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My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

392 points by dejavucoder 1y ago

ChuckMcM 1y ago
Reading this I can see these tools as training tools for software engineering managers.
wahnfrieden 1y ago
One approach to improving CC's search is to use Repo Prompt https://repoprompt.com https://repoprompt.com
- dejavucoder 1y ago
  Thanks, I will check this out
voicedYoda 1y ago
Be lovely if i could sign up for Claude using my g voice number
- fuzzy2 1y ago
  Or no number even. Sucks to be missing out, but I won’t budge on this.
ctoth 1y ago
Sometimes, you'll just have a really productive session with Claude Code doing a specific thing that maybe you need to do a lot of. One trick I have gotten some milage out of was this: have Claude Code research Slash commands, then make a slash command to turn the previous conversation into a slash command. That was cool and great! But then, of course you inevitably will interrupt it and need to do stuff to correct it, or to make a change or "not like that!" or "use this tool" or "think harder before you try that" or "think about the big picture" ... So you do that. And then you ask it to make a command and it figures out you want a /improve-command command. So now you have primitives to build on! Here are my current iterations of these commands (not saying they are optimal!) https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/make-command.md https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/make-comm... https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/improve-command.md https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/improve-c...
- whatever1 1y ago
  I find amazing all the effort that people put trying to program a non deterministic black box. True courage.
  - ctoth 1y ago
    Oh do let me tell you how much effort I put into tending my non-deterministic garden or relationships or hell even the contractors I am using to renovate my house! A few small markdown documents and putting in the time to understand something interesting hardly seems a steep price!
    - blub 1y ago
      The contractors working on my house sometimes paint a room bright pink for no particular reason. When I point that out, they profusely apologize and say that of course the walls must be white and wonder why they even got the idea of making them pink in the first place. Odd, but nice fellows otherwise. It feels like they’re 10x more productive than other contractors.
      - ctoth 1y ago
        I asked my contractor to install a door over the back stairs opening outward, came back, and it was installed opening inward. He told me he tried to figure out a way he could do it in-code, but there wasn't one, so that's what he had to do. I was slightly miffed he didn't consult me first, but he did the pragmatic thing. This actually happened to me Monday. But sure, humans are deterministic clockwork mechanisms! Are you now going to tell me how I got a bad contractor? Because that sure would sound a lot like "you're using the model wrong"
        roywiggins 1y ago
        The big difference is that when questioned he didn't profusely apologize and immediately get to work undoing it, but instead gave you a reason that was probably causally related to the decision he made and not a retroactive justification made up on the spot.
iambateman 1y ago
Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.
- apwell23 1y ago
  half the posts on hackernews is same discussion over and over about coding agent usefulness or lack of
- dejavucoder 1y ago
  Almost feels like a game as you level up!
- pragmatic 1y ago
  Could you elaborate a bit on the tasks,languages,domain etc you’re using it with? People have such widely varying experiences and I’m wondering why.
  - criddell 1y ago
    I haven't had great luck with Claude writing Windows Win32 (using MFC) in C++. It invents messages and APIs all the time that read like exactly what I want it to do. I'd think Win32 development would be something AIs are very strong at because it's so old, so well documented, and there's a ton of code out there for it to read. Yet it still struggles with the differences between Windows messages, control notification messages, and command messages.
  - thegrim33 1y ago
    I find it pretty interesting that it's a roughly 2,500 word article on "using Claude Code" and they never once actually explain what they're using it for, what type of project they're coding. It's all just so generic. I read some of it then realize that there was absolutely no substance in what I just read. It's also another in my growing list of data points towards my opinion that if an author posts meme pictures in their article, it's probably not an article I'm interested in reading.
wrs 1y ago
There is a VS Code extension for Claude Code. It's hardly more than a terminal window really, but that in itself is pretty handy. If you do /ide to connect up the extension it does a few things, but not yet anything resembling the Cursor diff experience (much less the Cursor tab experience, which is the reason I still use it).
- dejavucoder 1y ago
  I use Claude Code 50% of times with Cursor now due to the diff and tab. The extension is just a bit buggy sometimes otherwise I would use it much more. I hit some node related bugs today while searching stuff with it (forgot to report to Anthropic lol). Other bugs include a scroll stuttering.
- mike1o1 1y ago
  Claude Code has pretty much replaced Copilot overnight for me, though I wish the VS Code plugin was a bit more integrated, as it's only a little bit more than a terminal, though I guess that's the point. I was hoping for syntax highlighting to match my editor and things like that (beyond just light/dark theme). What I'd really want is a way to easily hide it, which I did quite frequently with Copilot as its own pane.
deeshee 1y ago
It's great to see even the most hardcore developers who are not fond of change being happy with the latest releases related to AI-assisted development. My workflow now boils down to 2 tools really - leap.new to go from 0 to 1 because it also generates the backend code w/ infra + deployment and then I pick it up in Zed/Claude Code and continue working on it.
- ardit33 1y ago
  1.So far, it is great if you know what you want, and tell it exactly how you want it, and AI can help you on that (basically intern level work). 2. When you are in a new area, but you don't want to dive deep and just want something quick and it is not core of the app/service. But, if you are experienced, you can see how AI can mess things up pretty quickly, hence for me it has been best used to 'fill in clear and well defined functionality' at peacemeal. Basically it is best for small bites, then large chunks.
  - deeshee 1y ago
    I agree. But it's also a mindset game. Experienced devs often approach AI with preconceptions that limit its utility - pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism can prevent seeing where AI truly shines. I've found letting go of those instincts and treating AI as a thought partner rather than just a code generator be super useful. The psychological aspects of how we interact with these tools might be as important as the technical ones. Bunch of comments online also reflect how there's a lot of "butthurt" developers shutting things down with a closed mind - focusing only on the negatives, and not letting the positives go through. I sound a bit philosophical but I hope I'm getting my point across.
    - financltravsty 1y ago
      What's your track record. What is your current scope of work for Claude Code? This conversation is useless without knowing the author's skillset and use-case.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
bluetidepro 1y ago
How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?
- ndr_ 1y ago
  I had success through Amazon Bedrock on us-east1 during European office hours. Died 9 minutes before 10 a.m. New York time, though.
- terhechte 1y ago
  you need the max plan to break free of most rate limits
  - bluetidepro 1y ago
    I wish there was a Max trial (while on Pro) to test if this was the case or not. Even if it was just a 24 hour trial. Max is an expensive trigger to pull, and hope it just solves this.
    - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
