Live data from Hacker News

I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

twitter.com

71–80 of 507 posts

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#71
post #43

As a junior, this scares me. I don't think I'll be out of a job soon, but certainly the job market will change drastically and the times where SWEs are paid like doctors and lawyers will end?

Make sure you learn a lot. Ask the LLMs to explain anything you don't deeply understand. With all of these coding assistants, there will be many juniors that get a lot done, but don't really understand what they are doing, and their worth will drop quickly. So far LLMs are great at producing code, but not at architecture or maintenance.

Learning just by asking is not enough. One needs to exercise to build those muscles.

I'm just restating the obvious because LLMs can do exercise for you, but there is not much to be gained if one follows this path.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#72

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

What I've noticed from my extensive use over the past couple weeks has been Claude Code really sucks at thinking things through enough to understand the second and third order consequences of the code that it's writing. That said, it's easy enough to work around its deficiencies by using a model with extended thinking (Grok, GPT4.5, Sonnet 3.7 in thinking mode) to write prompts for it and use Claude Code as basically a dumb code-spewing minion. My workflow has been: give Grok enough context on the problem with specific code examples, ask it to develop an implementation plan that a junior developer can follow, and paste the result into Claude Code, asking it to diligently follow the implementation plan and nothing else.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#74
post #68

Sidenote: thank you for using twitter dot com instead of x. This is a little detail and I'm sure I'm not the only one appreciating it.

For me, Twitter as we knew it has been long dead, and X is the shambling, corrupt corpse that's taken its place. I no longer mind referring to it as X, because that clearly outlines that it's a different website with a much more rancid vibe.

That's another take. Never thought of it that way.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#75
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's probably the difference between "code" and "programming". An LLM can produce code and if you're willing to surrender to the LLMs version of whatever it is you ask for, then you can have a great and productive time. If you're opinionated about programming, LLMs fall short. Most people (software engineers, developers, whatever) are not "programmers" they're "coders" which is why they have a positive impres…

I'm waiting for artisan programming to become a thing.

Like, writing binaries directly? Is assembly code too much of an abstraction?

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#78
I asked it to summarise my repo. It did a pretty good job. Then I asked it to see if it could summarise a specific function, but it said my $5 was up. Now I need to find whoever's in charge of our company account and spend half an hour busking in front of their desk to get some more credit.

Until then I'm sticking to a combination of Amazon Q Developer (with the @workspace tag in Intellij), ChatGPT and Gemini online.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#79

I tried it too and tasked it to do a bigger migration (one web framework to another). It failed pretty bad where I stopped the experiment. It still gave me a headstart where I can take parts and continue the migration manually. But the worst thing was that it did things I didn't asked for like changing the HTML structure and CSS of pages and changing hand picked HEX color codes... More about my experience on my blog:…

Such a nice read, thanks for sharing!

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#80
I had to give up my attempt to use Claude code when it didn’t let me specify my API key and password, instead requiring me to sign into a user account first which then forced creation of an API account ?

Something like that. Anyhow Claude needs to allow me to put in my own API keys.

Post reply on HN