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A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

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Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#61

Post by LtWorf »

awesome_dude wrote: post #42
groby_b wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: Do you also laud your compiler for particularly good optimizations?

There's a couple of things there 1. I don't see the output of the compiler, as in, all I get is an executable blob. It could be inspected, but I don't think that I ever have in my 20+ year career. Maybe I lie and I've rocked up with a Hex editor once or twice, out of pure curiousity, but I've never got past looking for strings that I recognise. 2. When I use Claude, I am using it to do things that I can do, by hand,…

You've got to check the assembly, not the binary, for optimisations…

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#62

Post by meerab »

I have barely written any code since my switch to Claude Code! It's the best thing since sliced bread!

Here's what works for me:

- Detailed claude.md containing overall information about the project.

- Anytime Claude chooses a different route that's not my preferred route - ask my preference to be saved in global memory.

- Detailed planning documentation for each feature - Describe high-level functionality.

- As I develop the feature, add documentation with database schema, sample records, sample JSON responses, API endpoints used, test scripts.

- MCP, MCP, MCP! Playwright is a game changer

The more context you give upfront, the less back-and-forth you need. It's been absolutely transformative for my productivity.

Thank you Claude Code team!

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#63

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

lucasyvas wrote: post #55
dontlaugh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, why not just write the code yourself?

I reached this conclusion pretty quickly. With all the hand holding I can write it faster - and it’s not bragging, almost anyone experienced here could do the same. Writing the code is the fast and easy part once you know what you want to do. I use AI as a rubber duck to shorten that cycle, then write it myself.

I’ve been trapped in a hole of “can I get the agent to do this?” And the change would have taken me 1/10th the time.

Choosing the battles to pick is part of the skill at the moment.

I use AI for a lot of boiler plate, tedious tasks I can’t quite do a vim recording for, small targeted scripts.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#64

Post by wg0 »

abraxas wrote: post #44
lordnacho wrote: post #23

I'm using Claude all the time now. It works, and I'm amazed it worked so easily for me. Here's what it looks like: 1) Summarize what I think my project currently does 2) Summarize what I think it should do 3) Give a couple of hints about how to do it 4) Watch it iterate a write-compile-test loop until it thinks it's ready I haven't added any files or instructions anywhere, I just do that loop above. I know of people…

I tried to follow the same pattern on a backend project written in Python/FastAPI and this has been mostly a heartache. It gets kind of close but then it seems to periodically go off the rails, lose its mind and write utter shit. Like braindead code that has no chance of working. I don't know if this is a question of the language or what but I just have no good luck with its consistency. And I did invest time into de…

I can second that. Even on plain CRUD with little to no domain logic.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#65

Post by jedberg »

I'd like to share my journey with Claude (not code).

I fed Claude a copy of everything I've ever written on Hacker News. Then I asked it to generate an essay that sounds like me.

Out of five paragraphs I had to change one sentence. Everything else sounded exactly as I would have written it.

It was scary good.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#66

Post by CharlesW »

awesome_dude wrote: post #19
axus wrote: post #18

I like his point about more objectivity and zero ego. You don't have to worry about hurting an AI's feelings or your own when you throw away code.

But I still find myself needing (strongly) to let Claude know when it's made a breakthrough that would have been hard work on my own.

Good creators tend to treat their tools with respect, and I can't imagine any reason we shouldn't feel gratitude toward our tools after a particularly satisfying session.

Also, there may be selfish reasons to do this as well: (1) "Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance" https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14531 (2) "Three Things to Know About Prompting LLMs" https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/three-things-to-know-abo...

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#68

Post by jprokay13 »

lucasyvas wrote: post #55
dontlaugh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, why not just write the code yourself?

I reached this conclusion pretty quickly. With all the hand holding I can write it faster - and it’s not bragging, almost anyone experienced here could do the same. Writing the code is the fast and easy part once you know what you want to do. I use AI as a rubber duck to shorten that cycle, then write it myself.

I am coming back to this. I’ve been using Claude pretty hard at work and for personal projects, but the longer I do it, the more disappointed I become with the quality of output for anything bigger than a script. I do love planning things out and clarifying my thoughts. It’s a turbocharged rubber duck - but it’s not a great engineer

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#69

Post by drzaiusx11 »

colordrops wrote: post #50
yodsanklai wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, all good engineering principles which reduce cognitive load for humans work for AI as well.

This is the big secret. Keep code modular, small, single purpose, encapsulated, and it works great with vibe coding. I want to write a protocol/meta language similar to the markdown docs that Claude et al create that is per module, and defines behavior, so you actually program and compose modules with well defined interfaces in natural language. I'm surprised someone hasn't done it already.

Isn't what you're describing exactly what Kiro aims to solve?

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#70

Post by jaggederest »

hex4def6 wrote: post #48
nostrademons wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that an effective tactic for larger, more complex tasks is to tell it "Don't write any code now. I'm going to describe each of the steps of the problem in more detail. The rough outline is going to be 1) Read this input 2) Generate these candidates 3) apply heuristics to score candidates 4) prioritize and rank candidates 5) come up with this data structure reflecting the output 6) write the output back to…

FYI: You can force "Plan mode" by pressing shift-tab. That will prevent it from eagerly implementing stuff.

> That will prevent it from eagerly implementing stuff.

In theory. In practice, it's not a very secure sandbox and Claude will happily go around updating files if you insist / the prompt is bad / it goes off on a tangent.

I really should just set up a completely sandboxed VM for it so that I don't care if it goes rm-rf happy.

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