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Claude Code Unleashed
- 0_gravitas 1y agoHow much does it seem like this will be affected by the recent headline saying that Max rate-limits are getting shadow-tightened?
- ipnon 1y agoIt's pretty clear to me that every member Big Token is converging on practically identical models and they're now just competing on compute efficiency based on their particular capital situation. So in the short-term products like Terragon might be nerfed. But in a year or two (2027!) it's hard to imagine OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral, and so on not all having terminal modes with automatic background agent creation and separate Git branching. At that point it's a race to the bottom for consumer prices.
- cheema33 1y agoThis article reads like an ad for the author’s product.
- futuraperdita 1y agoThis article is an ad for the author's product.
- meowface 1y agoIt definitely is. But, hey; it worked on me. I'm going to try it, since I've been looking for exactly this.
- lopatin 1y agoI knew I was being sold to and I couldn't stop reading and signing up anyways. It's an effective ad.
- mike_hearn 1y agoGood. Advertising is valuable and important. It's how people learn about new products and services. Articles like this are part of why I come to HN. And I wanted something like Terragon for ages. It's an obvious idea, clearly where the industry needs to go, and if it's well implemented then I'd be happy to use it. OpenAI has been trying the same thing with Codex. Of course, the question is price. It's "free during beta".
- mirsadm 1y agoHN is full of ads masquerading as comments. They usually start with I used [insert tool from link] to create my [insert as for their product]. It was so great!!
- beefnugs 1y agoThere can't really be any other person recommending AI tools other than people with products to sell, can there? Anyone paying $3000 a month to a third party, coding and trying to wrangle this stuff, has got shit to sell for sure. The one thing we dont see news stories of is how open source has finally crushed that big evil corp because ai-multiplier times many open source contributors is Unlimited Power (tm)
- chadcmulligan 1y agoHow are people using Claude to use this much API? I use it to write the occasional bit and the free one seems enough - I've only once been told to come back tomorrow.
- serf 1y agowrite any project with a lot of math and memory shuffling and the structure will generally start eating lots of tokens. write any project that has a lot of interactive 'dialogues', or exacting and detailed comments, eats a lot of tokens. My record for tapping out the Claude Max API quickly was sprint-coding a poker solver and accompanying web front end w/ Opus. The backend had a lot of gpgpu stuff going on , and the front end was extremely verbose w/ a wordy ui/ux.
- chadcmulligan 1y agoSo you write the whole thing using Claude? Any walkthroughs/YouTube things to show how to do this? Not sure I want to, but I'm curious
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y agoPro was not sufficient when i started to: Use git worktrees, type every command in plain english in CC. For example “commit and push”
- mcintyre1994 1y agoHow good is it at writing commit messages out of interest?
- input_sh 1y agoNot great by default, it just lists the files that were added or modified and "signs" itself at the bottom. I see no value in its commit messages compared to just scrolling down and seeing the actual diff. You can make it somewhat better by adding instructions in CLAUDE.md, but I did notice those instructions getting ignored from time to time unless you "remind it". See for yourself: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%F0%9F%A4%96+Generated+with+%5BClaude+Code%5D+AND+NOT+coderabbit.ai&type=commits https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%F0%9F%A4%96+Gene...
- brainless 1y agoI am using Claude Code full-time for about 6 weeks* with the $20/month subscription. I am trying out building different products from ideas I have already had. It frees me a lot of time to talk about my founder journey. I have not needed multiple agents or using CC over an SSH terminal to run overnight. The main reason is that LLMs are not correct many times. So I still need time to test. Like run the whole app, or check what broke in CI (GitHub Actions), etc. I do not go through code line by line anymore and I organize work with tickets (sometimes they are created with CC too). Both https://github.com/pixlie/Pixlie https://github.com/pixlie/Pixlie and https://github.com/pixlie/SmartCrawler https://github.com/pixlie/SmartCrawler are vibe coded (barely any code that I wrote). With LLMs you can generated code 10x than writing manually. It means you can also get 10x the errors. So the manual checks take some time. Our existing engineering practices are very helpful when generating code through LLMs and I do not have mental bandwidth to review a mountain of code. I am not sure if we scale out LLMs, it will help in building production quality software. I already see that sometimes CC makes really poor guesses. Imagine many such guesses in parallel, daily. edit: typo - months/weeks
- eisbaw 1y agoyou just rick rolled me!
