds kind of like a high school essay i.e. "God level engineer...Zero ego." I cannot at all understand writing an essay and then having an llm "tighten up the sentences" which instead just makes it sound like slop generated from a list of bullets
  - ler_ 10mo ago
    Adding to this: too many negatives before making a point, which AI text is prone to do in order to give surface level emphasis to random points in an argument. For example: "I sat there for a second. It didn't lose the thread. It didn't panic. It prioritized like a real engineer would." Then there is the fact that the paragraph ends in just about the same way, which also activates one's AI-voice-detector, so to speak: "This wasn't autocomplete. This was collaboration." In my opinion, to write is to think. And to write is also to express oneself, not only to create a "communication object," let's put it that way. I would rather read an imperfect human voice than a machine's attempts to fix it. I think it's worth to face the frustration that comes with writing, because the end goal of refining your own argument and your delivery is that much sweeter. Let your human voice shine through.
- geophph 10mo ago
  “Here’s the thing” “The best part?”
  - bentcorner 10mo ago
    "It's not just X, it's Y" I find it really hard to read articles that use AI slop aphorisms. Please use your own words, it matters.
    - Rikudou 10mo ago
      What if I no good in English? Jokes aside, my English is passable and I'm fine with it when writing comments but I'm very aware that some of it doesn't sound native due to me, well, not being native speaker. I use AI to make it sound more fluent when writing for my blog.
      - exe34 10mo ago
        As long as your bullet points+prompt are shorter than the output, couldn't you post that instead? The only time I think an LLM might be ethically acceptable for something a human has to read is if you ask it to make it shorter.
        Rikudou 10mo ago
        I write the full article in my Czenglish (English influenced by Czech sentence structure). Then I let it rewrite it in proper English. So it's me doing the writing and GPT making it sound more English.
      - mcphage 10mo ago
        > What if I no good in English? It would still sound more human coming from you.
    - geophph 10mo ago
      Yeah it’s hard to keep interest when there’s no voice, just the same AI feel that you see everywhere else.
erichocean 10mo ago
Do you have any sources you've found that document Claude Code's UI in detail? I'm really curious about what they've built, as a UI designer.
- lnbharath 10mo ago
  Anthropic has some docs at docs.anthropic.com but honestly most of what I learned came from just using it and poking around. the slash commands have help text built in. shrivu shankar has a good breakdown of the features too if you're looking for a more structured overview
  - erichocean 10mo ago
    Thanks!
amtamt 10mo ago
> I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline. Feels more like peer pressure induced post, than evaluating a tool critically for pros and cons. > Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY. Definitely gives the "vibe" of social media's infinite scroll induced dopamine rush. Overall, this post just seems to be enforcing the idea that "fuzzy understanding of business domain will be enough to get a mature product using some AI, and the AI will somehow magically figure out most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain". Thing is that figuring out "most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain" is where most of the blood and sweat goes.

fluidcruft 10mo ago

I sort of agree with this about cognitive load. I'm somewhat new (started dipping my toes around July) but use Claude code heavily now. I did spend a lot of time playing with configuring it at first and creating agents etc. But I have a weird setup where I have three computers that I work on and at one point I realized vanilla Claude Code had adopted the things I was doing as defaults (and improved on them). So I have sort of declared a configuration bankruptcy and just use the recommended things. The only things I still do are things that help both Claude and I keep track of things (md files describing decisions and context of files). [I still haven't figured out MCP or how/why to use them or why to bother. You run servers. I guess. It's too complex for my smol brain to understand]

lnbharath 10mo ago
I definitely relate with your sentiment and I like your term "configuration bankruptcy" on MCP, the mental model that clicked for me is "giving claude access to tools it can call" so that instead of copy pasting from your database or API, claude can just... query it playwright MCP for me is godsend
- Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 10mo ago
  I thought skills were supposed to help with “giving claude access to tools it can call”. When would one use MCP over skills?
  - lnbharath 10mo ago
    skills are basically markdown files that teach claude how to do something. they live in your repo and load on demand. MCP is for when you need claude to actually interact with external systems like querying a database, hitting an API, etc...
    - tstrimple 10mo ago
      I've not explicitly used skills or MCP, but have had zero issues with Claude calling apis via curl as an example. I'm not sure what the MCP server or skill is actually enabling at this point. If I wanted CC to talk to SQL Server, I'd have it open a nix-env with the tools needed to talk to the database. One of my primary initial claude.md entries has to do with us running on NixOS and that temporarily installing tools is trivial and it should do things in the NixOS way whenever possible. Since then it has just worked with practically everything I've thrown at it. Very rarely do I see it trying to use a tool that isn't installed anymore. CC even uses my local vaultwarden where I have a collection of credentials shared with it. All driven through claude.md.

