I think most of this is good stuff but I disagree with not letting Claude touch tests or migrations at all. Handing writing tests from scratch is the part I hate the most. Having an LLM do a first pass on tests which I add to and adjust as I see fit has been a big boon on the testing front. It seems the difference between me and the author is I believe whether code was generated by an LLM or not the human still takes ownership and responsibility. Not letting Claude touch tests and migrations is saying you rightfully dont trust Claude but are giving ownership to Claude for Claude generated code. That or he doesn't trust his employees to not blindly accept AI slop, the strict rules around tests and migrations is to prevent the AI slop from breaking everything or causing data loss.
Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#22Some thoughts: - Is there a more elegant way to organize the prompts/specifications for LLMs in a codebase? I feel like CLAUDE.md, SPEC.mds, and AIDEV comments would get messy quickly. - What is the definition of "vibe-coding" these days? I thought it refers to the original Karpathy quote, like cowboy mode, where you accept all diffs and hardly look at code. But now it seems that "vibe-coding" is catch-all clickbait…
> - Is there a more elegant way to organize the prompts/specifications for LLMs in a codebase? I feel like CLAUDE.md, SPEC.mds, and AIDEV comments would get messy quickly.
Yeah, the comments do start to pile up. I’m working on a vscode extension that automatically turns them into tiny visual indicators in the gutter instead.
> - What is the definition of "vibe-coding" these days? I thought it refers to the original Karpathy quote, like cowboy mode, where you accept all diffs and hardly look at code. But now it seems that "vibe-coding" is catch-all clickbait for any LLM workflow. (Tbf, this title "shipping real code with Claude" is fine)
Depends on who you ask ig. For me, hasn’t been a panacea, and I’ve often run into issues (3.7 sonnet and codex have had ~60% success for me but Opus 4 is actually v good)
> - Do you obfuscate any code before sending it to someone's LLM?
In this case, all of it was open source to begin with but good point to think about.
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#23I think most of this is good stuff but I disagree with not letting Claude touch tests or migrations at all. Handing writing tests from scratch is the part I hate the most. Having an LLM do a first pass on tests which I add to and adjust as I see fit has been a big boon on the testing front. It seems the difference between me and the author is I believe whether code was generated by an LLM or not the human still takes…
True but, in my experience, a few major pitfalls that happened:
1. We ran into really bad minefields when we tried to come back to manually edit the generated tests later on. Claude tended to mock everything because it didn’t have context about how we run services, build environments, etc.
2. And this was the worst, all of the devs on the team including me got realllyy lazy with testing. Bugs in production significantly increased.
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#24I finally decided few days ago to try this Claude Code thing in my personal project. It's depressingly efficient. And damn expensive - I used over 10 dollars in one day. But I'm afraid it is inevitable - I will have to pay tax to AI overlords just to be able to keep my job.
I was looking at $2,000 a year and climbing, before Anthropic announce $100 and $200 Max subscriptions that bundled Claude Console and Claude Code. There are limits per five hour windows, but one can toggle back to metered API with the login/ command, or just walk the dog. $100 a month has done me fine.
Same. I ran out on the $200 one too yesterday. It’s skyrocketed after Opus 4. Nothing else comes close
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#25Author here: To be honest, I know there are like a bajillion Claude code posts out there these days. But, there are a few nuggets we figured are worth sharing, like Anchor Comments [1], which have really made a difference: —— # CLAUDE.md ### Anchor comments Add specially formatted comments throughout the codebase, where appropriate, for yourself as inline knowledge that can be easily `grep`ped for. - Use `AIDEV-NOTE:…
Just to provide a contrast to some of the negative comments…
As a very experienced engineer who uses LLMs sporadically* and not in any systematic way, I really appreciated seeing how you use them in production in a real project. I don’t know why people are being negative, you just mentioned your project in details where it was appropriate to talk about the structure of it. Doesn’t strike me as gratuitous self promotion at all.
Your post is giving me motivation to empower the LLMs a little bit more in my workflows.
*: They absolutely don’t get the keys to my projects but I have had great success with having them complete specific tasks.
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#26One of the exciting things to me about the ai agents is how they push and allow you to build processes that we’ve always known were important but were frequently not prioritized in the face of shipping the system. You can use how uncomfortable you are with the ai doing something as a signal that you need to invest in systematic verification of that something. As a for instance in the link, the team could build a syst…
For sure. Another interesting trick I found to be surprisingly effective is to ask Claude Code to “Look around the codebase, and if something is confusing, or weird/counterintuitive — drop a AIDEV-QUESTION: … comment so I can document that bit of code and/or improve it”. We found some really gnarly things that had been forgotten in the codebase.
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#27Author here: To be honest, I know there are like a bajillion Claude code posts out there these days. But, there are a few nuggets we figured are worth sharing, like Anchor Comments [1], which have really made a difference: —— # CLAUDE.md ### Anchor comments Add specially formatted comments throughout the codebase, where appropriate, for yourself as inline knowledge that can be easily `grep`ped for. - Use `AIDEV-NOTE:…
Just to provide a contrast to some of the negative comments… As a very experienced engineer who uses LLMs sporadically* and not in any systematic way, I really appreciated seeing how you use them in production in a real project. I don’t know why people are being negative, you just mentioned your project in details where it was appropriate to talk about the structure of it. Doesn’t strike me as gratuitous self promoti…
Really appreciate the kind words! I did not intend the post to be too much about our company, just that it is the codebase I mostly hack on. :)
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Q: How do you ensure tests are only written by humans? Basically just the honor system?
You can: 1. Add instructions in CLAUDE.md to not touch tests. 2. Disallow the Edit tool for test directories in the project’s .claude/settings.json file
Disallow edit in test dirs is a good tip. thanks.
I meant though in the wider context of the team - everyone uses it but not everyone will work the same, use the same underlying prompts as they work. So how do you ensure everyone keeps to that agreement?
Re: Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude
#29Honest question: approx what percent of the post was human vs machine written?
I’d say around ~40% me, the ideating, editing, citations, and images are all mine; rest Opus 4 :) I typically try to also include the original Claude chat’s link in the post but it seems like Claude doesn’t allow sharing chats with deep research used in them. Update : here’s an older chatgpt conversation while preparing this: https://chatgpt.com/share/6844eaae-07d0-8001-a7f7-e532d63bf8...
thanks. to be clear, I'm not asking the q to be particularly negative about it. Its more just curiosity, mixed with trade in effort. If you wrote it 100%, I'm more inclined to read the whole thing. vs say now just feeding it back to the GPM to extract the condensed nuggets.