- brainless 1y agoI am so sorry, it was not intentional at all. I had asked Claude Code to keep a placeholder video. I did not even know what "rick rolling" means. Just searched and understood what I have done!
- eulgro 1y agoApparently this is typical to LLMs: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_687a285d9f708191a884d2ad39ddcb53 https://chatgpt.com/s/t_687a285d9f708191a884d2ad39ddcb53 I mean, it's probably the most linked YouTube video by a factor of 100x so it makes sense for it to be hardcoded in the model.
- wg0 1y ago
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y agoThis is the dream, but we are not yet there. For any reasonable complex code base, CC needs guidance, like avoiding duplicate code/use library function. Write more tests. Sometimes there is a much more elegant solution for a problem. Claude will find it, but you need to hint and ask. If people use Claude without a critical eye, our code bases will grow immensely.
- bapak 1y ago> If people use Claude without a critical eye, our code bases will grow immensely. Sounds like the baseline for programming in teams. People are more likely to write their own helpers or install dependencies than knowing what's already available in the repository.
- barrenko 1y agoIt's a lot of work, but it's a different type of work.
- kasey_junk 1y agoWith most of the async Claude code systems I’ve tried you’d do iterations like this as part of code review. And fwiw I use cc with a complex code base and an async workflow like the author describes daily.
- nojs 1y agoThe problem with working at the PR level is it massively sacrifices speed if you need to make small tweaks yourself interspersed with CC’s work, which seems to be the best workflow atm, at least for nontrivial changes. Local git worktrees are way faster.
- kasey_junk 1y agoYeah. I don’t think it’s an all or nothing thing. Sometimes a change is best done all through async iterations, sometimes you want to be interactive and sometimes agent wrangling is just not worth it. The painful thing for me right now is setting up the agent instructions, permissions and sandboxes varies for each of those use cases and the tooling around that is very rudimentary right now.
- nikisweeting 1y agoWhats the benefit of this over the Claude code github action? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action It's already great at spinning up 5+ agents working on different PRs, triggered by just @mentioning claude on any github issue.
- stavros 1y agoI guess this uses your subscription, when the GH action doesn't. That alone is a significant benefit, as I've turned the action off due to cost.
- k1m 1y agoI think the GH action can also now use your subscription https://x.com/alexalbert__/status/1943332121814405412 https://x.com/alexalbert__/status/1943332121814405412
- stavros 1y agoAw man, they say it's available but then the instructions refer to "getting the API key from the console". I'll play around with the installation command again, thank you! EDIT: The command does it now, thanks! I tried if a few weeks ago and it didn't, so this is great.
- eisbaw 1y agoNoise? Iterating in PRs - if humans are involved. That said, Terragon here (which is akin to Codex and Jules) are often "too autonomous" for my taste. Human in the loop is made more difficult -- commenting may not be enough: I can't edit the code from those because the workspace is so ephemeral and/or remote.
- thatscot 1y agoWhen I work side-by-side with Claude to fix bugs or ask it to fix problems. It constantly makes mistakes, like the other day it got the concept of batchItemFailures on an sqs queue completely wrong. How are people just firing them off to build stuff with any confidence?
- eisbaw 1y agohttps://ghuntley.com/stdlib/ https://ghuntley.com/stdlib/ applies to claude as well. AI won't magically know your codebase unless it is pretty vanilla - but then you teach it. If it makes a mistake, teach it by adding a rule. You have to confine the output space or else you quickly get whatever.
