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A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

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91–100 of 410 posts

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#91
> budget for $1000-1500/month for a senior engineer going all-in on AI development.

Is this another case of someone using API keys and not knowing about the claude MAX plans? It's $100 or $200 a month, if you're not pure yolo brute-force vibe coding $100 plan works.

https://www.anthropic.com/max

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess each to their own? I can easily end up coding for 16 hours straight (having a great time) if I'm not careful. I can't imagine I'd have as much patience with an AI.

I wonder if this is an introvert vs extrovert thing. Chatting with the AI seems like at least as much work as coding to me (introvert). The folks who don't may be extroverts?

I don't feel like I need to say too much to the agent to get my work done. I'm pretty dang introverted.

I just don't enjoy the work as much as I did when was younger. Now I want to get things done and then spend the day on other more enjoyable (to me) stuff.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#94
every god damn time AI hallucinates a solution that is not real (in ChatGPT)

I havn't put a huge effort into learning to write prompts but in short, it seems easier to write the code myself than determine prompts. If you don't know every detail ahead of time and ask a slightly off question, the entire result will be garbage.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plan mode disabled the tools, so I don’t see how it would do that.

A sandboxed devcontainer is worth setting up though. Lets me run it with —dangerously-skip-permissions

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#96
post #62

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 de…

Does Claude Code provide some kind of "global memory" the llm refers to, or is this just a request you make within the the llm's context window? Just curious hadn't heard the use of the term

EDIT: I see, you're asking Claude to modify claude.md to track your preference there, right?

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/memory

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My method is that I work together with the LLM to figure out the step-by-step plan. I give an outline of what I want to do, and give some breadcrumbs for any relevant existing files that are related in some way, ask it to figure out context for my change and to write up a summary of the full scope of the change we're making, including an index of file paths to all relevant files with a very concise blurb about what e…

The problem is, by the time you’ve gone through the process of making a granular plan and all that, you’ve lost all productivity gains of using the agent. As an engineer, especially as you get more experience, you can kind of visualize the plan for a change very quickly and flesh out the next step while implementing the current step All you have really accomplished with the kind of process described is make the world…

It takes maybe 30min and then it can go off and generate code that would take literal weeks for me to write. There are still huge productivity gains being had.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#99

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.

My set of Claude agent files have an explicit set of interface definitions. Is that what you’re talking about?

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#100
post #34

To all the engineers using claude code: how do you submit your (well, claude’s) to review? Say, you have a big feature/epic to implement. Typically (pre-ai) times you would split it in chunks and submit each chunk as PR to be reviewed. You don’t want to submit dozens of file changes because nobody would review it. Now with llms, one can easily explain the whole feature to the machine and they would output the whole c…

I built a tool to split up a single PR into multiple nice commits: https://github.com/edverma/git-smart-squash
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