For this particular project I suggest manually prying one section of the app, committing that change, and then telling Claude "look at commit HASH first, now port feature X in the same style".
Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
201–210 of 491 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey Boris from the Claude Code team - could you guys please be so kind so as to stop pushing that narrative about CLAUDE.md, either yourselves or through influencers and GenAI-grifters? The reason being, it is simply not true. A lot of the time the instructions will be ignored. Actually, the term "ignored" is putting the bar too high, because your tool does not intentionally "ignore", not having sentience and knowled…
CLAUDE.md is read on session startup. If you're continually finding that it's being forgotten, maybe you're not starting fresh sessions often enough.
I should not have to fight tooling, especially the supposedly "intelligent" one. What's the point of it, if we have to always adapt to the tool, instead of the other way around?
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#203Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. A few tips: 1. If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. I add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. 2. Use Plan mode (press shift-tab 2x). Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan b…
Hey Boris, can you teach CC how to use cd?
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. Sure, for 4/5 interactions then will ignore those completely :) Try for yourself: add to CLAUDE.md an instruction to always refer to you as Mr. bcherny and it will stop very soon. Coincidentally at that…
Yeah, adherence is a hard problem. It should be feeling much better in newer models, especially Opus 4.5. I generally find that Opus listens to me the first time.
Have been using Opus 4.5 and can confirm this is how it feels, it just works.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#205Hey, Boris from the Claude Code team here. A few tips: 1. If there is anything Claude tends to repeatedly get wrong, not understand, or spend lots of tokens on, put it in your CLAUDE.md. Claude automatically reads this file and it’s a great way to avoid repeating yourself. I add to my team’s CLAUDE.md multiple times a week. 2. Use Plan mode (press shift-tab 2x). Go back and forth with Claude until you like the plan b…
Hey Boris, I couldn't agree more. And using Plan mode was a major breakthrough for me. Speaking of Plan Mode... I was previously using it repeatedly in sessions (and was getting great results). The most recent major release introduced this bug where it keeps referring back to the first plan you made in a session even when you're planning something else ( https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/12505 ). I fin…
Yes, I've also been confused by things like this. Claude code is sometimes saving plans to ~/.claude/plans under animal names. But it's not really surface where the plan goes, not what the expected way to refer back to them is?
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
CLAUDE.md is read on session startup. If you're continually finding that it's being forgotten, maybe you're not starting fresh sessions often enough.
I should not have to fight tooling, especially the supposedly "intelligent" one. What's the point of it, if we have to always adapt to the tool, instead of the other way around?
It's a tool. The first time you used a shell you had to learn it. The first time you used a text editor you had to learn it.
You can learn how to use it, or you can put it down if you think it doesn't bring you any benefit.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously the Anthropic employee advertising their product wants you to pay as much as possible for it.
The generosity of the Max plans indicates otherwise.
God bless these generously benevolent corporations, giving us such amazing services for the low low price of only $200 per month. I'm going to subscribe right now! I almost feel bad, it's like I'm stealing from them.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#208Using voice transcription is nice for fully expressing what you want, so the model doesn't need to make guesses. I'm often voicing 500-word prompts. If you talk in a winding way that looks awkward when in text, that's fine. The model will almost certainly be able to tell what you mean. Using voice-to-text is my biggest suggestion for people who want to use AI for programming (I'm not a particularly slow typer. I can…
voice transcription is silly when someone is listening you talking to something that isn't exactly human, imagine explaining you were talking to AI. When it's more than one sentence I use voice too.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real secret to agent productivity is letting go of your understanding of the code and trusting the AI to generate the proper thing. Very pro agent devs like ghuntley will all say this. And it makes sense. For most coding problems the challenge isn’t writing code. Once you know what to write typing the code is a drop in the bucket. AI is still very useful, but if you really wanna go fast you have to give up on you…
> The real secret to agent productivity is letting go of your understanding of the code and trusting the AI to generate the proper thing The few times I've done that, the agent eventually faced a problem/bug it couldn't solve and I had to go and read the entire codebase myself. Then, found several subtle bugs (like writing private keys to disk even when that was an explicit instruction not to). Eventually ended up re…
You made the mistake of looking at the code, though. If you didn't look at the code, you wouldn't have known those bugs existed.
Re: Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should not have to fight tooling, especially the supposedly "intelligent" one. What's the point of it, if we have to always adapt to the tool, instead of the other way around?
It's a tool. The first time you used a shell you had to learn it. The first time you used a text editor you had to learn it. You can learn how to use it, or you can put it down if you think it doesn't bring you any benefit.
I am sorry but what do I have to learn? That the tool does not work as advertised? That sometimes it will work as advertised, sometimes not? That it will sometimes expose critical secrets as plain text and some other time suggest to solve a problem in a function by removing the function code completely? What are you even talking about, comparing to shell and text editors? These are still bloody deterministic tools. You learn how they work and the usage does not change unpredictably every day! How can you learn something that does not have predictable outputs?