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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

#81

Post by amtamt »

lnbharath wrote: post #2

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.

> I wrote this because everyone is talking about Claude Code right now and it's all over my timeline.

Feels more like peer pressure induced post, than evaluating a tool critically for pros and cons.

> Claude Code has this effect where you KNOW it's good but can't quite say WHY.

Definitely gives the "vibe" of social media's infinite scroll induced dopamine rush.

Overall, this post just seems to be enforcing the idea that "fuzzy understanding of business domain will be enough to get a mature product using some AI, and the AI will somehow magically figure out most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain". Thing is that figuring out "most non-functional requirements and missing details of business domain" is where most of the blood and sweat goes.

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

#82

Post by ler_ »

lnbharath wrote: post #14
MasterScrat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much AI did you use to write up this article? It tripped up my "fake AI-written article" detector a few times despite being interesting enough to read to the end

used claude to polish the draft and tighten sentences. the thinking, analysis, and examples are all mine and based on personal experiences. spent the weekend reflecting on my past experiences with claude code and actually digging into why claude code feels the way it does. curious to know what tripped your detector.

Adding to this: too many negatives before making a point, which AI text is prone to do in order to give surface level emphasis to random points in an argument. For example: "I sat there for a second. It didn't lose the thread. It didn't panic. It prioritized like a real engineer would." Then there is the fact that the paragraph ends in just about the same way, which also activates one's AI-voice-detector, so to speak: "This wasn't autocomplete. This was collaboration."

In my opinion, to write is to think. And to write is also to express oneself, not only to create a "communication object," let's put it that way. I would rather read an imperfect human voice than a machine's attempts to fix it. I think it's worth to face the frustration that comes with writing, because the end goal of refining your own argument and your delivery is that much sweeter. Let your human voice shine through.

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

#83

Post by Rikudou »

exe34 wrote: post #76
Rikudou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I write the full article in my Czenglish (English influenced by Czech sentence structure). Then I let it rewrite it in proper English.

So it's me doing the writing and GPT making it sound more English.

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

#84

Post by christophilus »

cgearhart wrote: post #71
christophilus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I know a lot about Typescript and its ecosystem. I’ve taught it to students, and worked on it at companies whose names you’d recognize. Claude Code is better than I am at some things that I know deeply, in some cases. It does stupid things on occasion (like use global mutable state), but it is still more useful than not. So, I guess it depends on how you define “better”, but I’ve learned things I didn’t know, and it allows me to do projects and experiments that I’d otherwise be too lazy to do.

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

#85

Post by skydhash »

christophilus wrote: post #84
cgearhart wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

I know a lot about Typescript and its ecosystem. I’ve taught it to students, and worked on it at companies whose names you’d recognize. Claude Code is better than I am at some things that I know deeply, in some cases. It does stupid things on occasion (like use global mutable state), but it is still more useful than not. So, I guess it depends on how you define “better”, but I’ve learned things I didn’t know, and it…

You forgot to mention that you're a cat on the internet.

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

#86

Post by insane_dreamer »

codegladiator wrote: post #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.

Except a god-level engineer wouldn't write unit tests that pass but don't actually test anything because it mocked the responses instead of testing the _actual_ responses, so your app is still broken despite tests passing and "victory!" claims by the "engineer".

Just one example of many personal experiences.

It is helpful, and very very fast at looking things up, sifting through logs and documentation to figure out a bug, writing ad-hoc scripts, researching solutions; but definitely junior-level when it comes to reasoning, you really have to keep your thinking cap on and guide it.

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

#87

Post by tstrimple »

lnbharath wrote: post #62
Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought skills were supposed to help with “giving claude access to tools it can call”. When would one use MCP over skills?

skills are basically markdown files that teach claude how to do something. they live in your repo and load on demand. MCP is for when you need claude to actually interact with external systems like querying a database, hitting an API, etc...

I've not explicitly used skills or MCP, but have had zero issues with Claude calling apis via curl as an example. I'm not sure what the MCP server or skill is actually enabling at this point. If I wanted CC to talk to SQL Server, I'd have it open a nix-env with the tools needed to talk to the database. One of my primary initial claude.md entries has to do with us running on NixOS and that temporarily installing tools is trivial and it should do things in the NixOS way whenever possible. Since then it has just worked with practically everything I've thrown at it. Very rarely do I see it trying to use a tool that isn't installed anymore. CC even uses my local vaultwarden where I have a collection of credentials shared with it. All driven through claude.md.

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

#88

Post by exe34 »

codegladiator wrote: post #59
exe34 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running claude code on a 13 year old potato and it's never used 136GB of RAM - possibly because I only have 8GB.

Its vram or something makes the OS completely busy even I have only 32 gb ram. task manager shows 100+ gbs forcing to terminate

is that vram on your GPU? I don't think claude code uses that.

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

#89

Post by codegladiator »

exe34 wrote: post #88
codegladiator wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its vram or something makes the OS completely busy even I have only 32 gb ram. task manager shows 100+ gbs forcing to terminate

is that vram on your GPU? I don't think claude code uses that.

Not on GPU, I think it's just paged memory. You are right claude-code isn't running the model locally. Today I've had to kill it 5 times till now.

edit: https://ibb.co/Fbn8Q3pb

that's the 6th

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #65
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…

>"AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about." Maybe this is a case well represented by the bell curve meme? "AI is great; can do everything" (but you've no domain knowledge so cannot guide it and everything means autonomous creation, so when eventually reaches a roadblock will have no idea what to do), "AI is really good until you know what you’re talking about" (then seemingly doesn't work and is ev…

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