Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 507 posts

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

#121

Post by WD-42 »

slooonz wrote: post #69
develoopest wrote: post #4

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…

I decided to try seriously the Sonnet 3.7. I started with a simple prompt on claude.ai ("Do you know claude code ? Can you do a simple implementation for me ?"). After minimal tweaking from me, it gave me this : https://gist.github.com/sloonz/3eb7d7582c33e95f2b000a0920016... After interacting with this tool, I decided it would be nice if the tool could edit itself, so I asked (him ? it ?) to create its next version.…

So you’re telling me you spent 20 dollars and an entire day for 200 lines of JavaScript and 75 lines of python and this to you constitutes a working re-creation of Claude Code?

This is why expectations are all out of whack.

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

#122

Post by iambateman »

develoopest wrote: post #4

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…

I have a challenging, repetitive developer task that I need to do ~200 times. It’s for scraping a site and getting similar pieces of data.

I wrote a worksheet for Cursor and give it specific notes for how to accomplish the task in a particular case. Then let it run and it’s fairly successful.

Keep in mind…it’s never truly “hands off” for me. I still need to clean things up after it’s done. But it’s very good at figuring out how to filter the HTML down and parse out the data I need. Plus it writes good tests.

So my success story is that it takes 75% of the energy out of a task I find particularly tedious.

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

#123

Post by h4ny »

kleiba wrote: post #99
rs186 wrote: post #40

A single tweet with lots of analogy, with no screenshot/screen recording/code examples whatsoever. These are just words. Are we just discussing programming based on vibe?

What, someone cannot utter an opinion anymore?

I find that question ironic.

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

#124

Post by simonw »

nsonha wrote: post #106
triyambakam wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of candidates? That's significant if not an exaggeration. What are the stark differences you have seen? Did you inquire about the candidate's use of language models?

if it's real that person interviewed at least one candidate per day last year. Idk what kind of engineering role in what kind of org where you even do that.

When I've had an open req for my team at a California tech company I've had days where I would interview (remotely) 2-3 candidates in a single day, several days a week for several weeks straight. It's not impossible to interview 100 people in a few months at that rate.

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

#125

Post by smallerfish »

triyambakam wrote: post #92
smallerfish wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done code interviews with hundreds of candidates recently. The difference between those who are using LLMs effectively and those who are not is stark. I honestly think engineers who think like OP are going to get left behind. Take a weekend to work on getting your head around this by building a personal project (or learning a new language). A few things to note: a) Use the "Projects" feature in Claude web. The c…

Hundreds of candidates? That's significant if not an exaggeration. What are the stark differences you have seen? Did you inquire about the candidate's use of language models?

Yes. I do async video interviews in round 1 of my interview process in order to narrow the candidate funnel. Candidates get a question at the start of the interview, with a series of things to work through in their own IDE while sharing their screen. I review all recordings (though I will skip around, and if candidates don't get very far I won't spend a lot of time watching at 1x speed.) The question as laid out encourages them to use all of the tools they usually rely on while coding (including google, stackoverflow, LLMs, ...).

Candidates who use LLMs generally get through 4 or 5 steps in the interview question. Candidates who don't are usually still on step 2 by the end of the interview (with rare exceptions), without their code quality being significantly better.

(I end up in 1:1 interviews with perhaps 10-15% of candidates who take round 1).

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

#126

Post by sbszllr »

chaosprint wrote: post #56

It seems the original poster hasn't extensively tried various AI coding assistants like Cursor or Windsurf. Just a quick heads-up based on my recent experience with agent-based AI: while it's comfortable and efficient 90% of the time, the remaining 10% can lead to extremely painful debugging experiences. In my view, the optimal scenarios for using LLM coding assistants are: - Architectural discussions, effectively re…

> In my view, the optimal scenarios for using LLM coding assistants are:

> - Architectural discussions, effectively replacing traditional searches on Google.

> - Clearly defined, small tasks within a single file.

I think you're on point here, and it has been my experience too. Also, not limited to coding but general use of LLMs.

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

#127

Post by WD-42 »

iambateman wrote: post #122
develoopest wrote: post #4

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…

I have a challenging, repetitive developer task that I need to do ~200 times. It’s for scraping a site and getting similar pieces of data. I wrote a worksheet for Cursor and give it specific notes for how to accomplish the task in a particular case. Then let it run and it’s fairly successful. Keep in mind…it’s never truly “hands off” for me. I still need to clean things up after it’s done. But it’s very good at figur…

I haven’t found llm code gen to be very good except in cases like you mention here. When you need to do large boilerplatey code with a lot of hardcoded values or parameters. The kind of thing you could probably write a code generator yourself for if you cared enough to do it. Thankfully Llms can save us from some of that.

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

#128

Post by WD-42 »

TylerLives wrote: post #98
crabl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This has been my experience as well. Breaking problems into smaller problems where you can easily verify correctness works much better than having it solve the whole problem on its own.

you just described how a good developer works.

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

#129

Post by jdmoreira »

beezlewax wrote: post #34
abxyz wrote: 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.

From before people even knew what llms were: https://handmade.network

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

#130

Post by miki123211 »

abxyz wrote: post #26
develoopest wrote: post #4

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…

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…

Oh, this captures my experience perfectly.

I've been using Claude Code a lot recently, and it's doing amazing work, but it's not exactly what I want it to do.

I had to push it hard to refactor and simplify, as the code it generated was often far more complicated than it needed to be.

To be honest though, most of the code it generated I would accept if I was reviewing another developer's work.

I think that's the way we need to look at it. It's a junior developer that will complete our tasks, not always in our preferred way, but at 10x the speed, and frequently make mistakes that we need to point out in CR. It's not a tool which will do exactly what we would.

Post reply on HN