      FWIW I went Claude Max after Pro, and the trick is to turn off Opus. If you do that you can pretty much use Sonnet all working day in a normal session. I don't personally find Opus that useful, and it burns through quota at 5x the speed of Sonnet.
      - wahnfrieden 1y ago
        It is typical to buy 2-3 Max tier plans for sustained Opus use
- tomashubelbauer 1y ago
  I have the same issue and in recent days I seem to have gotten an extra helping of overload errors which hit extra hard when I realize how much this thing costs. Edit: I see a sibling comment mention the Max plan. I wanna be clear that I am not talking about rate limits here but actual models being inaccessible - so not a rate limit issue. I hope Anthropic figures this out fast, because it is souring me on Claude Code a bit.
ToJans 1y ago
Whenever I'm rate limited (pro max plan), I stop developing. For anything but the smallest things I use claude code... And even then... For the bigger things, I ask it to propose to me a solution (when adding new features). It helps when you give proper guidance: do this, use that, avoid X, be concise, ask to refactor when needed. All in all, it's like a slightly autistic junior dev, so you need to be really explicit, but once it knows what to do, it's incredible. That being said, whenever you're stuck on an issue, or it keeps going in circles, I tend to rollback, ask for a proper analysis based on the requirements, and fill in the details of necessary. For the non-standard things (f.e. detect windows on a photo and determine the measurement in centimetres), you still have to provide a lot of guidance. However, once I told it to use xyz and ABC it just goes. I've never written more then a few lines of PHP in my life, but have a full API server with an A100 running, thanks to Claude. The accumulated hours saved are huge for me, especially front-end development, refactoring, or implementing new features to see if they make sense. For me it's a big shift in my approach to work, and I'd be really sad if I have to go back to the pre-AI area. Truth to be told, I was a happy user of cline & Gemini and spent hundreds of dollars on API calls per month. But it never gave me the feeling Claude code gave me, the reliability for this thing is saving me 80% of my time.
- dontlaugh 1y ago
  I still don’t get why I should want that. I’ve mentored and managed juniors. They’re usually a net negative in productivity until they are no longer juniors.
  - quesera 1y ago
    My current working theory is this: People who enjoy mentoring juniors are generally satisfied with the ROI of iterating through LLM code generation. People who find juniors sort-of-frustrating-but-part-of-the-job-sometimes have a higher denominator on that ROI calc, and ask themselves why they would keep banging their head against the LLM wall. The first group is probably wiser and more efficient at multiplying their energies, in the long term. I find myself in the second group. I run tests every couple months, but I'm still waiting for the models to have a higher R or a lower I. Any day now.
erentz 1y ago
There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.
- TheRoque 1y ago
  100% agree, I have been looking for a YouTube video or stream of someone leveraging AI to get their productivity boost, but I haven't found anything that made me think "okay, that really speeds up things"
  - aniforprez 1y ago
    It was extremely telling to me that the Zed editor team put out a video about using their AI interface and I don't remember what model they used but they asked it to add a new toggle for a feature and then spent half they video demonstrating their admittedly excellent review workflow to accept or reject the AI generated code and you could directly see how useless it was down to adding completely superfluous new lines randomly and the explanation was "it just does that sometimes" I'm really not seeing these massive gains in my workflow either and maybe it's the nature of my general work but it's baffling how every use case for programming I'm seeing on YouTube is so surface level. At this point I've given up and don't use it at all
    - leptons 1y ago
      I asked the "AI" to do something relatively simple - fix when a button was enabled or disabled. And it then rewrote the entire 200+ line file, which then did not run, it was completely broken. Nice job "AI"!
  - FiberBundle 1y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGwgaGFzaGltb3RvIGFnZW50cw%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGw... Not a "100x" boost, but a pretty good take on what tasks agents can do for even very good programmers.
tortila 1y ago
After reading and hearing rave reviews I’d love to try Claude Code in my startup. I already manage Claude Team subscription, but AFAIK Code is not included, it only exists in Pro/Max which are for individual accounts. How do people use it as a subscription for a team (ideally with central billing)?
- dukeyukey 1y ago
  You can use CC with AWS Bedrock, with all the centralised billing AWS offers. That's how my company handles it.
- sixhobbits 1y ago
  Yeah this is super annoying and wish they'd fix it. I missed the asterisk and bought Claude Team for my team so they could use claude code but then saw it's excluded and had to go through a refund cycle and now they have to buy it individually.
38 1y ago
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- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  The only plan worth considering is the $200 Max tier. And it is typical to pay for 2 or 3 of them.
kypro 1y ago
HN has flipped so quickly on saying how AI produces unreliable slop, to most people using it to replace junior devs at their org – something I was heavily criticised for saying orgs should be doing a few months back. Progress doesn't end here either, imo CC is more a mid-level engineer with a top-tier senior engineer's knowledge. I think we're getting to the point where we can begin to replace the majority of engineers (even seniors) for just a handful of seniors engineers to prompt and review AI produced code and PRs. Not quite there yet, of course, but definitely feeling that shift starting now... There's going to be huge productivity boosts for tech companies towards the end this year if we can get there. Exciting times.
- hooverd 1y ago
  Where do the juniors come from?
  - throw1235435 1y ago
    I think the point of the poster is that there's no need for them because as he puts it replace "the majority of engineers". Tech is about to be decimated - software as a field is about to shrink quite substantially. To be honest the way things are going it is possible IMO (although would severely disadvantage me) - 3 years ago given the amount of skill required and lifetime learning in it I would of never thought this. Why do you need juniors - well you may need them but with the oversatuation it will take maybe 20 years (a generation to retire) for the current crop of seniors to get exhausted given AI will decimate them too according to the OP. That's definitely a far enough away time for it to be someone else's problem - by then AI might be significantly better anyway; we could even have superintelligence and SWE jobs might be the least of our worries. Great for the owners of tech companies and non-tech companies using tech (many non-technical, capital based who now scale with less cost base); not so great for people with tech skills who invested for their future. Which is the goal of these AI companies. Your pain/unemployment/cost is their profit/economic surplus. To the OP its "exciting times" for capital - probably for many people however it seems like an impending nightmare is coming especially if they are relying on intellectual work to survive/provide/etc. Most CC articles on HN trend I've seen trend to the top; which shows it is definitely instigating either greed or fear in people. I would argue that "code" seems to be the most successful AI product to date - most others are just writing assistants, meme generators, risky operators, etc at least for me. Its code that seems to instigate this persistent fear. On a side note, at least for me, AI has personally dissuaded me from learning/investing more in this career as a senior engineer with almost 20 years experience. I hope I'm wrong.
Imanari 1y ago
