5 ms·

> I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-) > the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and tr

by imron 10mo ago

> I have learned how to use Claude Code effectively This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-) > the most reasonable advice is to just keep going and try different kind of things. This is where I’ve been at for a while now. Every couple of months I try again with latest models and latest techniques I hear people talking about but there’s very little concrete info there that works for me. Then I wonder if it’s just my spend? I don’t mind spending $30/month to experiment but I’m not going to drop $300/month unless I can see evidence that it’ll be worth it, which I haven’t really seen, but maybe there’s a dependency and you don’t get the result without increased spend? Some posts I’ve seen claim spending of $1,500/month, which would be worth it if it could increase productivity enough, but there’s very few specifics on workflows and results.

LouisSayers 10mo ago
You can achieve a lot on the $30 plan. I use Claude every day for everything, it's amazing value for money. Give it a specific task with the context it needs, that's what I find works well, then iterate from there. I just copy paste, nothing fancy.
- hawk_ 10mo ago
  You just copy paste as in you copy paste all the necessary context and the results. You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?
  - LouisSayers 9mo ago
    Exactly, copy paste related code and files. Give it some background ontext on what it is you're doing and then tell it what you'd like it to do.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    > You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct? I'm sure you can derive some benefit without doing that, but you're not going to see much of a speedup if you're still copy/pasting and manually prompting after each change. If anybody is copy/pasting and saying "I don't get it", yeah you don't.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9mo ago
  What do you mean by copy paste? I use copy paste in non-agentic workflows.
  - LouisSayers 9mo ago
    Yeah, copy paste for non-agentic workflows. I'm keeping things extremely simple.
kukkeliskuu 9mo ago
> This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-) Fair enough :-) This reminds me about pigeon research by Skinner. Skinner placed hungry pigeons in a "Skinner box" and a mechanism delivered food pellets at fixed, non-contingent time intervals, regardless of the bird's behavior. The pigeons, seeking a pattern or control over the food delivery, began to associate whatever random action they were performing at the moment the food appeared with the reward. I think we humans have similar psychology, i.e. we tend to associate superstitions about patterns of what were doing when we got rewards, if they happen at random intervals. To me it seems we are at a phase where what works with LLMs *(the reward) are still quite random, but it is psychologically difficult for us to admit it. Therefore we try to invent various kinds of theories of why something appears to work, which are closer to superstitions than real repeatable processes. It seems difficult to really generalize repeatable processes of what really works, because it depends on too many things. This may be the reason why you are unsuccessful when using these descriptions. But while it seems less useful to try to work based on theories of what works -- although I had skeptical attitude -- I have found that LLMs can be huge productive boost -- but it really depends on the context. It seems you just need to keep trying various things, and eventually you may find out what works for you. There is no shortcut where you just read a blog post and then you can do it. Things I have tried succesfully: - modifying existing large-ish Django projects, adding new apps to it. It can sometimes use Django components&HTMX/AlpineJS properly, but sometimes starts doing something else. One app uses tenants, and LLM appears to constantly struggle with this. - creating new Django projects -- this was less successful than modifying existing projects, because LLM could not imitate practices - Apple Swift mobile and watch applications. This was surprisingly succesful. But these were not huge apps. - python GUI app was more or less succesful - GitHub Pages static web sites based on certain content I have not copied any CLAUDE.md or other files. Every time Claude Code does something I don't appreciate, I add a new line. Currently it is at 26 lines. I have made a few skills. They are mostly so that they can work independently in a loop, for example test something that does not work. Typically I try to limit the technologies to something I know really well. When something fails, I can often quickly figure out what is wrong. I started with the basic plan (I guess it is that $30/month). I only upgraded to $100 Max and later to $180 2xMax because I was hitting limits. But reason I was hitting limits was because I was working on multiple projects on multiple environments at the same time. The only difference I have seen is that I have hit the limits. I have not seen any difference in quality.

by imron 10mo ago

LouisSayers 10mo ago

You can achieve a lot on the $30 plan. I use Claude every day for everything, it's amazing value for money. Give it a specific task with the context it needs, that's what I find works well, then iterate from there. I just copy paste, nothing fancy.

hawk_ 10mo ago
You just copy paste as in you copy paste all the necessary context and the results. You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct?
- LouisSayers 9mo ago
  Exactly, copy paste related code and files. Give it some background ontext on what it is you're doing and then tell it what you'd like it to do.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  > You don't give it access to your codebase for read or write, correct? I'm sure you can derive some benefit without doing that, but you're not going to see much of a speedup if you're still copy/pasting and manually prompting after each change. If anybody is copy/pasting and saying "I don't get it", yeah you don't.
dvfjsdhgfv 9mo ago
What do you mean by copy paste? I use copy paste in non-agentic workflows.
- LouisSayers 9mo ago
  Yeah, copy paste for non-agentic workflows. I'm keeping things extremely simple.

kukkeliskuu 9mo ago

> This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-) Fair enough :-) This reminds me about pigeon research by Skinner. Skinner placed hungry pigeons in a "Skinner box" and a mechanism delivered food pellets at fixed, non-contingent time intervals, regardless of the bird's behavior. The pigeons, seeking a pattern or control over the food delivery, began to associate whatever random action they were performing at the moment the food appeared with the reward. I think we humans have similar psychology, i.e. we tend to associate superstitions about patterns of what were doing when we got rewards, if they happen at random intervals. To me it seems we are at a phase where what works with LLMs *(the reward) are still quite random, but it is psychologically difficult for us to admit it. Therefore we try to invent various kinds of theories of why something appears to work, which are closer to superstitions than real repeatable processes. It seems difficult to really generalize repeatable processes of what really works, because it depends on too many things. This may be the reason why you are unsuccessful when using these descriptions. But while it seems less useful to try to work based on theories of what works -- although I had skeptical attitude -- I have found that LLMs can be huge productive boost -- but it really depends on the context. It seems you just need to keep trying various things, and eventually you may find out what works for you. There is no shortcut where you just read a blog post and then you can do it. Things I have tried succesfully: - modifying existing large-ish Django projects, adding new apps to it. It can sometimes use Django components&HTMX/AlpineJS properly, but sometimes starts doing something else. One app uses tenants, and LLM appears to constantly struggle with this. - creating new Django projects -- this was less successful than modifying existing projects, because LLM could not imitate practices - Apple Swift mobile and watch applications. This was surprisingly succesful. But these were not huge apps. - python GUI app was more or less succesful - GitHub Pages static web sites based on certain content I have not copied any CLAUDE.md or other files. Every time Claude Code does something I don't appreciate, I add a new line. Currently it is at 26 lines. I have made a few skills. They are mostly so that they can work independently in a loop, for example test something that does not work. Typically I try to limit the technologies to something I know really well. When something fails, I can often quickly figure out what is wrong. I started with the basic plan (I guess it is that $30/month). I only upgraded to $100 Max and later to $180 2xMax because I was hitting limits. But reason I was hitting limits was because I was working on multiple projects on multiple environments at the same time. The only difference I have seen is that I have hit the limits. I have not seen any difference in quality.