ThouYS 10mo ago

what on earth is a DX?

royal_ts 10mo ago
Developer Experience
ycuser2 10mo ago
Developer Experience (as in UX - User Experience)
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

phplovesong 10mo ago

SlopDX.

charlesabarnes 10mo ago

What scares me about Claude Code (and ai developer tools in general) is that a small model update could change how I interact with the tool entirely. There's no freezing the communication style that I need to use for good results.

Workaccount2 10mo ago
I suspect that this is already a big reason why we get so many conflicting signals on "the best coding model". People tune into the style of the model they use the most, and hit snags and friction when they take another model for a spin. Most iOS users report that Android is a disaster of an operating system, with layers and layers of user frustration. In reality, they actually are just totally in tune with how iOS does stuff. I can only imagine we have something similar going on here.
- fluidcruft 10mo ago
  My impression is people build very fragile Rube Goldberg devices on top of the models and those things break. That's not to say anything is wrong about the Rube Goldberg machines! They're very interesting and do new things (and they help me understand how things work). I'm just saying that there's probably a significant misattribution about where the fragility exists. https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

GiorgioG 10mo ago

If only LLMs didn’t just make shit up regularly.

erichocean 10mo ago
If a coding agent was released that never made anything up, how much would that change things for you?
- geophph 10mo ago
  I’d save a lot of time from not choosing to smugly telling the AI how wrong it was just for my own reassurances that at least for now I’m still more useful than it is.
ltbarcly3 10mo ago
They both make stuff up and make very obvious mis-interpretations of evidence. If you take the output of an LLM, and ask another LLM to check it, this dramatically reduces this. Even if you do it with the same LLM but without the existing context. I was able to write a detailed analysis of a rule system by doing this with 3 steps, claude -> chatgpt -> gemini3. It caught all the mistakes, including overstatements and vague statements. It wasn't perfect, but even after one review the # of mistakes or stupid statements was almost 0.

buster 10mo ago

I've not used Claude Claude yet, but why would it be bad if it gains features that people use? Did people ever complain about Photoshop to have too many features demanding some cognitive load? Excel? Practically every IDE out there? There is a reason people use those tools instead of the plain text editor or paint. It's for power users and people will become power users of AI as well. Some will forever stick to chatgpt and some will use an ever increasing ecosystem of tools.

ch2026 10mo ago
because devs will have no clue how their systems work, the only ones who do will be LLMs, gatekept behind an ever-increasing cost-per-usage.
charlesabarnes 10mo ago
It is a very significant consideration for every one of those tools. The introduction of the "ribbon" in Excel was moderately controversial in 2007. The default tools made available in Photoshop is why it remains on top to this day.
lnbharath 10mo ago
good question. the difference with AI tools is the interface isn't stable in the same way photoshop or excel is. with traditional software you learn it once and muscle memory carries you. with LLM tools the model itself changes, the optimal prompting style shifts, features interact with model behavior in unpredictable ways. so the cognitive load compounds differently. not saying features are bad, just that the tradeoffs are different

ltbarcly3 10mo ago

"With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you." Well, not to me or the people I respect. It's getting very good, but it's like having a recent college grad who obsessively reads documentation. Someone with low skill but very high knowledge, often knowledge they are mixing up or not quite getting right. I think if Claude is already 'better' at coding than you, maybe think about going back to college to be a lawyer or something. For the rest of us, lets just hope that Claude hits some natural limit before it gets better than us too. If it doesn't hit some limit I think we have a year or two.

dawnerd 10mo ago
Yet when I try it, it feels like a developer fresh out of a coding bootcamp with no real experience. There’s no real reasoning, problem solving is still brute forced. It still rewrites rather than modifies. The context is way too limiting and it gets lost in its own “thinking”
- ltbarcly3 10mo ago
  The problem solving is very very not brute force. I have seen it make detailed analysis. Often if a problem stumps me it also stumps Claude, no surprise there. But if I give it a ticket I haven't looked at yet, it is often able to find the exact problem via careful 'reasoning' and fix it in 1/100th the time it would take me.
- coffeefirst 10mo ago
  Except I’ve coached a lot of those people and there’s usually a method to their madness. You can sit down, help them back up to where they went off the rails, and it all makes sense. Robot code is bonkers.
salomonk_mur 10mo ago
I had it One-shot the full architecture for a fairly advanced distributed system for a client. It then one shot the actual code design (following absolutely all our our internal requirements on auth, stack to use, security, code styling, documentation, etc). It then one shot (and we code reviewed everything thoroughly) each of the 5 micro services needed. It one shot the infrastructure to use and created the terraform file to put it up anywhere. It deployed it. It caught some of the errors it had made by itself after load-testing, and corrected them. It created the load test itself (following patterns from previews projects we had). It did all of this in a week. With human supervision on each step, but in a fucking week. We gave it all the context it needed and one-shotted everything. It is more than god-level. If you are not getting these increases in productivity, you are using it wrong.