PSA: you can use CC with any model via https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router The recent Kimi-K2 supposedly works great.
- dejavucoder 1y ago
  thanks!
- chrismustcode 1y ago
  I’d just use sst/opencode if using other models (I use it for Claude through Claude pro subscription too)
- nxobject 1y ago
  Corollary if you're unfamiliar with how CC works (because you've never been able to consider it for its price, like me) – the CC client is freely available over 'npm'.
- nikcub 1y ago
  > The recent Kimi-K2 supposedly works great. My own experience is that it is below sonnet and opus 4.0 on capability - but better than gemini 2.5 pro on tool calling. It's really worth trying if you don't want to spend the $100 or $200 per month on Claude Max. I love how succinct the model is. > you can use CC with any model via Anthropic should just open source Claude Code - they're in a position to become the VS Code of cli coding agents. Shout out to opencode: https://github.com/sst/opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode which supports all the models natively and attempts to do what CC does
  - Imanari 1y ago
    I tried gemini2.5 and while it is certainly a very strong model you really notice that it was not trained to be 'agentic'/with strong initiative for tool calling. Oftentimes it would make a plan, I'd say 'go ahead' and it just replied something like 'I made a todo list we are ready to implement' or something similar lol. You really had to push it to action and the whole CC experience fell apart a bit.
graphememes 1y ago
It's great for me. I have a claude.md at the root of every folder generally, outlined in piped text for minimal context addition about the rulesets for that folder, it always creates tests for what it's doing and is set to do so in a very specific folder in a very specific way otherwise it tries to create debug files instead. I also have set rules for re-use so that way it doesn't proliferate with "enhanced" class variants or structures and always tries to leverage what exists instead of bringing in new things unless absolutely necessary. The way I talk to it is very specific as well, I don't write huge prose, I don't set up huge PRDs and often I will only do planning if its something that I am myself unsure about. The only time I will do large text input is when I know that the LLM won't have context (it's newer than it's knowledge window). I generally get great 1-shot (one input and the final output after all tasks are done) comments. I have moved past claude code though I am using the CLI itself with another model although I was using claude code and my reason for switching isn't that claude was a bad model it's just that it was expensive and I have access to larger models for cheaper. The CLI is the real power not the model itself per-se. Opus does perform a little better than others. It's totally made it so I can do the code that I like to do while it works on other things during that time. I have about 60-70 different agent streams going at a time atm. Codebases sizes vary, the largest one right now is about 200m tokens (react, typescript, golang) in total and it does a good job. I've only had to tell it twice to do something differently.
- leonidasv 1y ago
  Which models do you use instead of Anthropic ones? I've only tried Claude Code with an external model once (Kimi K2) but it performed poorly.
  - graphememes 1y ago
    I'm using fine-tuned models some with 600b+ parameters and some with 1t+ kimi base / deepseek base and others are general purpose that are from huggingface but I use those through mcp tools
- jatora 1y ago
  Can you list some of your agent streams you have going? Very curious
to-too-two 1y ago
Anyone using it for game dev? Like just having the agent try to build a game?
- singron 1y ago
  I tried using aider with godot. CC would probably be better. Aider with 4o/o3-mini wasn't very good at gdscript, and it was terrible at editing tres/tscn files (which are usually modified through the editor). If you had a very code-centric game, it could turn out OK, but if you have resources/assets that you normally edit with special programs, it is going to struggle.
  - wahnfrieden 1y ago
    You should be using the best models. Try o3-pro
ipaddr 1y ago
What I wonder is how is the interview process now? Are they testing you with AI or without? Is leet code being asked with AI proving the answer? Is there a bigger disconnect on how you are judged in an interview vs the job now? How are the AI only developers handling this?
- ct0 1y ago
  The projects you work on and the impact that they had. Hopefully.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  Same as it always was, you ask the candidate to explain his reasoning process in detail and ask questions along the way. AI can't think or reason, LLMs are still mostly useless for gaming interviews.
jwpapi 1y ago
Wait till he learns about aider
- jamil7 1y ago
  I use both for different tasks, Aider is a sharp knife and claude code more of a blunt instrument.
maxmarrfun 1y ago
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komali2 1y ago
One thing I'm slightly anxious about in this new LLM world is whether the prices I'm paying are sustainable. I crank the fuck out of cursor and I think we're paying like 40 bucks a month for the privilege. Is this early Uber where it was unbelievable how cheap the rides were? In 2030 am I going to have gotten dependent on ai assisted levels of productivity, be making client and customer promises based on that expectation, but suddenly find myself looking at 1k+ bills, now that all the ai companies need to actually make money?
- aerhardt 1y ago
  I am speaking out of intuition, but I think that part will be the quickest to be optimized. The current capabilities will cost pennies in a few years. I base this on the past trajectory but also on hearing very authorized people say that there is still room for a lot of optimizations across the stack.
djaychela 1y ago
Can someone offer me some help? I've just been messing about "vibe coding" little python apps with local llm, continue and vscode. And I got so far with it. Then I found the free tier of claude so I fed in the "works so far" version with the changes that the local llm made, and it fixed and updated all the issues (with clear explanation) in one go. Success! So my next level attempt was to get all the spec and prompts for a new project (a simple manic miner style 2d game using pygame). 8 used chat gpt to craft all this and it looked sensible to me with appropriate constraints for different parts of the projrct. Which claude created. But it keeps referring to a method which it says is not present in the code and that I'm running the wrong version. (I'm definitely not). I've tried indicating it by reference to the line number and the surrounding code but it's just gas lighting me. Any ideas how to progress from this? I'm not expecting perfection, but it seems it's just taken me to a higher level before it runs into essentially the same issue as the local llm. All advice appreciated, I'm just dabbling with this four a bit of fun when I can (I'm pretty unwell so do things as and when I feel up to it) Thanks in advance.
- postalcoder 1y ago
  It's likely you're running into "too deep into mediocre code with unclear interfaces and a lot of hidden assumptions hell" that LLMs are generally poor at handling. If you're running into an inextricable wall then it's better to do a controlled demolition. ie, take everything written by chatgpt and have the highest-quality model you have summarize what the game does, and break down all the features in depth. Then, take that document and feed it into claude. It may take a few iterations but the code you get will be much better than your attempt on iterating on the existing code. Claude will likely zero-shot a better application or, at least, one that it can improve on itself. If claude still insists on making up new features then install the context7 MCP server and ask it to use context7 when working on your request.
  - djaychela 1y ago
