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Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
71–80 of 268 posts
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would put anthropic in the business of minimizing the context to increase profits, same as Cursor and others who cheap out on context and try to RAG etc. Which would quickly make it worse, so I hope they stay on api pricing Some base usage included in the plan might be a good balance
You know, I wouldn't mind if they just applied the API pricing after Claude Code ran through the plan limits. It would definitely get me to use it more.
But the Claude Pro plan is almost certainly priced under the assumption that some users will use it below the usage limit.
If everyone used the plan to the limit, the plan would cost the same as the API with usage equal to the limit.
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tool-calling agents with search tools do very well at information retrieval tasks in codebases. They are slower and more expensive than good RAG (if you amortize the RAG index over many operations), but they're incredibly versatile and excel in many cases where RAG would fall down. Why do you think you need semantic indexing?
> Why do you think you need semantic indexing? Unfortunately I can only give an anecdotal answer here, but I get better results from Cursor than the alternatives. The semantic index is the main difference, so I assume that's what's giving it the edge.
Is it a very large codebase? Anything else distinctive about it? Are you often asking high-level/conceptual questions? Those are the questions that would help me understand why you might be seeing better results with RAG.
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can ask it to store its current context to a file, review the file, ask it to emphasize or de-emphasize things based on your review, and then use `/clear`. Then, you can edit the file at your leisure if you want to. And when you want to load that context back in, ask it to read the file. Works better than `/compact`, and is a lot cheaper.
Neat, thanks, I had no idea! Edit: It so happens I had a Claude Code session open in my Terminal, so I asked it: Save your current context to a file. Claude produced a 91 line md file... surely that's not the whole of its context? This was a reasonably lengthy conversation in which the AI implemented a new feature.
What is in the file?
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
correct; utilised correctly these tools ship teams of output in a single day.
Do you have a link to some of this output? A repo on Github of something you’ve done for fun? I get a lot of value out of LLMs but when I see people make claims like this I know they aren’t “in the trenches” of software development, or care so little about quality that I can’t relate to their experience. Usually they’re investors in some bullshit agentic coding tool though.
I will shortly; am building a serious self-compiling compiler rn out of an brand-new esoteric language. Meaning the LLM is able to program itself without training data about the programming language...
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
$100/day seems reasonable as an upper-percentile spend per programmer. $500/day sounds insane. A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.
It sounds insane until you drive full agentic loops/evals. I'm currently making a self-compiling compiler; no doubt you'll hear/see about it soon. The other night, I fell asleep and woke up with interface dynamic dispatch using vtables with runtime type information and generic interface support implemented...
Do you actually understand the code Claude wrote?
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
$100/day seems reasonable as an upper-percentile spend per programmer. $500/day sounds insane. A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.
It sounds insane until you drive full agentic loops/evals. I'm currently making a self-compiling compiler; no doubt you'll hear/see about it soon. The other night, I fell asleep and woke up with interface dynamic dispatch using vtables with runtime type information and generic interface support implemented...
Fair enough. That's pretty cool, I haven't gone that far in my own work with AI yet, but now I am inspired to try.
The point is to get a pipeline working, cost can be optimized down after.
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a link to some of this output? A repo on Github of something you’ve done for fun? I get a lot of value out of LLMs but when I see people make claims like this I know they aren’t “in the trenches” of software development, or care so little about quality that I can’t relate to their experience. Usually they’re investors in some bullshit agentic coding tool though.
I will shortly; am building a serious self-compiling compiler rn out of an brand-new esoteric language. Meaning the LLM is able to program itself without training data about the programming language...
I would hold on on making grand claims until you have something grand to show for it.
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#79The issue with many of these tips is that they require you use to claude code (or codex cli, doesn't matter) to spend way more time in it, feed it more info, generate more outputs --> pay more money to the LLM provider. I find LLM-based tools helpful, and use them quite regularly but not 20 bucks+, let alone 100+ per month that claude code would require to be used effectively.
> let alone 100+ per month that claude code would require I find this argument very bizarre. $100 is pay for 1-2 hours of developer time. Doesn't it save at least that much time in a whole month?
what happened to the "$5 is just a cup o' coffee" argument? Are we heading towards the everything-for-$100 land?
On a serious note, there is no clear evidence that any of the LLM-based code assistants will contribute to saving developer time. Depends on the phase of the project you are in and on a multitude of factors.
Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
#80So I have been using Cursor a lot more in a vibe code way lately and I have been coming across what a lot of people report: sometimes the model will rewrite perfectly working code that I didn't ask it to touch and break it. In most cases, it is because I am asking the model to do too much at once. Which is fine, I am learning the right level of abstraction/instruction where the model is effective consistently. But wh…
Why do you think it's supposed to be cheap? Developers are expensive. Claude doesn't have to be cheap to make software development quicker and cheaper. It just has to be cheaper than you.
There are ways to use LLMs cheaply, but it will always be expensive to get the most out of them. In fact, the top end will only get more and more costly as the lengths of tasks AIs can successfully complete grows.