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What makes Claude Code so damn good

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Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#161

Post by erelong »

> The main takeaway, again, is to keep things simple.

if true this seems like a bloated approach but tbh I wouldn't claim to know totally how to use Claude like the author here...

I find you can get a lot of mileage out of "regular" prompts, I'd call them?

Just asking for what you need one prompt at a time?

I still can't visualize how any of the complexity on top of that like discussed in the article adds anything to carefully crafted prompts one at a time

I also still can't really visualize how claude works compared to simple prompts one at a time.

Like, wouldn't it be more efficient to generate a prompt and then check it by looping through the appendix sections ("Main Claude Code System Prompt" and "All Claude Code Tools"), or is that basically what the LLM does somewhat mysteriously (it just works)? So like "give me while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" is the entirety of the prompt... then if you need to you can loop through the appendix section? Otherwise isn't that a massive over-use of tokens, and the requests might even be ignored because they're too complex?

The control flow eludes me a bit here. I otherwise get the impression that the LLM does not use the appendix sections correctly by adding them to prompts (like, couldn't it just ignore them at times)? It would seem like you'd get more accurate responses by separating that from whatever you're prompting and then checking the prompt through looping over the appendix sections.

Does that make any sense?

I'm visualizing coding an entire program as prompting discrete pieces of it. I have not needed elaborate .md files to do that, you just ask for "how to do a while loop equivalent in [new language I'm learning]" for example. It's possible my prompts are much simpler for my uses, but I still haven't seen any write-ups on how people are constructing elaborate programs in some other way.

Like how are people stringing prompts together to create whole programs? (I guess is one question I have that comes to mind)

I guess maybe I need to find a prompt-by-prompt breakdown of some people building things to get a clearer picture of how LLMs are being used

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#162

Post by zackify »

erelong wrote: post #161

> The main takeaway, again, is to keep things simple. if true this seems like a bloated approach but tbh I wouldn't claim to know totally how to use Claude like the author here... I find you can get a lot of mileage out of "regular" prompts, I'd call them? Just asking for what you need one prompt at a time? I still can't visualize how any of the complexity on top of that like discussed in the article adds anything to…

How you see and use it is the same way I do. So interested to hear other replies

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#163

Post by CuriouslyC »

seanwessmith wrote: post #159
CuriouslyC wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini is amazing for taking a merge file of your whole repo, dropping it in there, and chatting about stuff. The level of whole codebase understanding is unreal, and it can do some amazing architectural planning assistance. Claude is nowhere near able to do that. My tactic is to work with Gemini to build a dense summary of the project and create a high level plan of action, then take that to gpt5 and have it try to…

mind typing this up? i've got a basic GPT -> Claude workflow going for now

https://gist.github.com/githubcustomerserviceistrash/c716e76...

I should mention I made that one for my research/stats workflow, so there's some specific stuff in there for that, but you can prompt chat gpt to generalize it.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#164

Post by jampa »

yumraj wrote: post #74

I made insane progress with CC over last several weeks, but lately have noticed progress stalling. I’m in the middle of some refactoring/bug fixing/optimization but it’s constantly running into issues, making half baked changes, not able to fix regressions etc. Still trying to figure out how to make do a better job. Might have to break it into smaller chunks or something. Been pretty frustrating couple of weeks. If a…

I felt that, too. It turns out I was getting 'too comfortable' while using CC. The best way is to treat CC like a junior engineer and overexplain things before letting it do anything. With time, you start to trust CC, but you shouldn't do that because it is still the same LLM when you started.

Another thing is that before, you were in a greenfield project, so Claude didn't need any context to do new things. Now, your codebase is larger, so you need to point out to Claude where it should find more information. You need to spoon-feed the relevant files with "@" where you want it to look up things and make changes.

If you feel Claude is lazy, force it to use more thinking budget "think" [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#165

Post by alankarmisra »

fragmede wrote: post #160
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mirrors a weird thought I’ve had recently. It’s not a thing I necessarily agree with, but just an idea. I hear people say things like, “AI isn’t coming for my job because LLMs suck at [language or tech stack]!” And I wonder, does that just mean that other stacks have an advantage? If a senior engineer with Claude Code can solve the problem in Python/TypeScript in significantly less time than you can solve it in…

LLMs write python and typescript well, because of all the examples in their training data. But what if we made a new programming language whos goal was to be optimal for an LLM to generate it? Would it be closer to assembly? If we project that the future is vibe coded, and we scarcely look at the outputted code, testing, instead, that the output matches the input correctly, not looking at the code, what would that la…

They’d presumably do worse. LLMs have no intrinsic sense of programming logic. They are merely pattern matching against a large training set. If you invent a new language that doesn’t have sufficient training examples for a variety of coding tasks, and is syntactically very different from all the existing languages, the LLMs wouldn’t have enough training data and would do very badly.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#166

Post by metrix »

fragmede wrote: post #160
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mirrors a weird thought I’ve had recently. It’s not a thing I necessarily agree with, but just an idea. I hear people say things like, “AI isn’t coming for my job because LLMs suck at [language or tech stack]!” And I wonder, does that just mean that other stacks have an advantage? If a senior engineer with Claude Code can solve the problem in Python/TypeScript in significantly less time than you can solve it in…

LLMs write python and typescript well, because of all the examples in their training data. But what if we made a new programming language whos goal was to be optimal for an LLM to generate it? Would it be closer to assembly? If we project that the future is vibe coded, and we scarcely look at the outputted code, testing, instead, that the output matches the input correctly, not looking at the code, what would that la…

I have thought the same thing. How is it created? is it an idea by an LLM to make the language, or a dev to create a language designed for an llm.

How do we get the LLM to gain knowledge on this new language that we have no example usage of?

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#167

Post by [deleted] »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #156
schmookeeg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gre…

This mirrors a weird thought I’ve had recently. It’s not a thing I necessarily agree with, but just an idea. I hear people say things like, “AI isn’t coming for my job because LLMs suck at [language or tech stack]!” And I wonder, does that just mean that other stacks have an advantage? If a senior engineer with Claude Code can solve the problem in Python/TypeScript in significantly less time than you can solve it in…

[deleted]

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#169

Post by esafak »

alex1138 wrote: 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

I used to like it a lot but I feel like it got dumber lately. Am I imagining things or has anyone else observed this too?

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#170

Post by bilekas »

dgunay wrote: post #157
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mirrors a weird thought I’ve had recently. It’s not a thing I necessarily agree with, but just an idea. I hear people say things like, “AI isn’t coming for my job because LLMs suck at [language or tech stack]!” And I wonder, does that just mean that other stacks have an advantage? If a senior engineer with Claude Code can solve the problem in Python/TypeScript in significantly less time than you can solve it in…

Letting go of the particulars of the generated code is proving difficult for me. I hand edit most of the code my agents produce for taste even if it is correct, but I feel that in the long term that's not the optimal use of my time in agent-driven programming. Maybe the models will just get so good that they know how I would write it myself.

I would argue this approach will help you in the long term with code maintainability. Which I feel will be one of the biggest issues down the line with AI generated codebases as they get larger.
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