    Thanks. I think I should have made it more clear in my post, the code is claude's and was done from scratch (the first app was a mandelbrot viewer which it added features to, this is a platfrom game). It's a single file at the moment (I did give a suggested project structure with files for each area of responsibility) and it kind-of-works. I think I could create the missing method in the class but wanted to see if it was possible by getting the tools to do it - it's as much of an experiment in the process and the end result. Thanks for replying, I shall investigate what you've suggested and see what happens.
hamandcheese 1y ago
For me the best part about AI is that when I'm feeling lazy, I can tell the AI to do it. Whether it gives me gold or gives me shit, it doesn't matter, because I have now started my work.
- crinkly 1y ago
  I go for a walk and have a coffee. It feels less intellectually dishonest. Best to solve human problems with human solutions.
  - rantallion 1y ago
    The best part is that you can do both. Give the agent a prompt, go for a walk, come back to see how well it did.
  - kaffekaka 1y ago
    Where in lies the dishonesty? Having the AI just getting the wheels turning when I'm not in the mood myself has many times been a good way to make progress.
    - crinkly 1y ago
      When you say progress, I wonder at what cost. The apparatus for original thought isn't used and pushing through a problem and deriving the satisfaction of doing that doesn't happen. That leads to the wrong motivational cues. The brain is lazy and likes to take the easy route. Eventually you become merely a machine operator, which is something a lot of my colleagues are starting to do. And it's very worrying. The biased behaviour towards just asking for a solution both devalues you and leads to any innovative outcomes disappearing before they had a chance to exist. I've ended up being the company ideas man not because I'm good but everyone else stopped thinking.
      - jasoncartwright 1y ago
        I enjoy the idea that when programming before AI I wasn't 'merely a machine operator'
dyl000 1y ago
using claude code is absolutely incredible sometimes and absolute junk other times. great for easy to mid complexity refactors. ask it to do anything decently complex and it explodes. It's taken the place of a junior dev for me now. well worth the $200/mo.
perrin_veronica 1y ago
With Cursor and CC Max both throttling and changing terms recently, I worry that the trend has started to just charge and throttle more and more like a drug dealer, until we’re all stealing and living on the floor in some abandoned building.
- dejavucoder 1y ago
  lol yeah
ianberdin 1y ago
Reading all these glowing reviews of Claude Code, I still get the feeling that either everyone’s been paid off or it’s just the die-hard fans of terminal windows and editors like Emacs and Vim. Using the terminal is right up their alley—it’s in their DNA. Every time I read comments saying Claude Code is far better than Cursor, I fire it up, pay for a subscription, and run it on a large, complex TypeScript codebase. First, the whole process takes a hell of a lot of time. Second, the learning curve is steep: you have to work through the terminal and type commands. And the outcome is exactly the same as with the Claude that’s built into Cursor—only slower, less clear, and the generated code is harder to review afterward. I don’t know… At this point my only impression is that all those influencers in the comments are either sponsored, or they’ve already shelled out their $200 and are now defending their choice. Or they simply haven’t used Cursor enough to figure out how to get the most out of it. I still can’t see any real advantage to Claude Code, other than supposedly higher limits. I don’t get it. I’ve already paid for Claude Code, and I’m also paying for Cursor Pro, which is another $200, but I’m more productive with Cursor so far. I’ve been programming for 18 years, write a ton of code every single day, and I can say Cursor gives me more. I switch between Gemini 2.5 Pro—when I need to handle tasks with a big, long context—and Claude 4.0 for routine stuff. So no one has convinced me yet, and I haven’t seen any other benefit. Maybe later… I don’t know.
- phito 1y ago
  I just feel sad for all the professional developers out there that are still scared of the terminal.
  - mountainriver 1y ago
    it's just a worse interface for writing code, no one is scared of anything
- james_marks 1y ago
  Some of it is taste. Personally, I dislike VSCode and its descendants; it feels bloated and like I’m always being advertised to inside the product. I want my editor to disappear from thought, and Sublime does this for me. In that context, CC is amazing.
jonstewart 1y ago
What is “branch-analysis.md” for in CC? Googling comes up short.
- dejavucoder 1y ago
  It's just a you can tell claude to make to write notes to
swader999 1y ago
My biggest problem at the moment is that I am more inclined to talk to Claude and GPT O3 than the other more junior devs on my team. I just get more done. I'm not being facetious here, I really don't like that about the way I've been the past few days. I have to use the new free time I have to work more with them I guess.
- jmkni 1y ago
  I guess the inverse is true too though, junior devs are more inclined to ask AI than their superiors.
  - swader999 1y ago
    Except that they don't. Most can't afford it. My fault though, I'm about a month away from getting subscriptions for all of them and then I'll mob program with them and Claude until they either sink or swim. I'm in full on learning mode, still trying to prove it out and get a real validation of it all ..
- Herring 1y ago
  Yeah I noticed the same. I would much rather have sensitive discussions (eg US foreign policy) with Gemini pro rather than with a human. I was recently watching Seinfeld, and apparently in the 90s, picking up a friend from the airport was an important social contract. Today we just uber.
kierangill 1y ago
Past the basic setup, what are people doing to grease the tracks for these tools? That is, how are people organizing their context and codebase to help the tooling guide themselves to the right answer? I have some half-baked thoughts here [1], but I know there are more (better) methodologies to be discovered. [1]: https://blog.kierangill.xyz/oversight-and-guidance https://blog.kierangill.xyz/oversight-and-guidance
clbrmbr 1y ago
I've been getting a lot of alpha out of Claude Code, but struggling a bit with how to bring it to the rest of my team. Does anyone have any practical advice on sharing best practices or generally getting team members or folks you supervise to also benefit from Claude Code?
NewUser76312 1y ago
I'm still not sold on these "AIs in your codebase" tools. Same for 'vibe coding'. I use AI like a scalpel - I go in and figure out exactly what I want, use my prompting experience to get a few functions, or up to 1 script at a time, read it, put it in, and stress-test it immediately. As a result, I am extremely happy with my AI-generated code about 95% of the time. However, this requires that I still understand my codebase, requirements, failure modes, etc. My philosophy is that software dev creation speed is certainly important, but durability is even more critical. Currently, it seems like going too deep with these AI tools is sacrificing the former for the latter. If all you're doing is POCs all day I could see it (even then, don't let them get too big...) but it's just not for me, at least not yet.
- _sharp 1y ago
  You should consider documenting your durability requirements, failure modes, important context related to the feature/component your working on, as you would a junior engineer. Then, you can re-use the context documents. If the AI doesn't know what your expectations are, it will just assume you need a PoC, and give you PoC code quality.
williamsss 1y ago
As a daily active user of Cursor and CC user myself, it’s gratifying to discover nuanced tricks that push productivity further. I stumble upon one every now and again. Solid write up. And chock full of useful tricks! I was manually copy pasting PR change requests today to CC where some of this would have saved my wrists some pain.
actinium226 1y ago
I don't see any actual work getting done here. Just one part where it added reply_to_email to a bunch of classes and removed it from a couple places, which doesn't seem like a big lift.
Adifounder 1y ago
seems like claudes strength is being overhyped by the people who can actually make it work for them. why is the learning curve so hard.