- eisbaw 1y agoClaudia helps regarding managment and session mental switching. I added a web server ontop, so I can use Claudia from my phone now: https://github.com/getAsterisk/claudia/pull/216 https://github.com/getAsterisk/claudia/pull/216
- UnreachableCode 1y agoAm I the only person who hasn't found the time, money, permission from work, resources, etc to be able to produce software like this? I'm still at my corporate 9-5 where they're still making the decision on whether we're allowed to use copilot yet.
- mnky9800n 1y agoI do stuff after work to keep up to date. Like scrolling hacker news and as my gf says “shitposting on LinkedIn”. But also I’ve been building some apps with Claude code. It’s fun actually. But I also do other stuff like gym and cycling and Russian language learning.
- dr_kiszonka 1y agoI am in a situation where everyone uses it but is ashamed to admit it. I often spot people secretly glancing at GH copilot chat or Chat GPT.
- dismalpedigree 1y agoIts the Ozempic of programming!
- mdaniel 1y agoWow, that's actually a great analogy: it's hailed as the 2nd coming to cure all of society's woes, it's trying to use a quick fix instead of making lifestyle changes, it may damage your organs, and if you stop using it you go back to where you were before or worse
- olmo23 1y agoThey gave us copilot and honestly for me it's been a bit of a double-edged sword. I often use it with Claude 4 as model. What I noticed is that the tool is able and eager to make large sweeping modifications to the code base where I would be apprehensive and look for an easier way. For example: changing the type signatures of all functions in a module to pass along some extra state, a huge amount of work. I ended up reverting the changes and replacing the functionality with thread local storage (well, dynamically scoped variables). So, definitely not a panacea, but still well worth the money.
- internet1776 1y ago[dead]
- davedx 1y agoAre all these Claude Code articles adverts for people building wrappers around Claude Code? I'm starting to get quite sceptical about how good it actually is
- khalic 1y agoClaude code is very good, no idea about the wrapper and don’t really care. The “hidden” adverts do get on my nerves though
- machiaweliczny 1y agoI disagree. It's pricy and does crap code unless precisely instructed. Maybe because I was prompting in non-english langauge
- mike_hearn 1y agoDon't do that. Quality of all models tanks in non-English unfortunately. It's fine for chat and translation tasks but their cognitive capacities does reduce a lot. One of the next features I'm expecting wrappers to add on top is auto-translation. In many work contexts it makes more sense to translate what the user said to English, process that and translate the answer back than ask the model to speak the language natively.
- khalic 1y agoIf I may, LLMs have no cognitive capacities. Their corpora in English are simply bigger.
- khalic 1y agoOh I wouldn’t try anything other than English with Claude. For the quality, it depends on many things, the context given, the quality of the code given as context, style, etc. I easily double my output with very little effect on quality. It does require constant supervision though, I don’t see AI producing professional quality code by any other mean than human supervision, for a looooong time.
- johnfn 1y agoThis sounds fantastic. I found myself nodding along the entire time as the author's experience matched mine. I'm really surprised it isn't more popular here on HN; I can only think that most people haven't really used Claude Max yet.
- ksynwa 1y agoCan someone explain to me like I'm from 2020 what these multiple agents are for? Is it something like starting five different Claude Code sessions in parallel to fix five different issues? Or are they collaborating in some capacity?
- mike_hearn 1y agoFive different issues. They don't (yet) collaborate. However, Claude Code does let the model farm out subtasks to "sub agents" which is basically just forking the chat history in order to manage context explosion. Claude often does this to find things in the codebase - it effectively instructs a sub-instance of itself to work out where something is, the sub-conversation terminates with an answer and the main context window only contains the answer. It can also do this in parallel. So, it's kinda both. Terragon works on separate tasks in parallel, Claude Code farms out subtasks and sometimes also in parallel.
- bananapub 1y ago> Is it something like starting five different Claude Code sessions in parallel to fix five different issues? yes
- socketcluster 1y agoI tried Claude Code with my custom serverless BaaS https://saasufy.com/ https://saasufy.com/ - The results were excellent. I'm hoping this will commodify the BaaS sector which is good news if you're competing on efficiency and functionality as opposed to relying on network effects.
