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One thing that kind of baffles me about the popularity of tools like Claude Code is that their main target group seems to be developers (TUI interfaces, semi-st
by c7b 9mo ago
One thing that kind of baffles me about the popularity of tools like Claude Code is that their main target group seems to be developers (TUI interfaces, semi-structured instruction files,... not the kind of stuff I'd get my parents to use). So people who would be quite capable of building a simple agentic loop themselves [0]. It won't be quite as powerful as the commercial tools, but given that you deeply know how it works you can also tailor it to your specific problems much better. And sandbox it better (it baffles me that the tools' proposed solution to avoid wiping the entire disk is relying on user confirmation [1]).
It's like customizing your text editor or desktop environment. You can do it all yourself, you can get ideas and snippets from other people's setups. But fully relying on proprietary SaaS tools - that we know will have to get more expensive eventually - for some of your core productivity workflows seems unwise to me.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46545620
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/google_antigravity_wipes_d_drive/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/google_antigravity_wi...
- tempaccount420 9mo agoYou would have to pay the API prices, which are many times worse than the subscriptions.
- fercircularbuf 9mo agoThis is the answer right here as for why I use claude code instead of an api key and someone else's tool.
- imdsm 9mo agoFor what it's worth, Cowork does run inside a sandbox
- manmal 9mo agoAnyone can build _an_ agent. A good one takes a talented engineer. That’s because TUI rendering is tough (hello, flicker!) and extensibility must be done right lest it‘s useless. Eg Mario Zechner (badlogic) hit it out of the park with his increasingly popular pi, which does not flicker and is VERY hackable and is the SOTA for going back to previous turns: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/main/packages/coding-agent/README.md https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/main/packages/codin...
- behnamoh 9mo ago> That’s because TUI rendering is tough (hello, flicker!) That's just Anthropic's excuse. Literally no other agentic AI TUI suffers from flickers, esp. on tmux Claude Code is unusable.
- manmal 9mo agoNo, most of them actually flicker occasionally.
- wiseowise 9mo agoHuh, nice to see that he has dropped Java. Now if he could only create TS based LibGdx.
- manmal 9mo agoMake a pull request.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rolisz 9mo agoI've been using Claude code daily almost since it came out. Codex weekly. Tried out Gemini, GitHub copilot cli, AMP, Pi. None of them ever even tried to delete any files outside of project directory. So I think they're doing better than me at "accidental file deletion".
- Closi 9mo agoFor day-to-day coding, why use your own half-baked solution when the commercial versions are better, cheaper and can be customised anyway? I've written my own agent for a specialised problem which does work well, although it just burns tokens compared to Cursor! The other advantage that Claude Code has is that the model itself can be finetuned for tool calling rather than just relying on prompt engineering, but even getting the prompts right must take huge engineering effort and experimentation.
- RamblingCTO 9mo agoBecause we want to work and not tinker? > It won't be quite as powerful as the commercial tools If you are a professional you use a proper tool? SWEs seem to be the only people on the planet that rather used half-arsed solutions instead of well-built professional tools. Imagine your car mechanic doing that ...
- lpcvoid 9mo agoYou're on hacker news, where people (used to?) like hacking on things. I like tinkering with stuff. I'd take a half working open source project over a enshittified commercial offering any day.
- RamblingCTO 9mo agoBut hacking and tinkering is a hobby. I also hack and tinker, but that's not work. Sometimes it makes sense. But the mindset is often times "I can build this" and "everything commercial sucks". > take a half working open source project See, how is that appropriate in any way in a work environment?
- mock-possum 9mo agoOr more to the point, I get paid to work, not to tinker. I’ve considered doing it on my own time, sure, but not exactly hurting for hobbies right now. Who has time to mess around with all that, when my employer will just pay for a ready-made solution that works well enough?
- fauigerzigerk 9mo agoI remember this argument being used against Postgres and for Oracle, against Linux and for Windows or AS/400, etc. And I think it makes sense for a certain type of organisation that has no ambition or need to build its own technology competence. But for everyone else I think it's important to find the right balance in the right areas. A car mechanic is never in the business of building tools. But software engineers always are to some degree, because our tools are software as well.
- 9mo ago
- singularity2001 9mo agoFound the guy who built Reddit and Postgres himself
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bogtog 9mo agoPeople will pay extra for Opus over Sonnet and often describe the $200 Max plan as cheap because of the time it saves. Paying for a somewhat better harness follows the same logic
- LaGrange 9mo agoAbility to actually code something like that is likely inversely correlated with willingness to give Dr Sbaitso access to one’s shell.