392 points by dejavucoder 1y ago

ChuckMcM 1y ago

Reading this I can see these tools as training tools for software engineering managers.

wahnfrieden 1y ago

One approach to improving CC's search is to use Repo Prompt https://repoprompt.com https://repoprompt.com

dejavucoder 1y ago
Thanks, I will check this out

voicedYoda 1y ago

Be lovely if i could sign up for Claude using my g voice number

fuzzy2 1y ago
Or no number even. Sucks to be missing out, but I won’t budge on this.

ctoth 1y ago

Sometimes, you'll just have a really productive session with Claude Code doing a specific thing that maybe you need to do a lot of. One trick I have gotten some milage out of was this: have Claude Code research Slash commands, then make a slash command to turn the previous conversation into a slash command. That was cool and great! But then, of course you inevitably will interrupt it and need to do stuff to correct it, or to make a change or "not like that!" or "use this tool" or "think harder before you try that" or "think about the big picture" ... So you do that. And then you ask it to make a command and it figures out you want a /improve-command command. So now you have primitives to build on! Here are my current iterations of these commands (not saying they are optimal!) https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/make-command.md https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/make-comm... https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/improve-command.md https://github.com/ctoth/slashcommands/blob/master/improve-c...

whatever1 1y ago
I find amazing all the effort that people put trying to program a non deterministic black box. True courage.
- ctoth 1y ago
  Oh do let me tell you how much effort I put into tending my non-deterministic garden or relationships or hell even the contractors I am using to renovate my house! A few small markdown documents and putting in the time to understand something interesting hardly seems a steep price!
  - blub 1y ago
    The contractors working on my house sometimes paint a room bright pink for no particular reason. When I point that out, they profusely apologize and say that of course the walls must be white and wonder why they even got the idea of making them pink in the first place. Odd, but nice fellows otherwise. It feels like they’re 10x more productive than other contractors.
    - ctoth 1y ago
      I asked my contractor to install a door over the back stairs opening outward, came back, and it was installed opening inward. He told me he tried to figure out a way he could do it in-code, but there wasn't one, so that's what he had to do. I was slightly miffed he didn't consult me first, but he did the pragmatic thing. This actually happened to me Monday. But sure, humans are deterministic clockwork mechanisms! Are you now going to tell me how I got a bad contractor? Because that sure would sound a lot like "you're using the model wrong"
      - roywiggins 1y ago
        The big difference is that when questioned he didn't profusely apologize and immediately get to work undoing it, but instead gave you a reason that was probably causally related to the decision he made and not a retroactive justification made up on the spot.

iambateman 1y ago

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

apwell23 1y ago
half the posts on hackernews is same discussion over and over about coding agent usefulness or lack of
dejavucoder 1y ago
Almost feels like a game as you level up!
pragmatic 1y ago
Could you elaborate a bit on the tasks,languages,domain etc you’re using it with? People have such widely varying experiences and I’m wondering why.
- criddell 1y ago
  I haven't had great luck with Claude writing Windows Win32 (using MFC) in C++. It invents messages and APIs all the time that read like exactly what I want it to do. I'd think Win32 development would be something AIs are very strong at because it's so old, so well documented, and there's a ton of code out there for it to read. Yet it still struggles with the differences between Windows messages, control notification messages, and command messages.
- thegrim33 1y ago
  I find it pretty interesting that it's a roughly 2,500 word article on "using Claude Code" and they never once actually explain what they're using it for, what type of project they're coding. It's all just so generic. I read some of it then realize that there was absolutely no substance in what I just read. It's also another in my growing list of data points towards my opinion that if an author posts meme pictures in their article, it's probably not an article I'm interested in reading.

wrs 1y ago

There is a VS Code extension for Claude Code. It's hardly more than a terminal window really, but that in itself is pretty handy. If you do /ide to connect up the extension it does a few things, but not yet anything resembling the Cursor diff experience (much less the Cursor tab experience, which is the reason I still use it).

dejavucoder 1y ago
I use Claude Code 50% of times with Cursor now due to the diff and tab. The extension is just a bit buggy sometimes otherwise I would use it much more. I hit some node related bugs today while searching stuff with it (forgot to report to Anthropic lol). Other bugs include a scroll stuttering.
mike1o1 1y ago
Claude Code has pretty much replaced Copilot overnight for me, though I wish the VS Code plugin was a bit more integrated, as it's only a little bit more than a terminal, though I guess that's the point. I was hoping for syntax highlighting to match my editor and things like that (beyond just light/dark theme). What I'd really want is a way to easily hide it, which I did quite frequently with Copilot as its own pane.

deeshee 1y ago

It's great to see even the most hardcore developers who are not fond of change being happy with the latest releases related to AI-assisted development. My workflow now boils down to 2 tools really - leap.new to go from 0 to 1 because it also generates the backend code w/ infra + deployment and then I pick it up in Zed/Claude Code and continue working on it.

ardit33 1y ago
1.So far, it is great if you know what you want, and tell it exactly how you want it, and AI can help you on that (basically intern level work). 2. When you are in a new area, but you don't want to dive deep and just want something quick and it is not core of the app/service. But, if you are experienced, you can see how AI can mess things up pretty quickly, hence for me it has been best used to 'fill in clear and well defined functionality' at peacemeal. Basically it is best for small bites, then large chunks.
- deeshee 1y ago
  I agree. But it's also a mindset game. Experienced devs often approach AI with preconceptions that limit its utility - pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism can prevent seeing where AI truly shines. I've found letting go of those instincts and treating AI as a thought partner rather than just a code generator be super useful. The psychological aspects of how we interact with these tools might be as important as the technical ones. Bunch of comments online also reflect how there's a lot of "butthurt" developers shutting things down with a closed mind - focusing only on the negatives, and not letting the positives go through. I sound a bit philosophical but I hope I'm getting my point across.
  - financltravsty 1y ago
    What's your track record. What is your current scope of work for Claude Code? This conversation is useless without knowing the author's skillset and use-case.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

bluetidepro 1y ago

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

ndr_ 1y ago
I had success through Amazon Bedrock on us-east1 during European office hours. Died 9 minutes before 10 a.m. New York time, though.
terhechte 1y ago
you need the max plan to break free of most rate limits
- bluetidepro 1y ago
  I wish there was a Max trial (while on Pro) to test if this was the case or not. Even if it was just a 24 hour trial. Max is an expensive trigger to pull, and hope it just solves this.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    FWIW I went Claude Max after Pro, and the trick is to turn off Opus. If you do that you can pretty much use Sonnet all working day in a normal session. I don't personally find Opus that useful, and it burns through quota at 5x the speed of Sonnet.
    - wahnfrieden 1y ago
      It is typical to buy 2-3 Max tier plans for sustained Opus use
tomashubelbauer 1y ago
I have the same issue and in recent days I seem to have gotten an extra helping of overload errors which hit extra hard when I realize how much this thing costs. Edit: I see a sibling comment mention the Max plan. I wanna be clear that I am not talking about rate limits here but actual models being inaccessible - so not a rate limit issue. I hope Anthropic figures this out fast, because it is souring me on Claude Code a bit.

