7 ms·
I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. When it makes a mistake like over-editing, I explain the mistake, it f
by hathawsh 5mo ago
I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. When it makes a mistake like over-editing, I explain the mistake, it fixes it, and I ask it to record what it learned in the relevant project-specific skills. It rarely makes that mistake again. When the skill file gets big, I ask Claude to clean and compact it. It does a great job.
It doesn't really make sense economically for me to write software for work anymore. I'm a teacher, architect, and infrastructure maintainer now. I hand over most development to my experienced team of Claude sessions. I review everything, but so does Claude (because Claude writes thorough tests also.) It has no problem handling a large project these days.
I don't mean for this post to be an ad for Claude. (Who knows what Anthropic will do to Claude tomorrow?) I intend for this post to be a question: what am I doing that makes Claude profoundly effective?
Also, I'm never running out of tokens anymore. I really only use the Opus model and I find it very efficient with tokens. Just last week I landed over 150 non-trivial commits, all with Claude's help, and used only 1/3 of the tokens allotted for the week. The most commits I could do before Claude was 25-30 per week.
(Gosh, it's hard to write that without coming across as an ad for Anthropic. Sorry.)
- Powdering7082 5mo agoIs your claude.md, skills or other settings that you have honed public?
- hathawsh 5mo agoSorry, no, and they're highly project specific anyway. I just started with the "/init" skill a few weeks ago and gradually improved it from there.
- swader999 5mo agoI feel the same way. Doesn't make sense economically or even in good faith for me to use company paid time writing code for line of business apps at anymore and I'm 28 years into this kind of work.
- p1necone 5mo agoWhich subscription tier are you using?
- Swizec 5mo ago> I'm either in a minority or a silent majority. Claude Code surpasses all my expectations. I looked at some stats yesterday and was surprised to learn Cursor AI now writes 97% of my code at work. Mostly through cloud agents (watching it work is too distracting for me) My approach is very simple: Just Talk To It People way overthink this stuff. It works pretty good. Sharing .md files and hyperfocusing on various orchestrations and prompt hacks of the week feels as interesting as going deep on vim shortcuts and IDE skins. Just ask for what you want, be clear, give good feedback. That’s it
- hathawsh 5mo agoI love the IDE skins analogy. Very true.
- acessoproibido 5mo agoEveryone knows that a red UI skin goes faster
- Rekindle8090 5mo ago[dead]
- anabis 5mo agoAre you mostly using the Composer model?
- Swizec 5mo ago> Are you mostly using the Composer model? Don’t really think about it. I think when I talk to it through Slack, cursor users codex, in my ide looks like it’s whatever highest claude. In Github comments, who even knows
- WatchDog 5mo agoHow do you collect these stats? Is it by characters human typed vs AI generated, or by commit or something?
- maxbond 5mo agoWhen I see people talking about Claude Code becoming "unusable" for them recently, I believe them, but I don't understand. It's a deeply flawed and buggy piece of software but it's very effective. One of the strangest things about AI to me is that everyone seems to have a radically different experience.
- enraged_camel 5mo agoI use it through the desktop app, which has a lot of features I appreciate. Today it was implementing a feature. It came across a semi-related bug that wasn’t a stopper but should really be fixed before go live. Instead of tackling it itself or mentioning it at the final summary (where it becomes easy to miss), it triggered a modal inside the Claude app with a description of the issue and two choices: fix in another session or fix in current session. Really good way to preserve context integrity and save tokens!
- sroussey 5mo agoHow to you get CC to connect to your dev container? I have the CC app but it’s kinda useless as I’m not have it barebacking my system, so I’m left with the cli and vs code extension.
- gommm 5mo agoI just run CC in a VM. It gets full control over the VM. The VM doesn't have access to my internal networks. I share the code repos it works on over virtiofs so it has access to the repos but doesn't have access to my github keys for pushing and pulling. This means it can do anything in the VM, install dependencies, etc... So far, it managed to bork the VM once (unbootable), I could have spent a bit of time figuring out what happened but I had a script to rebuild the VM so didn't bother. To be entirely fair to claude, the VM runs arch linux which is definitely easier to break than other distros.
