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Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

bharath.sh

21–30 of 97 posts

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#21
> In a monorepo, just loading the project consumes ~20k tokens

I don't work on a monorepo, and as an example, what I would consider a mid-size service in my mid-size company is 7M tokens.

I can't but ask: do all people who are so enthusiastic about AI for coding only work on trivial projects?

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#22
post #13

I've not used Claude Claude yet, but why would it be bad if it gains features that people use? Did people ever complain about Photoshop to have too many features demanding some cognitive load? Excel? Practically every IDE out there? There is a reason people use those tools instead of the plain text editor or paint. It's for power users and people will become power users of AI as well. Some will forever stick to chatg…

because devs will have no clue how their systems work, the only ones who do will be LLMs, gatekept behind an ever-increasing cost-per-usage.

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#23

Author here. I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline. Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY. So I spent the weekend digging into the DX decisions that make Claude Code delightful.

Do you have any sources you've found that document Claude Code's UI in detail? I'm really curious about what they've built, as a UI designer.

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#24

I sort of agree with this about cognitive load. I'm somewhat new (started dipping my toes around July) but use Claude code heavily now. I did spend a lot of time playing with configuring it at first and creating agents etc. But I have a weird setup where I have three computers that I work on and at one point I realized vanilla Claude Code had adopted the things I was doing as defaults (and improved on them). So I hav…

I definitely relate with your sentiment and I like your term "configuration bankruptcy"

on MCP, the mental model that clicked for me is "giving claude access to tools it can call" so that instead of copy pasting from your database or API, claude can just... query it

playwright MCP for me is godsend

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#25

What scares me about Claude Code (and ai developer tools in general) is that a small model update could change how I interact with the tool entirely. There's no freezing the communication style that I need to use for good results.

I suspect that this is already a big reason why we get so many conflicting signals on "the best coding model". People tune into the style of the model they use the most, and hit snags and friction when they take another model for a spin. Most iOS users report that Android is a disaster of an operating system, with layers and layers of user frustration. In reality, they actually are just totally in tune with how iOS d…

My impression is people build very fragile Rube Goldberg devices on top of the models and those things break. That's not to say anything is wrong about the Rube Goldberg machines! They're very interesting and do new things (and they help me understand how things work). I'm just saying that there's probably a significant misattribution about where the fragility exists.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#26

> In a monorepo, just loading the project consumes ~20k tokens I don't work on a monorepo, and as an example, what I would consider a mid-size service in my mid-size company is 7M tokens. I can't but ask: do all people who are so enthusiastic about AI for coding only work on trivial projects?

I’m not clear what “just loading the project” even means here - if that’s how many tokens are consumed by system prompt plus Claude.md and MCP tools well that has nothing to do with the size of the project

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#27
post #13

I've not used Claude Claude yet, but why would it be bad if it gains features that people use? Did people ever complain about Photoshop to have too many features demanding some cognitive load? Excel? Practically every IDE out there? There is a reason people use those tools instead of the plain text editor or paint. It's for power users and people will become power users of AI as well. Some will forever stick to chatg…

It is a very significant consideration for every one of those tools. The introduction of the "ribbon" in Excel was moderately controversial in 2007.

The default tools made available in Photoshop is why it remains on top to this day.

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#28

If only LLMs didn’t just make shit up regularly.

If a coding agent was released that never made anything up, how much would that change things for you?

I’d save a lot of time from not choosing to smugly telling the AI how wrong it was just for my own reassurances that at least for now I’m still more useful than it is.

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#29
> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego.

Who keeps forgetting variable names and function calling conventions it used 4 seconds ago while using 136 GBs of ram for the cli causing you to frequently force quit the whole terminal. Its not even human level.

Re: Claude Code's DX is too good. And that's a problem

#30

I sort of agree with this about cognitive load. I'm somewhat new (started dipping my toes around July) but use Claude code heavily now. I did spend a lot of time playing with configuring it at first and creating agents etc. But I have a weird setup where I have three computers that I work on and at one point I realized vanilla Claude Code had adopted the things I was doing as defaults (and improved on them). So I hav…

It's more like you want Claude to interact with X, and you go to see if there's an MCP server for it.

Claude could use the API directly but most MCP now comes with OAuth so you can let it act as you, in case API keys are hard to come by or chargeable. Sometimes with a good skill or a preconfigured CLI tool skills can be just as good if not far more powerful than an MCP server.

But the trigger you'd look for to decide to use an MCP is 'i wish Claude could access X'. My top examples:

- pulling designs from figma to implement them - fetching ticket context for a job from JIRA - getting a stack trace to investigate from Sentry

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