SatvikBeri 10mo ago

For what it's worth, I've been using a fairly minimal setup (24 lines of CLAUDE.md, no MCPs, skills, or custom slash commands) since 3.7 and I've only noticed Claude Code getting significantly better on each model release.

fuckinpuppers 10mo ago
Share it!
- SatvikBeri 10mo ago
  I posted my CLAUDE.md here, there's really not much to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262674

skydhash 10mo ago

> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego. > Claude was halfway through refactoring a complex auth flow[...] Then I realized: I'd forgotten to mention that one of those files was also used by a cron job. That is the kind of research you do before you go to refactoring. > Claude Code freed them from "the anxiety of the first step in programming constantly." Is there a first step in programming? If there is, that would be thinking because you ought to get a good solution in mind before even typing the first line of code. ... The whole article feels like someone roleplaying as software developer. Not that there's a barrier or a license to be one, but just that whole piece seems like as accurate as hackers portrayal in movies.

konart 10mo ago
>Is there a first step in programming? If there is, that would be thinking I'd argue that a first step (regardless of field) is either a necessity or curiosity. Thinking comes later. (And to be honest I can't really think of it as a "step", simply because this is a process).
gedy 10mo ago
I use Claude and not crapping on it or the boosters, but most of the people who I've encountered in real life who really gush about it, are either semi-technical, and who struggle in some way when coding. Non technical CEO of small startup I was at, manager who didn't go to college, etc. It's a cool tool! Just am tired of being treated like anti AI because I don't outsource my brain to it, or gush over their DIY UI demos.
- skydhash 10mo ago
  Yeah it’s just a LLM, able to do text transformations based on what latent factors it has captured in the training stage. But programming is not text manipulation, just like writing is not only putting words on paper and music is not merely producing sounds. Anyone can sat before a piano and start hitting keys. And someone can rig up some apparatus that highlight which keys to hit at precise times in order to play Moonlight Sonata. But no one will call those people pianist. Sure a good pianist can use such apparatus to learn to play a piece. But he may also not buy such thing and just use a music sheet.

tmoravec 10mo ago

> In a monorepo, just loading the project consumes ~20k tokens I don't work on a monorepo, and as an example, what I would consider a mid-size service in my mid-size company is 7M tokens. I can't but ask: do all people who are so enthusiastic about AI for coding only work on trivial projects?

pjm331 10mo ago
I’m not clear what “just loading the project” even means here - if that’s how many tokens are consumed by system prompt plus Claude.md and MCP tools well that has nothing to do with the size of the project
raincole 10mo ago
I'm quite sure "loading the project" isn't putting every single line of code into the context. Probably just a huge CLAUDE.md or something. Either that or this author is completely out of touch with reality.
ltbarcly3 10mo ago
You obviously don't have any idea how any of this actually works.
- tmoravec 10mo ago
  What do you think "loading the project" means when discussing context?
lnbharath 10mo ago
should have been clearer here. by "loading the project" I meant the initial context claude builds like CLAUDE.md, directory structure, etc... not literally putting every line of code into context. 7M tokens would obviously not fit in a 200k window
peacebeard 10mo ago
I dunno if I’d fall myself “enthusiastic” but I successfully use AI on a large production monorepo. The onus is on the user to break down the problem into llm-sized bites. How to do this effectively is a skill that takes time to develop. You’re not crazy: if you go in and ask it to do things in broad strokes it won’t work.

codegladiator 10mo ago

> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego. Who keeps forgetting variable names and function calling conventions it used 4 seconds ago while using 136 GBs of ram for the cli causing you to frequently force quit the whole terminal. Its not even human level.

