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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

#141

Post by faangguyindia »

adastra22 wrote: post #95
jaggederest wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

how can it plan if it does not have access to file read, search, bash tools to investigate things? If it has access to bash tools then it's going to write code, via echo or sed.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#142

Post by jaggederest »

shaunxcode wrote: post #132
jaggederest wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is prompting. Prompt to within an inch of your life. Treat prompts as source code - edit them in files, use @ notation to bring them into the console. Use Claude to generate its own prompts - https://github.com/wshobson/commands/ and https://github.com/wshobson/agents/ are very handy, they include a prompt-engineer persona. I'm at the point now where I have to yell at the AI once in a while, but I touch essen…

I am convinced that this comment once read aloud in the cadence of Ginsberg is a work of art!

Now I'm trying to find a text-to-Ginsberg translator. Maybe he's who I sound like in my head.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#143

Post by EnPissant »

jaggederest wrote: post #101
adastra22 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know either but I've seen it write to files in plan mode. Very confusing.

That's not possible. You are misremembering.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#144

Post by oxidant »

jaggederest wrote: post #101
adastra22 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know either but I've seen it write to files in plan mode. Very confusing.

I've never seen it write a file in plan mode either.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#145

Post by reissbaker »

nikcub wrote: post #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

Yeah $1k-1.5k seems absurdly high. The $200/month 20x variant of the Max plan covers an insane amount of usage, and the rate limits reset every five hours. Hard to imagine needing it so badly that you're blowing through that rate limit multiple times a day, every day... And if you are, I think switching to per-token payment would probably cost a lot more than $1k.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#146

Post by reissbaker »

block_dagger wrote: post #25

The author doesn't make it clear why they switched from Cursor to Claude. Curious about what they can do with Claude that can't be done with Cursor. I use both a lot and find Cursor to be superior for the very large codebases I work in.

Pretty much everyone I talk to prefers the opposite, and feels like Claude performs best inside the Claude Code harness and not the Cursor one. But I suppose different strokes for different folks...

Personally I'm a Neovim addict, so you can pry TUIs out of my cold dead hands (although I recognize that's not a preference everyone shares). I'm also not purely vibecoding; I just use it to speed up annoying tasks, especially UI work.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#147

Post by sshine »

EnPissant wrote: post #143
jaggederest wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know either but I've seen it write to files in plan mode. Very confusing.

That's not possible. You are misremembering.

I've seen it run commands that are naively assumed to be reading files or searching directories.

I.e. not its own tools, but command-line executables.

Its assumptions about these commands, and specifically the way it ran them, were correct.

But I have seen it run commands in plan mode.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#148

Post by drudolph914 »

to throw my hat into the ring, I am in no way shy about using the AI tooling and I like using it, but I am happy we're finally seeing people talk about AI that matches with my personal reality with the tools.

for the record, I've been bullish on the tooling from the beginning

My dev-tooling AI journey has been chatGPT -> vscode + copilot -> early cursor adopter -> early claude + cursor adopter -> cursor agent with claude -> and now claude code

I've also spent a lot of time trying out self-hosted LLMs such as couple version of Qwen coder 2.5/3 32B, as well as deepseek 30B - and talking to them through the vscode continue.dev extension

My personal feelings are that the AI coding/tooling industry has seen a major plateau in usefulness as soon as agents became apart of the tooling. The reality is coding is a highly precise task, and LLMs down to the very core of the model architecture are not precise in the way coding needs them to be. and it's not that I don't think we won't one day see coding agents, but I think it will take a deep and complete bottom up kind of change and an possibly an entirely new model architecture to get us to what people imagine a coding agent is

I've accepted to just use claude w/ cursor and to be done with experimenting. the agent tooling just slows my engineering team down

I think the worst part about this dev tooling space is the comment sections on these kinds of articles is completely useless. it's either AI hype bots just saying non-sense, or the most mid an obvious takes that you here everywhere else. I've genuinely have become frustrated with all this vague advice and how the AI dev community talks about this domain space. there is no science, data, or reason as to why these things fail or how to improve it

I think anyone who tries to take this domain space seriously knows that there's limit to all this tooling, we're probably not going to see anything group breaking for a while, and there doesn't exist a person, outside the AI researchers at the the big AI companies, that could tell ya how to actually improve the performance of a coding agent

I think that famous vibe-code reddit post said it best

"what's the point of using these tools if I still need a software engineer to actually build it when I'm done prototyping"

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#149

Post by [deleted] »

everforward wrote: post #79
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't use $20 of credit (gpt-5 thinking via intellij's pro AI subscription) a month right now with plenty of usage so I'm surprised at the $1k figure. Is Claude that much more expensive? (a quick Google suggests yes actually). Having said the above some level of AI spending is the new reality. Your workplace pays for internet right? Probably a really expensive fast corporate grade connection? Well they now also nee…

I don't know what Intellij's AI integration is like, but my brief Claude Code experience is that it really chews through tokens. I think it's a combination of putting a lot of background info into the context, along with a lot of "planning" sort of queries that are fairly invisible to the end user but help with building that background for the ultimate query. Aider felt similar when I tried it in architect mode; my p…

[deleted]

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#150

Post by LtWorf »

rester324 wrote: post #35

> If I were to give advice from an engineer's perspective, if you're a technical leader considering AI adoption: >> Let your engineers adopt and test different AI solutions: AI-assisted coding is a skill that you have to practice to learn. I am sorry, but this is so out of touch with reality. Maybe in the US most companies are willing to allocate you 1000 or 1500 USD/month/engineer, but I am sure that in many countri…

I love how you are getting downvoted, probably by people who have never set foot outside the USA.
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