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

bharath.sh

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

#71

Post by cgearhart »

christophilus wrote: post #64
pico303 wrote: post #34

The example in the article of letting Claude deploy the app worries me. It has me thinking of that line, “AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about.” If the author was clueless of how to deploy the app, how do they know the app was deployed safely or securely? Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you…

I agree you need to know what you’re doing. But Claude Code is definitely better than I am at some things- probably the most important of which is starting some mundane task that I would otherwise procrastinate indefinitely. It’s very good at Typescript, search, and research, but still does stupid stuff and requires review and steering. I don’t get into the same flow while using it, either, but I think that might be…

“Better than me” != “good”

I know approximately nothing about approximately everything. Claude seems pretty good at those things. But in every case I’ve used Claude Code for something I do know about it’s been unsatisfactory as a solo operator. It’s not useless, but it is basically useless for anything serious unless you’re very actively guiding it.

I think it has a lot of potential value and will become more useful over time, but it’ll be most useful when we can confidently understand the limitations.

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

#72

Post by salomonk_mur »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #46
salomonk_mur wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had it One-shot the full architecture for a fairly advanced distributed system for a client. It then one shot the actual code design (following absolutely all our our internal requirements on auth, stack to use, security, code styling, documentation, etc). It then one shot (and we code reviewed everything thoroughly) each of the 5 micro services needed. It one shot the infrastructure to use and created the terrafor…

Lol ok dude, good luck with your 'I just resell the output of Claude and I can't tell when it makes mistakes' business model. I'm sure it is a long term valid economic niche.

Before, I resold the output of engineers.

Now, I resell the output of AI supervised by engineers.

We can tell when it makes mistakes. It used to make a ton. Now, with the right context, it really makes very few mistakes (which it can find itself and fix itself)

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

#73

Post by exe34 »

salomonk_mur wrote: post #35
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #15

"With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you." Well, not to me or the people I respect. It's getting very good, but it's like having a recent college grad who obsessively reads documentation. Someone with low skill but very high knowledge, often knowledge they are mixing up or not quite getting right. I think if Claude is already 'better' at coding than you, maybe think about going ba…

I had it One-shot the full architecture for a fairly advanced distributed system for a client. It then one shot the actual code design (following absolutely all our our internal requirements on auth, stack to use, security, code styling, documentation, etc). It then one shot (and we code reviewed everything thoroughly) each of the 5 micro services needed. It one shot the infrastructure to use and created the terrafor…

Hey would you be willing to share your claude.md? I'm only starting out with AI coders, and while it often makes good choices for straightforward things, I find the token usage gets bigger and bigger as it proceeds down a list of requirements - my working hypothesis is that it's having to re-read everything as the project gets more complicated and doesn't have a concept of "this is where I go to kick it for this kind of thing".

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

#74

Post by chrisandchris »

pico303 wrote: post #34

The example in the article of letting Claude deploy the app worries me. It has me thinking of that line, “AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about.” If the author was clueless of how to deploy the app, how do they know the app was deployed safely or securely? Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you…

> But then I mentioned I had credits on Fly.io, was eligible for Vercel's free tier, had a Cloudflare account, and a Neon database.

I miss the days where deploying an app was just uploading some files. Maybe we need AI to understand this artificial complexity we introduced ourselves?

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

#75

Post by AaronAPU »

tmoravec wrote: post #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?

I think the agent mode stuff only works well on trivial projects. But the top tier models can be very productive with carefully constructed prompts and manually curated contexts for large mono repos.

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

#76

Post by exe34 »

Rikudou wrote: post #58
bentcorner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not just X, it's Y" I find it really hard to read articles that use AI slop aphorisms. Please use your own words, it matters.

What if I no good in English? Jokes aside, my English is passable and I'm fine with it when writing comments but I'm very aware that some of it doesn't sound native due to me, well, not being native speaker. I use AI to make it sound more fluent when writing for my blog.

As long as your bullet points+prompt are shorter than the output, couldn't you post that instead? The only time I think an LLM might be ethically acceptable for something a human has to read is if you ask it to make it shorter.

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

#77

Post by erichocean »

lnbharath wrote: post #54
erichocean wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anthropic has some docs at docs.anthropic.com but honestly most of what I learned came from just using it and poking around. the slash commands have help text built in. shrivu shankar has a good breakdown of the features too if you're looking for a more structured overview

Thanks!

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

#78

Post by mcphage »

Rikudou wrote: post #58
bentcorner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not just X, it's Y" I find it really hard to read articles that use AI slop aphorisms. Please use your own words, it matters.

What if I no good in English? Jokes aside, my English is passable and I'm fine with it when writing comments but I'm very aware that some of it doesn't sound native due to me, well, not being native speaker. I use AI to make it sound more fluent when writing for my blog.

> What if I no good in English?

It would still sound more human coming from you.

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

#79

Post by pico303 »

chrisandchris wrote: post #74
pico303 wrote: post #34

The example in the article of letting Claude deploy the app worries me. It has me thinking of that line, “AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about.” If the author was clueless of how to deploy the app, how do they know the app was deployed safely or securely? Just this past week I asked Claude for some help with C++ and a library I was somewhat unfamiliar with. What it produced looked great—-if you…

> But then I mentioned I had credits on Fly.io, was eligible for Vercel's free tier, had a Cloudflare account, and a Neon database. I miss the days where deploying an app was just uploading some files. Maybe we need AI to understand this artificial complexity we introduced ourselves?

Right there with you. I’m working on fixing an app deployment this weekend myself and dreading picking my way through GitHub actions, ansible scripts, container configs, and deployment APIs to figure how why the thing stopped deploying. Thank goodness it’s just deploying to VMs and not Kube, or I’d probably lose a week.

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

#80

Post by skydhash »

gedy wrote: post #48
skydhash wrote: post #18

> With Opus 4.5, Claude Code feels like having a god-level engineer beside you. Opinionated but friendly. Zero ego. > Claude was halfway through refactoring a complex auth flow[...] Then I realized: I'd forgotten to mention that one of those files was also used by a cron job. That is the kind of research you do before you go to refactoring. > Claude Code freed them from "the anxiety of the first step in programming c…

I use Claude and not crapping on it or the boosters, but most of the people who I've encountered in real life who really gush about it, are either semi-technical, and who struggle in some way when coding. Non technical CEO of small startup I was at, manager who didn't go to college, etc. It's a cool tool! Just am tired of being treated like anti AI because I don't outsource my brain to it, or gush over their DIY UI d…

Yeah it’s just a LLM, able to do text transformations based on what latent factors it has captured in the training stage. But programming is not text manipulation, just like writing is not only putting words on paper and music is not merely producing sounds.

Anyone can sat before a piano and start hitting keys. And someone can rig up some apparatus that highlight which keys to hit at precise times in order to play Moonlight Sonata. But no one will call those people pianist. Sure a good pianist can use such apparatus to learn to play a piece. But he may also not buy such thing and just use a music sheet.

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