ToJans 1y ago

Whenever I'm rate limited (pro max plan), I stop developing. For anything but the smallest things I use claude code... And even then... For the bigger things, I ask it to propose to me a solution (when adding new features). It helps when you give proper guidance: do this, use that, avoid X, be concise, ask to refactor when needed. All in all, it's like a slightly autistic junior dev, so you need to be really explicit, but once it knows what to do, it's incredible. That being said, whenever you're stuck on an issue, or it keeps going in circles, I tend to rollback, ask for a proper analysis based on the requirements, and fill in the details of necessary. For the non-standard things (f.e. detect windows on a photo and determine the measurement in centimetres), you still have to provide a lot of guidance. However, once I told it to use xyz and ABC it just goes. I've never written more then a few lines of PHP in my life, but have a full API server with an A100 running, thanks to Claude. The accumulated hours saved are huge for me, especially front-end development, refactoring, or implementing new features to see if they make sense. For me it's a big shift in my approach to work, and I'd be really sad if I have to go back to the pre-AI area. Truth to be told, I was a happy user of cline & Gemini and spent hundreds of dollars on API calls per month. But it never gave me the feeling Claude code gave me, the reliability for this thing is saving me 80% of my time.

dontlaugh 1y ago
I still don’t get why I should want that. I’ve mentored and managed juniors. They’re usually a net negative in productivity until they are no longer juniors.
- quesera 1y ago
  My current working theory is this: People who enjoy mentoring juniors are generally satisfied with the ROI of iterating through LLM code generation. People who find juniors sort-of-frustrating-but-part-of-the-job-sometimes have a higher denominator on that ROI calc, and ask themselves why they would keep banging their head against the LLM wall. The first group is probably wiser and more efficient at multiplying their energies, in the long term. I find myself in the second group. I run tests every couple months, but I'm still waiting for the models to have a higher R or a lower I. Any day now.

erentz 1y ago

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.

TheRoque 1y ago
100% agree, I have been looking for a YouTube video or stream of someone leveraging AI to get their productivity boost, but I haven't found anything that made me think "okay, that really speeds up things"
- aniforprez 1y ago
  It was extremely telling to me that the Zed editor team put out a video about using their AI interface and I don't remember what model they used but they asked it to add a new toggle for a feature and then spent half they video demonstrating their admittedly excellent review workflow to accept or reject the AI generated code and you could directly see how useless it was down to adding completely superfluous new lines randomly and the explanation was "it just does that sometimes" I'm really not seeing these massive gains in my workflow either and maybe it's the nature of my general work but it's baffling how every use case for programming I'm seeing on YouTube is so surface level. At this point I've given up and don't use it at all
  - leptons 1y ago
    I asked the "AI" to do something relatively simple - fix when a button was enabled or disabled. And it then rewrote the entire 200+ line file, which then did not run, it was completely broken. Nice job "AI"!
- FiberBundle 1y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGwgaGFzaGltb3RvIGFnZW50cw%3D%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ4ZTS5dGw&pp=ygUZTWl0Y2hlbGw... Not a "100x" boost, but a pretty good take on what tasks agents can do for even very good programmers.

tortila 1y ago

After reading and hearing rave reviews I’d love to try Claude Code in my startup. I already manage Claude Team subscription, but AFAIK Code is not included, it only exists in Pro/Max which are for individual accounts. How do people use it as a subscription for a team (ideally with central billing)?

dukeyukey 1y ago
You can use CC with AWS Bedrock, with all the centralised billing AWS offers. That's how my company handles it.
sixhobbits 1y ago
Yeah this is super annoying and wish they'd fix it. I missed the asterisk and bought Claude Team for my team so they could use claude code but then saw it's excluded and had to go through a refund cycle and now they have to buy it individually.

38 1y ago

[flagged]

wahnfrieden 1y ago
The only plan worth considering is the $200 Max tier. And it is typical to pay for 2 or 3 of them.

kypro 1y ago

HN has flipped so quickly on saying how AI produces unreliable slop, to most people using it to replace junior devs at their org – something I was heavily criticised for saying orgs should be doing a few months back. Progress doesn't end here either, imo CC is more a mid-level engineer with a top-tier senior engineer's knowledge. I think we're getting to the point where we can begin to replace the majority of engineers (even seniors) for just a handful of seniors engineers to prompt and review AI produced code and PRs. Not quite there yet, of course, but definitely feeling that shift starting now... There's going to be huge productivity boosts for tech companies towards the end this year if we can get there. Exciting times.

hooverd 1y ago
Where do the juniors come from?
- throw1235435 1y ago
  I think the point of the poster is that there's no need for them because as he puts it replace "the majority of engineers". Tech is about to be decimated - software as a field is about to shrink quite substantially. To be honest the way things are going it is possible IMO (although would severely disadvantage me) - 3 years ago given the amount of skill required and lifetime learning in it I would of never thought this. Why do you need juniors - well you may need them but with the oversatuation it will take maybe 20 years (a generation to retire) for the current crop of seniors to get exhausted given AI will decimate them too according to the OP. That's definitely a far enough away time for it to be someone else's problem - by then AI might be significantly better anyway; we could even have superintelligence and SWE jobs might be the least of our worries. Great for the owners of tech companies and non-tech companies using tech (many non-technical, capital based who now scale with less cost base); not so great for people with tech skills who invested for their future. Which is the goal of these AI companies. Your pain/unemployment/cost is their profit/economic surplus. To the OP its "exciting times" for capital - probably for many people however it seems like an impending nightmare is coming especially if they are relying on intellectual work to survive/provide/etc. Most CC articles on HN trend I've seen trend to the top; which shows it is definitely instigating either greed or fear in people. I would argue that "code" seems to be the most successful AI product to date - most others are just writing assistants, meme generators, risky operators, etc at least for me. Its code that seems to instigate this persistent fear. On a side note, at least for me, AI has personally dissuaded me from learning/investing more in this career as a senior engineer with almost 20 years experience. I hope I'm wrong.

