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A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

sanity.io

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Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#151
Once thing I've noticed is the difference in code quality by language. I'm constantly disappointed by the output of python code. I have to correct it to follow even the most basic software development principles (DRY, etc).

Typescript on the other hand, seems to do much better on first pass. Still not always beautiful code, but much more application ready.

My hypothesis is that this is due to the billions LOC of Jupyter Notebook it was probably trained on :/

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#152

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?

There is some line here. I don’t know if it’s introvert/extrovert but here are my observations.

I’ve noticed colleagues who enjoy Claude code are more interested in “just ship it!” (and anecdotally are more extroverted than myself).

I find Claude code to be oddly unsatisfying. Still trying to put my finger on it, but I think it’s that I quickly lose context. Even if I understand the changes CC makes, it’s not the same as wrestling with a problem and hitting roadblocks and overcoming. With CC I have no bearing on whether I’m in an area of code with lots of room for error, or if I’m standing in the edge of a cliff and can’t cross some line in the design.

I’m way more concerned with understanding the design and avoiding future pain than my “ship it” colleagues (and anecdotally am way more introverted). I see what they build and, yes, it’s working, for now, but the table relationships aren’t right and this is going to have to be rebuilt later, except now it’s feeding a downstream report that’s being consumed by the business, so the beta version is now production. But the 20 other things this app touches indirectly weren’t part of the vibe coding context, so the design obviously doesn’t account for that. It could, but of course the “ship it” folks aren’t the ones that are going to build out lengthy requirements and scopes of work and document how a dozen systems relate to and interact with each other.

I guess I’m seeing that the speed limit of quality is still the speed of my understanding, and (maybe more importantly) that my weaponizing of my own obsession only works when I’m wrestling and overcoming, not just generating code as fast as possible.

I do wonder about the weaponized obsession. People will draw or play music obsessively, something about the intrinsic motivation of mastery, and having AI create the same drawing, or music, isn’t the same in terms of interest or engagement.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many of these boilerplate do you actually have to do? Any script or complicated command that I had to write was worthy to be recorded in some bash alias or preserved somewhere. But they mostly live in my bash history or right next to the project. The boilerplate argument is becoming quite old.

One recent example of boilerplate for me is I’ve been writing dbt models and I get it to write the schema.yml file for me based on the sql.

It’s basically just a translation, but with dozens of tables, each with dozens of columns it gets tedious pretty fast.

If given other files from the project as context it’s also pretty good at generating the table and column descriptions for documentation, which I would probably just not write at all if doing it by hand.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#154

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…

How does a token predictor “apply heuristics to score candidates”? Is it running a tool, such as a Python script it writes for scoring candidates? If not, isn’t it just pulling some statistically-likely “score” out of its weights rather than actually calculating one?

Token prediction is the interface. The implementation is a universal function approximator communicating through the token weights.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#155

So we’re supposed to start paying $1k-$1,5k on top of already crazy salaries just to maybe get a productivity boost on trivial to semi trivial issues? I know my boss would not be keen on that at least.

The high salaries make productivity improvements even more important.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#156
post #125

So we’re supposed to start paying $1k-$1,5k on top of already crazy salaries just to maybe get a productivity boost on trivial to semi trivial issues? I know my boss would not be keen on that at least.

Hardware companies routinely license individual EDA tool seats that cost more than numerous developer salaries - $1k/year is nothing if it improves productivity by any measurable amount.

The OP was saying it's $1k/mo. That's a 5-10% raise, which is a bit more than nothing.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A similar, non-LLM battle, is a global find and replace, but _not quite identical_ everywhere. Do I just go through the 20 files and do it myself, or try to get clever with regex? Which is ultimately faster...

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#158
post #20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your tips are perfect. Most users will just give a vague tasks like: "write a clone of Steam" or "create a rocket" and then they blame Claude Code. If you want AI to code for you, you have to decompose your problem like a product owner would do. You can get helped by AI as well, but you should have a plan and specifications. Once your plan is ready, you have to decompose the problem into different modules, then make…

> Most users will just give a vague tasks like: "write a clone of Steam" or "create a rocket" and then they blame Claude Code. This seems like half of HN with how much HN hates AI. Those who hate it or say it’s not useful to them seem to be fighting against it and not wanting to learn how to use it. I still haven’t seen good examples of it not working even with obscure languages or proprietary stuff.

> not wanting to learn how to use it

I kind of feel this. I’ll code for days and forget to eat or shower. I love it. Using Claude code is oddly unsatisfying to me. Probably a different skillset, one that doesn’t hit my obsessive tendencies for whatever reason.

I could see being obsessed with some future flavor of it, and I think it would be some change with the interface, something more visual (gamified?). Not low-code per se, but some kind of mashup of current functionality with graph database visualization (not just node force graphs, something more functional but more ergonomic). I haven’t seen anything that does this well, yet.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#159
post #3

Preventing garbage just requires that you take into account the cognitive limits of the agent. For example ... 1) Don't ask for large / complex change. Ask for a plan but ask it to implement the plan in small steps and ask the model to test each step before starting the next. 2) For really complex steps, ask the model to write code to visualize the problem and solution. 3) If the model fails on a given step, ask it t…

> 1) Don't ask for large / complex change. Ask for a plan but ask it to implement the plan in small steps and ask the model to test each step before starting the next.

I asked Claude Code to read a variable from a .env file.

It proceeded to write a .env parser from scratch.

I then asked it to just use Node's built in .env file parsing....

This was the 2nd time in the same session that it wrote a .env file parser from scratch. :/

Claude Code is amazing, but it'll goes off and does stupid even for simple requests.

Re: A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

#160

So we’re supposed to start paying $1k-$1,5k on top of already crazy salaries just to maybe get a productivity boost on trivial to semi trivial issues? I know my boss would not be keen on that at least.

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…

Paying for Internet is not a great analogy imo. If you don't pay $1k/mo for Internet, you literally can't work.

What happens if you don't pay $1k/mo for Claude? Do you get an appreciable drop in productivity and output?

Genuinely asking.

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