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How I'm Productive with Claude Code

neilkakkar.com

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Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#21

Post by torben-friis »

felipevb wrote: post #9

> The worktree system removed the friction of context-switching - juggling multiple streams of work without them colliding. I'm so conflicted about this. On the one hand I love the buzz of feeling so productive and working on many different threads. On the other hand my brain gets so fried, and I think this is a big contributor.

I would like some research regarding multi agent flows and impact on speed and correctness, because I have a feeling that it's like a texting and driving situation, where self perception of skill loss and measured skill loss diverge.

I have nothing to back up the idea though.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#22

Post by dakiol »

I don't understand the "being more productive" part. Like, sure, LLMs make us iterate faster but our managers know we're using them! They don't naively think we suddenly became 10x engineers. Companies pay for these tools and every engineer has access to them. So if everyone is equally productive, the baseline just shifted up... same as always, no?

Mentioning LLM usage as a distinction is like bragging about using a modern compiler instead of writing assembly. Yeah it's faster, but so is everyone else code... Besides, I wouldn't brag about being more productive with LLMS because it's a double edge sword: it's very easy to use them, and nobody is reviewing all the lines of code you are pushing to prod (really, when was the last time you reviewed a PR generated by AI that changed 20+ files and added/removed thousands of lines of code?), so you don't know what's the long game of your changes; they seem to work now but who knows how it will turn out later?

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#23

Post by sodapopcan »

zahlman wrote: post #20
aguimaraes1986 wrote: post #11

This is the "lines of code per week" metric from the 90s, repackaged. "I'm doing more PRs" is not evidence that AI is working, it's evidence that you are merging more. Whether thats good depends entirely on what you are merging. I use AI every day too. But treating throughput of code going to production as a success metric, without any mention of quality, bugs, or maintenance burden is exactly the kind of thinking de…

> Turns out we weren't opposed to bad metrics! We were just opposed to being measured! Given the chance to pick our own, we jumped straight to the same nonsense. This seems like a distinction without a difference, unless there actually are any good metrics (which also requires them to be objectively and reliably quantifiable). I think most developers don't really want to measure themselves, it's just that pro-AI peop…

The only time metrics have been useful to me in the past is when they are kept private to each team, which is to say that I do think they are useful for measuring yourself, but not for others to measure you. Taken over time, they can eventual give you a really good idea of what you can deliver. Sandbag a bit (ie, undershoot that number), communicate that to ye olde stakeholders, and everybody's happy that you can actually do what you say you'll do without being stressed out (obviously this doesn't work in startups).

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#24

Post by ayhanfuat »

I don't know if I am just in an unlucky A/B assignment or anything but I really don't understand people juggling multiple agent sessions. For me Opus 4.6 High performance went from unbelievable to mediocre. And this keeps happening making the whole agentic coding very unreliable and frustrating. I do use it but I have to babysit and I get overwhelmed even with a single session.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#25

Post by munk-a »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #13
serf wrote: post #5

I like llms too, and I think they make me more productive.. but a chart of commits/contribs is such a lousy metric for productivity. It's about on par with the ridiculousness of LOC implying code quality.

I don't know. Claude helped me implement a ton of features I had been procrastinating for months in a matter of days. I'm implementing features in my project faster than I can blog about them. It definitely manifested as a huge commit spike. And it's not like I'm blindly commiting LLM output. I often write everything myself because I want to understand what I'm doing. Claude often comments that my version is better a…

This right here is the big value I see in LLMs as well. I specifically suffer from analysis paralysis when starting something big and just getting skeletonized cheap code out quick as a template then refining it is much more to my strengths. I am ADHD and task breakdown is a known difficulty for that disorder so it has been hugely helpful.

That said, by the time I'm happy with it all the AI stuff outside very boilerplate ops/config stuff has been rewritten and refined. I just find it quite helpful to get over that initial hump of "I have nothing but a dream" to the stage of "I have a thing that compiles but is terrible". Once I can compile it then I can refine which where my strengths lie.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#26

Post by koolba »

serf wrote: post #5

I like llms too, and I think they make me more productive.. but a chart of commits/contribs is such a lousy metric for productivity. It's about on par with the ridiculousness of LOC implying code quality.

My fav metric for codebase improvement (not feature improvement) is negative LOC. Nothing beats a patch that only deletes things without breaking anything or simply removing tests. Just dead code deletion.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#27

Post by vova_hn2 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #13
serf wrote: post #5

I like llms too, and I think they make me more productive.. but a chart of commits/contribs is such a lousy metric for productivity. It's about on par with the ridiculousness of LOC implying code quality.

I don't know. Claude helped me implement a ton of features I had been procrastinating for months in a matter of days. I'm implementing features in my project faster than I can blog about them. It definitely manifested as a huge commit spike. And it's not like I'm blindly commiting LLM output. I often write everything myself because I want to understand what I'm doing. Claude often comments that my version is better a…

> Claude often comments that my version is better and cleaner.

Every comment I make is a "really perceptive observation" according to Claude and every question I ask is either "brilliant" or at least "good", so...

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#28

Post by marginalia_nu »

jedmeyers wrote: post #14
serf wrote: post #5

I like llms too, and I think they make me more productive.. but a chart of commits/contribs is such a lousy metric for productivity. It's about on par with the ridiculousness of LOC implying code quality.

> It's about on par with the ridiculousness of LOC implying code quality. Most effective engineers on the brownfield projects I've worked on, usually deleted more LOC than they've added, because they were always looking to simplify the code and replace it with useful (and often shorter) abstractions.

Yeah it's very much the opposite of how Claude Code tends to approach a problem it hasn't seen before, which tends toward constructing an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine by just inserting more and more logic until it manages to produce the desired outcome. You can coax it into simplifying its output, but it's very time consuming to get something that is of a professional standard, and doesn't introduce technical debt.

Especially in brownfield settings, if you do use CC, you really should be spending something like a day refactoring the code for every 15 minutes of work it spends implementing new functionality. Otherwise the accumulation of technical debt will make the code base unworkable by both human and claude hands in a fairly short time.

I think overall it can be a force for good, and a source of high quality code, but it requires a significant amount of human intervention.

Claude Code operating on unsupervised Claude code fairly rapidly generates a mess not even Claude Code can decode, resulting in a sort of technical debt Kessler syndrome, where the low quality makes the edits worse, which makes the quality worse, rinse and repeat.

Re: How I'm Productive with Claude Code

#29

Post by keybored »

As an outsider it seems like agentic coders get buried in the weeds of running agents in parallel and churning out commits. (Even after a sheepish “commits are a bad metric but”) And every week there is a new orchestration, something, who even cares.

Is that the end game? Well why can’t the agents orchestrate the agents? Agents all the way down?

The whole agent coding scene seems like people selling their soul for very shiny inflatable balloons. Now you have twelve bespoke apps tailored for you that you don’t even care about.

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