- yahoozoo 1y agoI still don’t get how people blow so much money per day if they were just on API usage. My tasks at work are either so trivial that it’s easier and quicker to just do them the old fashioned way, or complex enough that having to steer, correct, and edit the LLMs output is more effort than just writing it myself. What I mainly use LLMs for is “Run a `git diff master` and summarize the changes for a PR description” to save some time there. I guess a lot of folks are vibe coding 90%+ their side hustles to the point they require 5 instances of CC, each running 8 subagents?
- ed_mercer 1y agoI need an open-source version of this. I’m not exactly comfortable exposing all of my code to some external service.
- barrenko 1y agoIf you watch the following 'til the end https://youtu.be/bUBF5V6oDKw https://youtu.be/bUBF5V6oDKw (from the AI Engineer conf, by the creator of Docker), you can I think find something satisfactory within those lines.
- ed_mercer 1y agoThank you, that was an awesome talk!
- mdaniel 1y agoDid you link to a video instead of https://github.com/dagger/container-use https://github.com/dagger/container-use (Apache 2)? I mean, as fun as it was to watch someone type into GhosTTY on stage ... Anyway, lightly discussed at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44193933
- barrenko 1y agoYes, a video, semi-on-purpose, thank you for linking the thread.
- conartist6 1y agoIt's just arbitrage. You aren't a programmer. The basic nature of your work is not serving users with better software, but buying $1000 of currency for $200.
- Flavius 1y agoJust as a tractor operator isn't truly a farmer if he doesn't engage in heavy manual labor. Who does he think he is, traversing the fields with a machine that merely converts diesel into grain?
- Eggpants 1y agoThis narrative has been pushed hard lately that $200 a month is a “bargain” because it’s “worth” $1000. If that’s true, then these companies will be running out of venture capital money very soon. Then their only recourse will be to sell themselves or insert ads into LLM responses then this will be a total shit show. It’s easy to see how trivial it will be to have an adwords type operation where output tokens are replaced with paid values. For example: this_varable_is_sponsored_by_starbucks = 42
- mdaniel 1y agoThat would be a terrible revenue model because no one's going to read code anymore, they're going to just keep piling on agents until the vibes align
- jamifsud 1y agoI've been using Claude Code for weeks now and I've found it to be fantastic at writing / debugging tests unit / integ tests that don't require external context. Still needs some guidance of course but it's been a huge productivity improvement. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for other types of tests like E2E tests. It makes sense why: CC doesn't have access to all of the context to determine what's going wrong. During an E2E test suite run it can't pause to look into the console, view whats on the page, look at the backend logs, etc. I tried writing some utilities to snapshot and log the state of parts of the page when a test failed and this did help a bit, but not enough to get the same productivity boost for other types of tests. Has anyone had any luck with this? Any strategies to share?
- dearilos 1y agoThere's a lot of arguments being made here that background agents aren't effective because code review is the bottleneck. I built a tool that understands the codebase and can give the agent the first pass. So you don't need to spend mental bandwidth to review mountains of code. If anyone is open to trying - email is in profile
- mdaniel 1y agoGiven the number of existing companies trying that stunt, you'd need to provide more insight into your moat for anyone to be able to judge if they are "open to trying"
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- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- rafram 1y agoClaude Code eating up hundreds of dollars of API credits a day doesn't make $200/month "cheap," it just means that Anthropic has figured out an effective way to talk you into getting ripped off.
- nberkman 1y agoI tried Terragon on an open source repo I maintain and ended up with a PR: "Showing 11,643 changed files with 2,441,792 additions and 584 deletions." Yikes!
- joss82 1y agoTerragon is amazing. I actually ordered a second laptop to be able to work on several Claude Code PRs at the same time, but with this I don't even need the extra laptop! I've been trying it for 24 hours and it's a nice boost to my productivity, on top of Claude Code's own boost. Yeah!