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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

#341

Post by Bjorkbat »

TheDong wrote: post #325
cwalv wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this tendency in myself and thought about the 'why' a lot, and I think it comes down to subconsciously factoring in the cost of lock-in, or worse, lack of access to fix/improve a tool I've come to rely on

For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works. Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work. Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages…

I've honestly thought of hacker spirit as embodying a kind of homesteader ethos in a way. There's this homesteading book I bought a long time ago when I was in college, rich with illustrations on how to do everything from raise animals and grow food to building a house, processing lumber, drilling a well, everything. The same fascination I have with homesteading and DIY culture extends into my interest in technology, and I suspect this is the same with a lot of developers as well.

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

#342

Post by firtoz »

stevage wrote: post #339
artdigital wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I did a few small taks with Claude Code after seeing this discussion here and is too expensive for me. A small change to create a script file (20 LoC) was 10cts, a quick edit to a README was 7ct Yes yes engineers make more than that blah blah but the cost would quickly jump out of control for bigger tasks. I’d easy burn through $10-20 upwards a day with this, or upwards $100-$300 a month. Unless you have a…

It's an interesting question. As a freelance consultant, theoretically a tool like this could allow me to massively scale up my income, assuming I could find enough clients. I'm a bit nervous where I'd end up though - with code I'd "written" but wasn't familiar with, and with who knows what kinds of limitations or subtle bugs baked in.

I currently pay around $200-300 to a combination of Cursor + Anthropic through the API. I have both a full time job and freelance work. It pays for itself. I end up reviewing more than manual coding, to ensure the quality of the results. Funnily, the work I did through this method has received more praise than my usual work.

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

#343

Post by MarkMarine »

an_taeus wrote: post #323
MarkMarine wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accepting an epoch timestamp rather than 3339 like the rest of the codebase is the most recent example. The API standardized on one timestamp and I had an endpoint expecting epoch, it was smart enough to infer the rest of the APIs were 3339 and go change the epoch timestamp accepting backend route including writing a database migration and fixing tests. I haven’t pushed the fix yet So think about the reasoning there.…

I hope this doesn’t come off as combative because that’s not my intention, but given that your code needed to be brought into alignment with the wider code base, couldn’t this have been achieved in a couple minutes with a find and replace that was scoped to just your endpoint methods and routes? In all the discussions about coding with AI I’m just continually struck by the idea that if someone has enough knowledge of…

The promise of AI before all of this was a robot would do the dishes and fold the laundry, so we could do the enjoyable things. This is a robot that can do the dishes, finally, so I can do the hard work.

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

#344

Post by deepGem »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #294
personjerry wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less

Tangential, but this reminds me of something someone said on Twitter that has resonated with me ever since. Startups targeting developers / building developer tooling are arguably one of the worst startups to build, because no matter how much of a steal the price is relative to the value you get, developers insist they can build their own or get by with an open-source competitor. We're as misguided on value as we are…

This is also why devs are not in charge of purchase decisions at tech companies. I don't mean FAANG but the usual tech shops. Someone buys a tool and you have to use it. I think the startups selling dev tools are not selling to developers at all, but to the IT folks of these big tech firms.

Should they pull it off, it's not at all a bad startup to build. However, you need to now invest in a sales force that can sell to the Fortune 500. As a tech founder with no sales trope, this will be incredibly hard to pull off.

I digress, but yeah selling to devs is almost always a terrible idea since we all want to build our own stuff. That spirit may also be waning with the advent of Replit agent, Claude code and other tools.

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

#345

Post by ido »

MarkMarine wrote: post #149
vander_elst wrote: post #140

Are there any videos showing these very advanced use cases? I'd be interested in learning how to achieve this level of proficiency. At the moment I still feel I'm better off without ai

Claude code doesn’t need magic prompts. It’s not perfect but holy moly is it good, when it’s working it just one shots things for you. It’s just EXPENSIVE. I’ve spent 30$ in tokens on it this week. Cursor’s “chat with your codebase” is a funny joke compared to Claude Code. Ask it questions, have it figure things out. I had it analyze the openAPI schema and the backend that is serving the schema for the API I’m writin…

A junior developer cost about €300 per workday (fully loaded & location dependent) and often achieves far less than that per day.

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

#347

Post by codebolt »

radlad wrote: post #303
CGamesPlay wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I pretty directly addressed that point. Yes, it would be more expensive to hire me to do what Claude Code / Aider did, but nobody would be satisfied with my work if I stopped where Claude Code / Aider did.

They aren't necessarily saying it can replace you. They're saying that even though it's expensive, it's cheaper than your time (which can be better spent on other tasks, as you point out.)

And with this increase in productivity, your boss needs fewer of you to do the work that would previously require a larger team.

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

#348

Post by baq »

radlad wrote: post #303
CGamesPlay wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I pretty directly addressed that point. Yes, it would be more expensive to hire me to do what Claude Code / Aider did, but nobody would be satisfied with my work if I stopped where Claude Code / Aider did.

They aren't necessarily saying it can replace you. They're saying that even though it's expensive, it's cheaper than your time (which can be better spent on other tasks, as you point out.)

The first half is correct, but the conclusions shouldn’t be ‘we’re replicating our software engineers with Claude today’, they’re ‘our experienced engineers just 10x their productivity, we’ll never need to hire an intern’

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

#349

Post by sagarpatil »

the_lonely_time wrote: post #219
dabinat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of this?

Can’t remember account login so created a new account to respond. I recently used Claude with something along the lines of “Ruby on rails 8, Hotwire, stimulus, turbo, show me how to do client side validations that don’t require a page refresh” I am new to prompt engineering so feel free to critique. Anyway, it generated a stimulus controller called validations_controller.js and then proceeded to print out all of the…

Say you hire a developer and ask him to directly debug an issue by simply skimming through the codebase, do you think he can complete this task say in 5-10 minutes? No, right? In claude code(CC), do the following: 1. /init which acts as a project guide. 2. Ask it to summarize the project as save it as summary.md 3. The prompt needs to be clear and detailed. Here’s an example: https://imgur.com/a/RJyp3f9

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

#350

Post by baq »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #293
personjerry wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less

I know this is not really in the spirit of the room here, but before I ever dreamed of getting paid to code, I only learned to at all because I was cheap and/or poor cook/grad student that wanted to make little artsy musical things on the computer. I remember the first time I just downloaded pure data. No torrent, no cracks, it was just there for me and all it asked for was my patience. The only reason I ever got int…

It must be said, preferably in bold, that:

> this pervasive sense that "the way to do things now" is seemingly inseparable from a credit card number and monthly charge

…is true, but it only applies to experienced engineers who can sculpt the whole solution using these tools, not just random code. You need the whole learning effort to be able to ground the code the slop generators make. The passion absolutely helps here.

Note this is valid today. I have concerns that I’ll have different advice in 2027…

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