Imanari 1y ago

PSA: you can use CC with any model via https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router The recent Kimi-K2 supposedly works great.

dejavucoder 1y ago
thanks!
chrismustcode 1y ago
I’d just use sst/opencode if using other models (I use it for Claude through Claude pro subscription too)
nxobject 1y ago
Corollary if you're unfamiliar with how CC works (because you've never been able to consider it for its price, like me) – the CC client is freely available over 'npm'.
nikcub 1y ago
> The recent Kimi-K2 supposedly works great. My own experience is that it is below sonnet and opus 4.0 on capability - but better than gemini 2.5 pro on tool calling. It's really worth trying if you don't want to spend the $100 or $200 per month on Claude Max. I love how succinct the model is. > you can use CC with any model via Anthropic should just open source Claude Code - they're in a position to become the VS Code of cli coding agents. Shout out to opencode: https://github.com/sst/opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode which supports all the models natively and attempts to do what CC does
- Imanari 1y ago
  I tried gemini2.5 and while it is certainly a very strong model you really notice that it was not trained to be 'agentic'/with strong initiative for tool calling. Oftentimes it would make a plan, I'd say 'go ahead' and it just replied something like 'I made a todo list we are ready to implement' or something similar lol. You really had to push it to action and the whole CC experience fell apart a bit.

graphememes 1y ago

It's great for me. I have a claude.md at the root of every folder generally, outlined in piped text for minimal context addition about the rulesets for that folder, it always creates tests for what it's doing and is set to do so in a very specific folder in a very specific way otherwise it tries to create debug files instead. I also have set rules for re-use so that way it doesn't proliferate with "enhanced" class variants or structures and always tries to leverage what exists instead of bringing in new things unless absolutely necessary. The way I talk to it is very specific as well, I don't write huge prose, I don't set up huge PRDs and often I will only do planning if its something that I am myself unsure about. The only time I will do large text input is when I know that the LLM won't have context (it's newer than it's knowledge window). I generally get great 1-shot (one input and the final output after all tasks are done) comments. I have moved past claude code though I am using the CLI itself with another model although I was using claude code and my reason for switching isn't that claude was a bad model it's just that it was expensive and I have access to larger models for cheaper. The CLI is the real power not the model itself per-se. Opus does perform a little better than others. It's totally made it so I can do the code that I like to do while it works on other things during that time. I have about 60-70 different agent streams going at a time atm. Codebases sizes vary, the largest one right now is about 200m tokens (react, typescript, golang) in total and it does a good job. I've only had to tell it twice to do something differently.

leonidasv 1y ago
Which models do you use instead of Anthropic ones? I've only tried Claude Code with an external model once (Kimi K2) but it performed poorly.
- graphememes 1y ago
  I'm using fine-tuned models some with 600b+ parameters and some with 1t+ kimi base / deepseek base and others are general purpose that are from huggingface but I use those through mcp tools
jatora 1y ago
Can you list some of your agent streams you have going? Very curious

to-too-two 1y ago

Anyone using it for game dev? Like just having the agent try to build a game?

singron 1y ago
I tried using aider with godot. CC would probably be better. Aider with 4o/o3-mini wasn't very good at gdscript, and it was terrible at editing tres/tscn files (which are usually modified through the editor). If you had a very code-centric game, it could turn out OK, but if you have resources/assets that you normally edit with special programs, it is going to struggle.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  You should be using the best models. Try o3-pro

ipaddr 1y ago

What I wonder is how is the interview process now? Are they testing you with AI or without? Is leet code being asked with AI proving the answer? Is there a bigger disconnect on how you are judged in an interview vs the job now? How are the AI only developers handling this?

ct0 1y ago
The projects you work on and the impact that they had. Hopefully.
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
Same as it always was, you ask the candidate to explain his reasoning process in detail and ask questions along the way. AI can't think or reason, LLMs are still mostly useless for gaming interviews.

jwpapi 1y ago

Wait till he learns about aider

jamil7 1y ago
I use both for different tasks, Aider is a sharp knife and claude code more of a blunt instrument.

maxmarrfun 1y ago

[flagged]

komali2 1y ago

One thing I'm slightly anxious about in this new LLM world is whether the prices I'm paying are sustainable. I crank the fuck out of cursor and I think we're paying like 40 bucks a month for the privilege. Is this early Uber where it was unbelievable how cheap the rides were? In 2030 am I going to have gotten dependent on ai assisted levels of productivity, be making client and customer promises based on that expectation, but suddenly find myself looking at 1k+ bills, now that all the ai companies need to actually make money?

aerhardt 1y ago
I am speaking out of intuition, but I think that part will be the quickest to be optimized. The current capabilities will cost pennies in a few years. I base this on the past trajectory but also on hearing very authorized people say that there is still room for a lot of optimizations across the stack.

djaychela 1y ago

Can someone offer me some help? I've just been messing about "vibe coding" little python apps with local llm, continue and vscode. And I got so far with it. Then I found the free tier of claude so I fed in the "works so far" version with the changes that the local llm made, and it fixed and updated all the issues (with clear explanation) in one go. Success! So my next level attempt was to get all the spec and prompts for a new project (a simple manic miner style 2d game using pygame). 8 used chat gpt to craft all this and it looked sensible to me with appropriate constraints for different parts of the projrct. Which claude created. But it keeps referring to a method which it says is not present in the code and that I'm running the wrong version. (I'm definitely not). I've tried indicating it by reference to the line number and the surrounding code but it's just gas lighting me. Any ideas how to progress from this? I'm not expecting perfection, but it seems it's just taken me to a higher level before it runs into essentially the same issue as the local llm. All advice appreciated, I'm just dabbling with this four a bit of fun when I can (I'm pretty unwell so do things as and when I feel up to it) Thanks in advance.

postalcoder 1y ago
It's likely you're running into "too deep into mediocre code with unclear interfaces and a lot of hidden assumptions hell" that LLMs are generally poor at handling. If you're running into an inextricable wall then it's better to do a controlled demolition. ie, take everything written by chatgpt and have the highest-quality model you have summarize what the game does, and break down all the features in depth. Then, take that document and feed it into claude. It may take a few iterations but the code you get will be much better than your attempt on iterating on the existing code. Claude will likely zero-shot a better application or, at least, one that it can improve on itself. If claude still insists on making up new features then install the context7 MCP server and ask it to use context7 when working on your request.
- djaychela 1y ago
  Thanks. I think I should have made it more clear in my post, the code is claude's and was done from scratch (the first app was a mandelbrot viewer which it added features to, this is a platfrom game). It's a single file at the moment (I did give a suggested project structure with files for each area of responsibility) and it kind-of-works. I think I could create the missing method in the class but wanted to see if it was possible by getting the tools to do it - it's as much of an experiment in the process and the end result. Thanks for replying, I shall investigate what you've suggested and see what happens.