- shimman 5mo agoMy workflow is to just use LLMs for small context work. Anything that involves multiple files it truly doesn't do better than what I'd expect from a competent dev. It's bitten me several times at work, and I rather not waste any more of my limited time doing the re-prompt -> modify code manually cycle. I'm capable of doing this myself. It's great for the simple tasks tho, most feature work are simple tasks IMO. They were only "costly" in the sense that it took a while to previously read the code, find appropriate changes, create tests for appropriate changes, etc. LLMs reduce that cycle of work, but that type of work in general isn't the majority of my time at my job. I've worked at feature factories before, it's hell. I can't imagine how much more hell it has become since the introduction of these tools. Feature factories treat devs as literal assembly line machines, output is the only thing that matters not quality. Having it mass induced because of these tools is just so shitty to workers. I fully expect a backlash in the upcoming years. --- My only Q to the OP of this thread is what kind of teacher they are, because if you teach people anything about software while admitting that you no longer write code because it's not profitable (big LOL at caring about money over people) is just beyond pathetic.
- Unbeliever69 5mo agoI think a lot of use have implemented our own ad hoc self-improvement checks into our agentic workflows. My observations are the same as yours.
- rtpg 5mo agoAre you writing code that gets reviewed by other people? Were code reviews hard in the past? Do your coworkers care about "code quality" (I mean this in scare quotes because that means different things to different people). Are you working more on operational stuff or on "long-running product" stuff? My personal headcanon: this tooling works well when built on simple patterns, and can handle complex work. This tooling has also been not great at coming up with new patterns, and if left unsupervised will totally make up new patterns that are going to go south very quickly. With that lens, I find myself just rewriting what Claude gives me in a good number of cases. I sometimes race the robot and beat the robot at doing a change. I am "cheating" I guess cuz I know what I want already in many cases and it has to find things first but... I think the futzing fraction[0] is underestimated for some people. And like in the "perils of laziness lost"[1] essay... I think that sometimes the machine trying too hard just offends my sensibilities. Why are you doing 3 things instead of just doing the one thing! One might say "but it fixes it after it's corrected"... but I already go through this annoying "no don't do A,B, C just do A, yes just that it's fine" flow when working with coworkers, and it's annoying there too! "Claude writes thorough tests" is also its own micro-mess here, because while guided test creation works very well for me, giving it any leeway in creativity leads to so many "test that foo + bar == bar + foo" tests. Applying skepticism to utility of tests is important, because it's part of the feedback loop. And I'm finding lots of the test to be mainly useful as a way to get all the imports I need in. If we have all these machines doing this work for us, in theory average code quality should be able to go up. After all we're more capable! I think a lot of people have been using it in a "well most of the time it hits near the average" way, but depending on how you work there you might drag down your average. [0]: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html https://blog.glyph.im/2025/08/futzing-fraction.html [1]: https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/the-peril-of-laziness-lost/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/the-peril-of-lazines...
- hathawsh 5mo agoYou hinted at an aspect I probably haven't considered enough: The code I'm working on already has many well-established, clean patterns and nearly all of Claude's work builds on those patterns. I would probably have a very different experience otherwise.
- ytoawwhra92 5mo ago> I intend for this post to be a question: what am I doing that makes Claude profoundly effective? I'm fascinated by this question. I think the first two sections of this article point towards an answer: https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-dynamics https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies... I've personally had radically different experiences working on different projects, different features within the same project, etc.
- leonidasv 5mo agoThe article has a benchmark and Opus has best score in two categories and the second-best in another (there are only three categories). Opus is probably the best choice when it comes to producing readable code right now. GPT (for example) lags way behind.
- baq 5mo agoAnecdotally it’s the exact opposite for me: gpt 5.4 is leagues ahead of opus for the kind of backend work I do. Opus keeps making stupid mistakes while overengineering the irrelevant parts. However when I have to work on the backoffice ui, I still pick opus.
- baq 5mo agoWait till you try codex so you don’t have to keep saying ‘don’t be lazy’
- nobodywillobsrv 5mo agoHow much does it cost though? This is the problem. I think there is a huge gap between people on salaries getting effectively more responsibility by being given spend that they otherwise would not have had and people hustling on projects on their own. Yes it is 100% what I use but I am never happy with usage. It burns up by sub fast and there is little feelings of control. Experiments like using lower tier models are hard to understand in reality. Graphify might work or it might not. I have no idea.