Trasmatta 10mo ago
And then hallucinating APIs that don't exist, breaking all the unit tests and giving up saying they're an "implementation detail", and over engineering a horrific class that makes Enterprise Fizzbuzz look reasonable
exe34 10mo ago
I've been running claude code on a 13 year old potato and it's never used 136GB of RAM - possibly because I only have 8GB.
- codegladiator 10mo ago
  Its vram or something makes the OS completely busy even I have only 32 gb ram. task manager shows 100+ gbs forcing to terminate
  - exe34 10mo ago
    is that vram on your GPU? I don't think claude code uses that.
    - codegladiator 10mo ago
      Not on GPU, I think it's just paged memory. You are right claude-code isn't running the model locally. Today I've had to kill it 5 times till now. edit: https://ibb.co/Fbn8Q3pb https://ibb.co/Fbn8Q3pb that's the 6th
      - lostmsu 10mo ago

koolba 10mo ago

> What happened next: Claude installed every CLI, prompted me to login once, then went into autopilot. Configured each service. Ran commands. Checked logs. Auto-corrected errors. Got the app running in minutes. > In another instance, a GitHub workflow was failing. Claude asked if it could SSH into my Hetzner instance to investigate. I said yes. It connected, looked up the config, restarted the Docker instances causing issues, and renewed some certificates as a hygiene step - which I never asked it to do. This type of thing scares the crap out of me and I’m flabbergasted that anyone wold give an LLM unrestricted shell access to a server.

jabedude 10mo ago
I've also noticed Claude "running away" and doing a bunch of work I never asked it to do.
candiddevmike 10mo ago
And I'm sure just "restarting docker instances" fixed the root problem here... The maintenance costs here are going to be eye watering.

pico303 10mo ago

The example in the article of letting Claude deploy the app worries me. It has me thinking of that line, “AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about.” If the author was clueless of how to deploy the app, how do they know the app was deployed safely or securely? Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you didn’t know C++ very well. It turned out Claude knew even less about this library than I did, generating tons of code that was completely incorrect. I eventually solve my problem through research and trial and error, and it was nothing like what Claude recommended. It certainly didn’t leave me feeling confident enough to let the LLM have the level of control over my computer or project that the author is allowing it in the article. I’m not looking forward to a future spending all my time cleaning up the messes LLM’s create.

lnbharath 10mo ago
yeah- this is a fair concern and I should have been clearer. I wouldnt do this on anything with real data or production traffic. that hetzner instance was a side project with nothing sensitive on it. the point was more about claudes ability to reason through infrastructure problems not that everyone should hand over ssh keys. you're right to be cautious
christophilus 10mo ago
I agree you need to know what you’re doing. But Claude Code is definitely better than I am at some things- probably the most important of which is starting some mundane task that I would otherwise procrastinate indefinitely. It’s very good at Typescript, search, and research, but still does stupid stuff and requires review and steering. I don’t get into the same flow while using it, either, but I think that might be a matter of time. I find it allows me to spend more of my time thinking at a higher level. I could see myself learning to really enjoy that. Code review is exhausting, though, and has always been my least favorite aspect of the job. It seems my future is going to be code-review-heavy, and that is probably the biggest drawback.
- cgearhart 10mo ago

Rikudou 10mo ago

I wish one day to be so brave to let a tool I clearly don't understand* ssh to a production server with root access**. * calling it a god-level programmer kinda gave it away they have no idea what's actually going on ** to restart docker containers you either have to be root or part of the docker group which effectively gives you root privileges

lostmsu 10mo ago
The consensus is that nobody should have root SSH to a production server.

tolerance 10mo ago

We are witnessing the emasculation of software developers.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo ago
Thesis: LLMs are a powerful tool Antithesis: LLMs are emasculating Synthesis: Programmers should be feminized

PaulHoule 10mo ago

I feel the same way about Junie. I have an "image sorter" that sucks in images from image galleries into tagging system with semantic web capabilities "Character:Mona -> Copyright:Genshin_Impact" and ML capabilities (it learns to tag the same way you do) Gen 1 of it was cued by a bookmarklet to have a webcrawler pull the gallery HTML and the images. I started having Cloudflare problems so Gen 2 worked by saving complete pages and importing the directories, that had problems so I was looking at a Gen 3 using a bookmarklet to fetch and POST the images out of the browser into the server so I tell Junie my plan and it tells me I'll have CORS trouble and "Would you consider making a browser extension?" Well I had considered that but was intimidated at the prospect, figured I'd probably have to carve out an uninterrupted weekend to study browser extensions, kick my son out of the house to go busk with his guitar instead of playing upstairs (the emotional/social bit is important) and even then have a high chance of not really getting it done and then end up taking another month to get an uninterrupted weekend. I told Junie "I've got no idea how you do that, don't you need a build system, don't you need to sign it?" and it said "No, you can just make the manifest file and a JS file and do a temporary install" so I say "make it so" and in 20 minutes I have the browser extension. It still isn't working end-to-end, but I'm now debugging it and ought to be able to get it working in a weekend with interruptions even if I didn't get any more AI help.