hamandcheese 1y ago

For me the best part about AI is that when I'm feeling lazy, I can tell the AI to do it. Whether it gives me gold or gives me shit, it doesn't matter, because I have now started my work.

crinkly 1y ago
I go for a walk and have a coffee. It feels less intellectually dishonest. Best to solve human problems with human solutions.
- rantallion 1y ago
  The best part is that you can do both. Give the agent a prompt, go for a walk, come back to see how well it did.
- kaffekaka 1y ago
  Where in lies the dishonesty? Having the AI just getting the wheels turning when I'm not in the mood myself has many times been a good way to make progress.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    When you say progress, I wonder at what cost. The apparatus for original thought isn't used and pushing through a problem and deriving the satisfaction of doing that doesn't happen. That leads to the wrong motivational cues. The brain is lazy and likes to take the easy route. Eventually you become merely a machine operator, which is something a lot of my colleagues are starting to do. And it's very worrying. The biased behaviour towards just asking for a solution both devalues you and leads to any innovative outcomes disappearing before they had a chance to exist. I've ended up being the company ideas man not because I'm good but everyone else stopped thinking.
    - jasoncartwright 1y ago
      I enjoy the idea that when programming before AI I wasn't 'merely a machine operator'

dyl000 1y ago

using claude code is absolutely incredible sometimes and absolute junk other times. great for easy to mid complexity refactors. ask it to do anything decently complex and it explodes. It's taken the place of a junior dev for me now. well worth the $200/mo.

perrin_veronica 1y ago

With Cursor and CC Max both throttling and changing terms recently, I worry that the trend has started to just charge and throttle more and more like a drug dealer, until we’re all stealing and living on the floor in some abandoned building.

dejavucoder 1y ago
lol yeah

ianberdin 1y ago

Reading all these glowing reviews of Claude Code, I still get the feeling that either everyone’s been paid off or it’s just the die-hard fans of terminal windows and editors like Emacs and Vim. Using the terminal is right up their alley—it’s in their DNA. Every time I read comments saying Claude Code is far better than Cursor, I fire it up, pay for a subscription, and run it on a large, complex TypeScript codebase. First, the whole process takes a hell of a lot of time. Second, the learning curve is steep: you have to work through the terminal and type commands. And the outcome is exactly the same as with the Claude that’s built into Cursor—only slower, less clear, and the generated code is harder to review afterward. I don’t know… At this point my only impression is that all those influencers in the comments are either sponsored, or they’ve already shelled out their $200 and are now defending their choice. Or they simply haven’t used Cursor enough to figure out how to get the most out of it. I still can’t see any real advantage to Claude Code, other than supposedly higher limits. I don’t get it. I’ve already paid for Claude Code, and I’m also paying for Cursor Pro, which is another $200, but I’m more productive with Cursor so far. I’ve been programming for 18 years, write a ton of code every single day, and I can say Cursor gives me more. I switch between Gemini 2.5 Pro—when I need to handle tasks with a big, long context—and Claude 4.0 for routine stuff. So no one has convinced me yet, and I haven’t seen any other benefit. Maybe later… I don’t know.

phito 1y ago
I just feel sad for all the professional developers out there that are still scared of the terminal.
- mountainriver 1y ago
  it's just a worse interface for writing code, no one is scared of anything
james_marks 1y ago
Some of it is taste. Personally, I dislike VSCode and its descendants; it feels bloated and like I’m always being advertised to inside the product. I want my editor to disappear from thought, and Sublime does this for me. In that context, CC is amazing.

jonstewart 1y ago

What is “branch-analysis.md” for in CC? Googling comes up short.

dejavucoder 1y ago
It's just a you can tell claude to make to write notes to

swader999 1y ago

My biggest problem at the moment is that I am more inclined to talk to Claude and GPT O3 than the other more junior devs on my team. I just get more done. I'm not being facetious here, I really don't like that about the way I've been the past few days. I have to use the new free time I have to work more with them I guess.

jmkni 1y ago
I guess the inverse is true too though, junior devs are more inclined to ask AI than their superiors.
- swader999 1y ago
  Except that they don't. Most can't afford it. My fault though, I'm about a month away from getting subscriptions for all of them and then I'll mob program with them and Claude until they either sink or swim. I'm in full on learning mode, still trying to prove it out and get a real validation of it all ..
Herring 1y ago
Yeah I noticed the same. I would much rather have sensitive discussions (eg US foreign policy) with Gemini pro rather than with a human. I was recently watching Seinfeld, and apparently in the 90s, picking up a friend from the airport was an important social contract. Today we just uber.

kierangill 1y ago

Past the basic setup, what are people doing to grease the tracks for these tools? That is, how are people organizing their context and codebase to help the tooling guide themselves to the right answer? I have some half-baked thoughts here [1], but I know there are more (better) methodologies to be discovered. [1]: https://blog.kierangill.xyz/oversight-and-guidance https://blog.kierangill.xyz/oversight-and-guidance

clbrmbr 1y ago

I've been getting a lot of alpha out of Claude Code, but struggling a bit with how to bring it to the rest of my team. Does anyone have any practical advice on sharing best practices or generally getting team members or folks you supervise to also benefit from Claude Code?

NewUser76312 1y ago

I'm still not sold on these "AIs in your codebase" tools. Same for 'vibe coding'. I use AI like a scalpel - I go in and figure out exactly what I want, use my prompting experience to get a few functions, or up to 1 script at a time, read it, put it in, and stress-test it immediately. As a result, I am extremely happy with my AI-generated code about 95% of the time. However, this requires that I still understand my codebase, requirements, failure modes, etc. My philosophy is that software dev creation speed is certainly important, but durability is even more critical. Currently, it seems like going too deep with these AI tools is sacrificing the former for the latter. If all you're doing is POCs all day I could see it (even then, don't let them get too big...) but it's just not for me, at least not yet.

_sharp 1y ago
You should consider documenting your durability requirements, failure modes, important context related to the feature/component your working on, as you would a junior engineer. Then, you can re-use the context documents. If the AI doesn't know what your expectations are, it will just assume you need a PoC, and give you PoC code quality.

williamsss 1y ago

As a daily active user of Cursor and CC user myself, it’s gratifying to discover nuanced tricks that push productivity further. I stumble upon one every now and again. Solid write up. And chock full of useful tricks! I was manually copy pasting PR change requests today to CC where some of this would have saved my wrists some pain.

actinium226 1y ago

I don't see any actual work getting done here. Just one part where it added reply_to_email to a bunch of classes and removed it from a couple places, which doesn't seem like a big lift.

Adifounder 1y ago

seems like claudes strength is being overhyped by the people who can actually make it work for them. why is the learning curve so hard.