How I use every Claude Code feature • Hacker News Board

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#151

Post by riskable » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 6:49 PM UTC

risyachka wrote: post #80

sshh12 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. I work for a growth stage startup and most of these apply to our internal mono repo so hard to share specifics. We use this for both new and legacy code each with their own unique AI coding challenges. If theres enough interest, I might replicate some examples in an open source project.

Whats interesting to see is not the project setup but the resulted generated code in a mid-sized project. To see if it is easy to digest, no repeated code etc or is it just slop that should be consumed by another agent and never by human.

I find the "slop" thing interesting because—to me—it looks like laziness. In the same way that anyone can tell ChatGPT to write something for them instead of writing it themselves and just having it check the work... Or going through multiple revisions before you're satisfied (with what it wrote).

Code is no different! You can tell an AI model to write something for you and that's fine! Except you have to review it! If the code is bad quality just take a moment to tell the AI to fix it!

Like, how hard is it to tell the AI that the code it just wrote is too terse and hard to read? Come on, folks! Take that extra moment! I mean, I'm pretty lazy when working on my hobby projects but even I'm going to get irritated if the code is a gigantic mess.

Just tell it, "this code is a gigantic mess. Refactor it into concise, human-readable files using a logical structure and make sure to add plenty of explanatory comments where anything might be non-obvious. Make sure that the code passes all the tests when you're done."

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#152

Post by cannonpalms » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 6:57 PM UTC

prodigycorp wrote: post #67

thoughtsyntax wrote: post #54

Crazy how fast Claude Code is evolving, every week there’s something new to learn, and it just keeps getting better.

Nothing crazy about it, judging by how much CPU and memory it uses. Now, if it managed to grow features without bringing my M4 Mac with 64GB of ram to a crawl... that's be magic .

CC uses very little system resources.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#153

Post by cannonpalms » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 7:12 PM UTC

FooBarWidget wrote: post #53

Does anyone have any suggestions on making Claude prefer to use project internal abstractions and utility functions? My C++ project has a lot of them. If I just say something like "for I/O and networking code, check IOUtils.h for helpers" then it often doesn't do that. But mentioning all helper functions and classes in the context also seems like a bad idea. What's the best way? Are the new Skills a solution?

I wonder how well a sentence or two in CLAUDE.md, saying to search the local project for examples of similar use cases or use of internal libraries, would work.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#154

Post by cannonpalms » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 7:17 PM UTC

mritchie712 wrote: post #102

> /clear + /catchup (Simple Restart): My default reboot. I /clear the state, then run a custom /catchup command to make Claude read all changed files in my git branch. I've found myself doing similar workarounds. I'm guessing anthropic will just make the /compact command do this instead soon enough.

I've found the latency of /compact makes it unusable. Perhaps this is just the result of my waiting until I have 0% context remaining.

Fun fact, a large chunk of context is reserved for compaction. When you are shown that you have "0% context remaining," it's actually like 30% remaining that's reserved for compaction.

And yet, for some reason I feel like 50% of the time, compaction fails because it runs out of context or hits (non-rate) API limits.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#155

Post by topherhunt » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #141

caymanjim wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, neither Claude nor any other agent actually reads AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md or anything else) without being told to explicitly every session.

I've sniffed Claude Code's HTTP traffic and confirmed that the CLAUDE.md file content (and AGENTS.md if it is @-referenced) is automatically included in the system prompt without it having to perform any additional file read operations.

Wow! That's....

discouraging, actually, considering how frequently Claude ignores my AGENTS.md guidance.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#156

Post by vladsh » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 7:48 PM UTC

Or use this solution and get fine-tuned context generated for each and every task just-in-time : devly.ai

Please stop expecting every engineer on the team to be an ai engineer just to get started with coding agents

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#157

Post by johnfn » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 8:03 PM UTC

Does anyone else struggle with getting Claude to follow even the simplest commands in CLAUDE.md? I’ve completely give up on maintaining it because there’s a coin flip chance it disregards even the simplest instructions. For instance, (after becoming increasingly exasperated and whittling it down over and over), my CLAUDE file now has a single instruction, which says that any ai generated one-off script should be named .aigen.ts, and I can’t get Claude to follow something as simple as that! It does sometimes, but half the time it disregards the instructions.

I use Claude all the time, and this is probably my biggest issue with it. I just workaround by manually supplying context in prompts, but it’s kind of annoying to do so.

Does anyone else struggle with this or am I just doing something horribly wrong?

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#158

Post by mhrmsn » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #157

Does anyone else struggle with getting Claude to follow even the simplest commands in CLAUDE.md? I’ve completely give up on maintaining it because there’s a coin flip chance it disregards even the simplest instructions. For instance, (after becoming increasingly exasperated and whittling it down over and over), my CLAUDE file now has a single instruction, which says that any ai generated one-off script should be name…

Same experience, although I gave up already a while ago so not sure if CLAUDE.md is better followed in newer versions.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#159

Post by dcre » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 8:31 PM UTC

"It shifts us from a “per-seat” license to “usage-based” pricing, which is a much better model for how we work. It accounts for the massive variance in developer usage (We’ve seen 1:100x differences between engineers)."

This is how we are doing it too, for the same reasons. For now, much easier to administer than trying to figure out who spends enough to get a real Claude Code seat. The other nice thing about using API keys is that you basically never hit rate limits.

Re: How I use every Claude Code feature

#160

Post by handfuloflight » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 8:36 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #157

Does anyone else struggle with getting Claude to follow even the simplest commands in CLAUDE.md? I’ve completely give up on maintaining it because there’s a coin flip chance it disregards even the simplest instructions. For instance, (after becoming increasingly exasperated and whittling it down over and over), my CLAUDE file now has a single instruction, which says that any ai generated one-off script should be name…

It's a known issue among us Claudemasters.