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What makes Claude Code so damn good

minusx.ai

141–150 of 322 posts

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#141
post #68

I’d be curious to know what MCPs you’ve found useful with CC. Thoughts?

(blogpost author here) I actually found none of them useful. I think MCP is an incomplete idea. Tools and the system prompt cannot be so cleanly separated (at least not yet). Just slapping on tools hurts performance more than it helps.

I've now gone back to just using vanilla CC with a really really rich claude.md file.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been DMCA'd since you posted it. Happen to know where I can find a fork?

> That's been DMCA'd since you posted it. I know, thus the :trollface: > Happen to know where I can find a fork? I don't know where you can find a fork, but even if there is a fork somewhere that's still alive, which is unlikely, it would be for a really old version of Claude Code. You would probably be better off reverse engineering the minified JavaScript or whatever that ships with the latest Claude Code.

Gotcha, I misunderstood.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#144
post #33

Oof, this comes at a hard moment in my Claude Code usage. I'm trying to have it help me debug some Elastic issues on Security Onion but after a few minutes it spits out a zillion lines of obfuscated JS and says: Error: kill EPERM at process.kill (node:internal/process/per_thread:226:13) at Ba2 (file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthropic-ai/claude-code/cli.js:506:19791) at file:///usr/local/lib/node_modules/@anthro…

Claude and some of the edgier parts of localstack are not friends either. It's pretty okay at rust which surprised me.

It makes me think that the language/platform/architecture that is "most known" by LLMs will soon be the preferred -- sort of a homogenization of technologies by LLM usage. Because if you can be 10x as successfully vibey in, say, nodejs versus elixir or go -- well, why would you opt for those in a greenfield project at all? Particularly if you aren't a tech shop and that choice allows you to use junior coders as if they were midlevel or senior.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#145
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the web ui (chat)? I actually really like gemini 2.5 pro. For the command line tool (claude code vs gemini code)? It isn't even close. Gemini code was useless. Claude code was mostly just slow.

You mean Gemini CLI. Yeah it's confusing

Thanks, that's the one!

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#146

Thanks for sharing this. At a time where this is a rush towards multi-agent systems, this is helpful to see how an LLM-first organization is going after it. Lots of the design aspects here are things I experiment with day to day so it's good to see others use it as well A few takeaways for me from this (1) Long prompts are good - and don't forget basic things like explaining in the prompt what the tool is, how to hel…

(author of the blogpost here) Yeah, you can extract a LOT of performance from the basics and don't have to do any complicated setup for ~99% of use cases. Keep the loop simple, have clear tools (it is ok if tools overlap in function). Clarity and simplicity >>> everything else.

does a framework like vercel's ai sdk help, or is handling the loop + tool calling so straightforward that a framework is overcomplicating things?

for context, i want to build a claude code like agent in a WYSIWYG markdown app. that's how i stumbled on your blog post :)

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#147

It shocks me when people say that LLMs don't make them more productive, because my experience has been the complete opposite, especially with Claude Code. Either I'm worse than then at programming, to the point that I find an LLM useful and they don't, or they don't know how to use LLMs for coding.

Speaking for myself, LLMs are reasonably good at writing tests or adapting existing structures, but they are not very good at doing what I actually want to do (design, novelty, trying to figure out the very best way to do a thing). I gain some productivity from the reduction of drudgery, but that's never been much of a bottleneck to begin with.

The thing is, a lot of the code that people write is cookie-cutter stuff. Possibly the entirety of frontend development. It's not copy-paste per se, but it is porting and adapting common patterns on differently-shaped data. It's pseudo-copy-paste, and of course AI's going to be good at it, this is its whole schtick. But it's not, like, interesting coding.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consensus is the opposite: most people find copilot does less well than Claude with both using sonnet 4. Without discounting your experience, you’ll need to give us more detail about what exactly you were trying to do (what problem, what prompt) and what you mean by “lazy” if you want any meaningful advice though.

Where do you find this "consensus"?

read HN threads, talk to people using AI alot. I have the same perception

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#150
post #5

What do people think of Google's Gemini (Pro?) compared to Claude for code? I really like a lot of what Google produces, but they can't seem to keep a product that they don't shut down and they can be pretty ham-fisted, both with corporate control (Chrome and corrupt practices) and censorship

The Gemini CLI tool is atrocious. It might work sometimes for analyzing code, but for modifying files, never. The inevitable conclusion of every session I've ever tried has been an infinite loop. Sometimes it's an infinite loop of self-deprecation, sometimes just repeating itself to failure, usually repeating the same tool failure until it catches it as an infinite loop. Tool usage frequently (we're talking 90% of th…

This matches my experience with it. I won’t let it touch any code I have not yet safely checked in before firing up Gemini. It will commonly get into a death loop mid session that can’t be recovered from.
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