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

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

#201

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've found AI to be useful on precisely-scoped tasks I might assign to a junior programmer to take a day to do, like "convert this exact bash script to a Powershell script". But in my own work, those tasks are pretty rare, like 3 times a month? Often I start working on something, and the scope and definition of success changes while I'm in the midst of it. Or it turns out to be harder than expected and it makes sense…

> you do actually want that (soft) pushback some of the time. Most modern LLMs will gleefully come up with a complete plan for how we're gonna get the square peg in the round hole.

I once accidentally asked a local DeepSeek distilled model to do the wrong thing by accidentally copy pasting the wrong variable name.

It told me how to do it, and then asked me if I was sure.

My local DeepSeek R1 model (deepseek-r1:7b) saw me trying to do something stuupid (I was working with the wrong variable). It told me how to do what I asked and then asked:

> _Is this modification part of a larger change you're making to the code? I'd like to make sure we're not modifying something important that might have side effects._

Looking at its though process:

> _The user wants to modify this string by replacing "-input" with "-kb". But looking at the ARN structure, I recall that AWS S3 ARNs are usually in the form arns3:::bucket_name RegionalPart path. The part after the bucket name is typically s3:// followed by the object key._ > _Wait, maybe the user has a specific reason to make this change. Perhaps they're formatting or structuring something for a different purpose. They might not realize that directly modifying ARNs can cause issues elsewhere if not done correctly._

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

#202
post #199

Do any of the current AI systems allow you to use voice? I’d love to sometimes chat to an agent and dictate what I want to happen. For one project there’s a lot of boilerplate and I imagine AI could be really fast for tasks like: “create a new controller called x”, “make a new migration to add a new field the to users table called x” etc

I saw something mentioned of voice control in aider.chat

Found!

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/voice.html

Thanks!

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

#203

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…

He literally says in his post "It might look antiquated but it makes Cursor, Windsurf, Augment and the rest of the lot (yeah, ours too, and Copilot, let's be honest) FEEL antiquated"

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took a while for me to realize it, and frankly, it's kind of embarrassing that I didn't think of it immediately. It is, after all, what many of us would do in our manual SW development. But when using an LLM that seems pretty good, we just assume we don't need to follow all the usual good practices.

Does the LLM make commits along the way? I think I’m missing why you need all these branches vs git reset —hard once it figures out the bug?

Aider, by default, makes commits after each change (so that you can easily tell it to "undo"). Once a feature is done, you manually squash the commits if desired. Some people love it, some hate it.

You can configure it not to autocommit, although I suppose the "undo" command won't work in that case.

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

#205
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That amount of output is comparable to what many professional engineers produce in a given day, and they are a lot more expensive. Keep in mind this is the commenters first attempt. And I'm surprised he paid so much. Using Aider and Sonnet I've on multiple occasions produced 100+ lines of code in 1-2 hours, for under $2. Most of that time is hunting down one bug it couldn't fix by itself (reflective of real world pro…

The lines of code isn’t the point. Op claimed they asked Claude to recreate Claude code and it was successful. This is obviously an extreme exaggeration. I think this is the crux of a lot of these posts. This code generator output a very basic utility. To some this is a revelation, but it leaves others wondering what all the fuss is about. It seems to me people’s perspective on code gen has largely to do with their e…

It's a very narrow reading of his comment. What he meant to say was it quickly created a rudimentary version of an AI code editor.

Just as a coworker used it to develop an AI code review tool in a day. It's not fancy - no bells and whistles, but it's still impressive to do it in a day with almost no manual coding.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the LLM make commits along the way? I think I’m missing why you need all these branches vs git reset —hard once it figures out the bug?

Aider, by default, makes commits after each change (so that you can easily tell it to "undo"). Once a feature is done, you manually squash the commits if desired. Some people love it, some hate it. You can configure it not to autocommit, although I suppose the "undo" command won't work in that case.

The just sounds like ⌘-Z with extra steps.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aider, by default, makes commits after each change (so that you can easily tell it to "undo"). Once a feature is done, you manually squash the commits if desired. Some people love it, some hate it. You can configure it not to autocommit, although I suppose the "undo" command won't work in that case.

The just sounds like ⌘-Z with extra steps.

Aider doesn't run in your editor. Undo in editor won't undo Aider's changes.

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

#208
Can Claude Code also be a devops agent or is it only for coding?

I currently use Cursor as a devops agent, I use the remote ssh extension to ssh into a VM, then Cursor will set up everything, I make snapshots on way in case it fucks up. It's been really great to quickly be able to setup and try out different infrastructures and backends in no time at all. It works well enough that I now do all my development using remote dev with ssh or remote containers on the a server. Having a virtualized dev environment is a great addition to just having git for the code.

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

#209
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly my impression of the summary of these kinds of posts and, I'm speculating here, maybe where there is such a stark difference. I'm guessing that the folks who read the output and want to understand it deeply and want to "approve" it like a standard pull request are having a very different perspective and workflow than those who are just embracing the vibe. I do not know if one leads to better outcomes…

Are you serious? Why not just vibe work with your human coworkers and merge to master then? Let's see what the outcome is!

> Are you serious?

I am serious and didn't think anything I said here was contentious. Which part are you feeling incredulity over? I'll try to clarify if I've been unclear or learn from your perspective.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a slow adopter of new tech but plan to spend a significant amount of time in 2025 using AI tools when coding. I am net negative on AI simply replacing programmers, but I think the practice of development is undergoing a seismic shift at this point. My recent usage is oriented towards using pseudocode descriptions that closely map to Python to produce Python functions. I am very impressed with Claude 3.7's syntac…

At this point very little code is "novel". Everyone is simply rewriting code that has already been written in a similar form. The LLM isn't slurping up and restating code verbatim. It is taking code that it has seen thousands of times and generating a customized version for your needs. It's hubris to think that anyone here is generating "novel" code.

I have seen the argument that very little code is novel but I find it inherently unsatisfying and lacking in nuance? I think what bugs me about is that if you squint hard enough, all programming reduces to "take some data, do something to it." That "something" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the argument that "something" is or isn't novel.

Heck, if we think about it from the programming language perspective, all code is "simply" using already existing language functions to cobble together a solution to some specific set of requirements. Is no program novel?

There is probably a consideration here that maybe boils down to the idea of engineering vs artisanal craftsmanship and where a specific project falls in that spectrum . . .

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