- nicbou 5mo agoSame. It's surprisingly good as a labour saving device. It produces code that I would accept without reservations from a coworker. I still read every line and make tweaks, but they're the same tweaks I would ask for in a code review. I don't measure my productivity, but I see it in the sort of tasks I tackle after years of waiting. It's especially good at tedious tasks like turning 100 markdown files into 5 json files and updating the code that reads them, for example.
- Calavar 5mo agoIt's interesting how variable people's experiences seem to be. Personally, I tend to get crap quality code out of Claude. Very branchy. Very un-DRY. Consistently fails to understand the conventions of my codebase (e.g. keeps hallucinating that my arena allocator zero initializes memory - it does not). And sometimes after a context compaction it goes haywire and starts creating new regressions everywhere. And while you can prompt to fix these things, it can take an entire afternoon of whack-a-mole prompting to fix the fallout of one bad initial run. I've also tried dumping lessons into a project specific skill file, which sometimes helps, but also sometimes hurts - the skill file can turn into a footgun if it gets out of sync with an evolving codebase. In terms of limits, I usually find myself hitting the rate limit after two or three requests. On bad days, only one. This has made Claude borderline unusable over the past couple weeks, so I've started hand coding again and using Claude as a code search and debugging tool rather than a code generator.
- max_streese 5mo agoTo people stating these high commit numbers: What is your average changeset size? I have found that having agent do large changes (few hundred lines or more) results in a lot of friction for me and it feels like at some point I leave a happy path where instead of moving quickly I get dragged down.
- rustyhancock 5mo agoI think on HN atleast. People enamoured by Claude are the vocal majority. The view of Claude on HN is extremely positive and nearly every thread will have highly positive comment "that is not an ad". I think people are seeing others just irked by the constant stream what feels like ads and reading it as Claude being somehow disliked.
- keybored 5mo agoThe silent majority of GenAI praise reaches the top of the thread again. Edit: The lurkers and the commenters must be a pretty different set of people I suppose.
- archargelod 5mo agoI am genuinely interested to know some details: 1. Is a product/software you develop novel? As in does it do something useful and unique? Or it's a product that already exists in many varietes and yours is just "one of ..."? 2. What if one day, LLMs will get regulated/become terrible/raise prices above your budget. Do you have plans for that?
- cultofmetatron 5mo agoI'm in a similar situation 1. Even really novel projects have large chunks of glue code and boring infrastructure that the novel bits depend on. claude means I spend 10% of my time on the borng stuff and 90% of time on stuff I previously onky had 10% of my day to work on. In my experience the software picked up our idioms fast and for context, we have a skill file explaining code standards. 2. codex and gemini are comparable when paired with a good harness (pi.dev). if things ever get really bad, I'll drop 8k on a dedicated agent coding server and run it locally. I tried it recently with my current system and it was sub par but I was running a drasticly simpler model.
- Pannoniae 5mo ago1. Fairly - I definitely don't see any training material about the stuff I do on the internet:D it's really far from your avg front-end app. And of course you can't let any of those make decisions automatically. Remember the IBM quote, "a computer can not be held accountable therefore a computer must not make any management decisions"... Even on completely greenfield and groundbreaking projects there's lots of throwaway code, scaffolding and so on. You contribute the value-add, you use the flanker to speed up the boring and grey parts. 2. Regulation? I'm sceptical that the cat can be put back into the bag. It's already out there. More realistic problem is the business model part - openweight/local provides a counterpoint to that.
- archerx 5mo agoI used Claude to help me with a function once and it added a memory leak, it wouldn’t have been noticeable to most people but I saw. I still write my own code and find LLMs frustrating because they almost get it right and it’s just more efficient for me to just write the code correctly instead of having an LLM write something that’s almost correct and me fixing it after the fact. I can’t wait for all the future vibe coded projects to be exploited by the black hats waiting in the shadows for things to reach a critical state. I don’t believe in anthropic because they love to lie.