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My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

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Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#11

Post by dejavucoder »

wrs wrote: post #9

There is a VS Code extension for Claude Code. It's hardly more than a terminal window really, but that in itself is pretty handy. If you do /ide to connect up the extension it does a few things, but not yet anything resembling the Cursor diff experience (much less the Cursor tab experience, which is the reason I still use it).

I use Claude Code 50% of times with Cursor now due to the diff and tab. The extension is just a bit buggy sometimes otherwise I would use it much more. I hit some node related bugs today while searching stuff with it (forgot to report to Anthropic lol). Other bugs include a scroll stuttering.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#12

Post by arealaccount »

iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

Weirdly enough I have the opposite experience where it will take several minutes to do something, then I go in and debug for a while because the app has become fubar, then finally realize it did the whole thing incorrectly and throw it all away.

And I reach for Claude quite a bit because if it worked as well for me like everyone here says, that would be amazing.

But at best it’ll get a bunch of boilerplate done after some manual debugging, at worst I spend an hour and some amount of tokens on a total dead end

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#13

Post by pragmatic »

iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

Could you elaborate a bit on the tasks,languages,domain etc you’re using it with?

People have such widely varying experiences and I’m wondering why.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#14

Post by jm4 »

arealaccount wrote: post #12
iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

Weirdly enough I have the opposite experience where it will take several minutes to do something, then I go in and debug for a while because the app has become fubar, then finally realize it did the whole thing incorrectly and throw it all away. And I reach for Claude quite a bit because if it worked as well for me like everyone here says, that would be amazing. But at best it’ll get a bunch of boilerplate done after…

You can tell Claude to verify its work. I’m using it for data analysis tasks and I always have it check the raw data for accuracy. It was a whole different ballgame when I started doing that.

Clear instructions go a long way, asking it to review work, asking it to debug problems, etc. definitely helps.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#15

Post by deeshee »

It's great to see even the most hardcore developers who are not fond of change being happy with the latest releases related to AI-assisted development.

My workflow now boils down to 2 tools really - leap.new to go from 0 to 1 because it also generates the backend code w/ infra + deployment and then I pick it up in Zed/Claude Code and continue working on it.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#16

Post by tcdent »

arealaccount wrote: post #12
iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

Weirdly enough I have the opposite experience where it will take several minutes to do something, then I go in and debug for a while because the app has become fubar, then finally realize it did the whole thing incorrectly and throw it all away. And I reach for Claude quite a bit because if it worked as well for me like everyone here says, that would be amazing. But at best it’ll get a bunch of boilerplate done after…

This has a lot to do with how you structure your codebase; if you have repeatable patterns that make conventions obvious, it will follow them for the most part.

When it drops in something hacky, I use that to verify the functionality is correct and then prompt a refactor to make it follow better conventions.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#17

Post by hnaccount_rng »

arealaccount wrote: post #12
iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

Weirdly enough I have the opposite experience where it will take several minutes to do something, then I go in and debug for a while because the app has become fubar, then finally realize it did the whole thing incorrectly and throw it all away. And I reach for Claude quite a bit because if it worked as well for me like everyone here says, that would be amazing. But at best it’ll get a bunch of boilerplate done after…

Yeah that is kind of my experience as well. And - according to the friend who highly recommended it - I gave it a task that is "easily within its capabilities". Since I don't think I'm being gaslighted, I suspect it's me using it wrong. But I really can't figure out why. And I'm on my third attempt now..

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#18

Post by vunderba »

jm4 wrote: post #14
arealaccount wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weirdly enough I have the opposite experience where it will take several minutes to do something, then I go in and debug for a while because the app has become fubar, then finally realize it did the whole thing incorrectly and throw it all away. And I reach for Claude quite a bit because if it worked as well for me like everyone here says, that would be amazing. But at best it’ll get a bunch of boilerplate done after…

You can tell Claude to verify its work. I’m using it for data analysis tasks and I always have it check the raw data for accuracy. It was a whole different ballgame when I started doing that. Clear instructions go a long way, asking it to review work, asking it to debug problems, etc. definitely helps.

> You can tell Claude to verify its work

Definitely - with ONE pretty big callout. This only works when a clear and quantifiable rubric for verification can be expressed. Case in point, I put Claude Code to work on a simple react website that needed a "Refresh button" and walked away. When I came back, the button was there, and it had used a combination of MCP playwright + screenshots to roughly verify it was working.

The problem was that it decided to "draw" a circular arrow refresh icon and the arrow at the end of the semicircle was facing towards the circle centroid. Anyone (even a layman) would take one look at it and realize it looked ridiculous, but Claude couldn't tell even when I took the time to manually paste a screenshot asking if it saw any issues.

While it would also be unreasonable to expect a junior engineer to hand-write the coordinates for a refresh icon in SVG - they would never even attempt to do that in the first place realizing it would be far simpler to find one from Lucide, Font Awesome, emojis, etc.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#19

Post by criddell »

pragmatic wrote: post #13
iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

Could you elaborate a bit on the tasks,languages,domain etc you’re using it with? People have such widely varying experiences and I’m wondering why.

I haven't had great luck with Claude writing Windows Win32 (using MFC) in C++. It invents messages and APIs all the time that read like exactly what I want it to do.

I'd think Win32 development would be something AIs are very strong at because it's so old, so well documented, and there's a ton of code out there for it to read. Yet it still struggles with the differences between Windows messages, control notification messages, and command messages.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#20

Post by kbuchanan »

iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

I've had the same experience, although I feel like Claude is far more than a junior to me. It's ability to propose options, make recommendations, and illustrate trade-offs is just unreal.
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