Ask HN: How are you productively using Claude code?

simply tell it what command it should call to compile, or better yet add that info to Claude.md

I had a great experience with it refactoring a project to use more modern patterns. A Go project moving from a deprecated and unwieldy query builder to using SQLC and protobuf for UI types etc. It did a great job just working its way through the entire system.

Had less luck on generating new features. It's great for prototyping UI but I routinely end up writing it myself.

It's also quick to forget how I like to do things or what libraries and packages it should use. So I either have to keep reminding it or fix up the work myself. While I'm unsure whether it still ends up being quicker, that's really immaterial for me because it absolutely kills the enjoyment of the work.

It's very good at refactoring, creating boilerplate, making big changes with moderate levels of precision.

Current LLM's at least a reasonable percentage of the time still get stuck on race conditions and bugs not obvious via static analysis. If you can explain the exact source of a bug to an LLM they can get it, but if there's a seemingly obvious solution that isn't the correct one, they will try to fix things the wrong way.

It's best to use AI in areas where a lack of specificity or precision isn't a major hinderance, and all abstraction is a closed loop that won't hurt you in the future due to not knowing how it works.

In my limited experience, it’s better to create a full plan for what you want first, then ask your agent to build pieces of it at a time. Larger plans tend to fail because of the complexity. I will ask it in some small detail to work on part a), while I create instructions for part b). I then review the result of a), before letting it continue with b), and so on. In my experience this has worked well, but you should always review the results very carefully of course.

The more open-source code the LLM has read (ie is in its training data), the better it will be. Rust is not a very popular language compared to others, so Claude might not be able to perform as well as it does with, say, Python or Javascript. Also, the more recent models might be better than the older ones.

I've been having fun with Claude Code and VSCode's agent. Any reasonably experienced engineer should be able to use it for a subset of languages without too many issues, but they definitely need to hydrate the context (eg. using Claude.md) and have a sensible set of system prompts set up. Good, well-written and broken-down-into-steps user prompts are non-negotiable.