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My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

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Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#121

Post by ookblah »

erentz wrote: post #50

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.

this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this).

i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3) boilerplate-ish/refactor type stuff. because of that i have a more consistent baseline.

i still code "by hand". i still have to babysit and review almost all the lines, i don't just let it run for hours and try to review it at the end (nightmare). production app that's been running for years. i don't post youtube videos bc i don't have the time to set it up and try to disprove the "naysayers" (nor does that even matter) and its code i can't share.

the caveat here is we are a super lean team so probably i have more context into the entire system and can identify problems early on and head them off. also i have a vested interest in increasing efficiency for myself wheras if you're part of a corpo ur probably doing more work for the same comp.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#122

Post by yoyohello13 »

erentz wrote: post #50

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.

Something really feels off about the whole thing. I use Claude code. I like it, it definitely saves me time reading docs or looking on stack overflow. It’s a phenomenal tool.

If we are to believe the hype though, shouldn’t these tools be launching software into the stratosphere? Like the CEO of stripe said AI tools provide a x100 increase in productivity. That was 3-4months ago. Shouldn’t stripe be launching rockets in to space now since that’s technically 400months of dev time? Microsoft is reportedly all in on AI coding. Shouldn’t Teams be the best, most rock solid software in existence now? There is so much hype around these tools being a super charger for more than a year, but the actual software landscape looks kind of the same to me as it did 3-4 years ago.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#123

Post by yoyohello13 »

dude250711 wrote: post #85
iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

How are you guys happy with an 80-s looking terminal interface is beyond me... If Claude is so amazing, could Anthropic not make their own fully-featured yet super-performant IDE in like a week?

Free yourself from the shackles of the GUI.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#124

Post by ghuntley »

dawnerd wrote: post #80
taude wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you create the claude.md files at several levels of your folder structure, so you can teach it how to do different things? Configuring these default system prompts is required to get it to work well. I'd definitely watch Boris's intro video below [1] [1] Boris introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eBSHbLKuN0 [2] summary of above video: https://www.nibzard.com/claude-code/

By the time you do all of that you might as well just write code by hand.

I think you are perhaps missing the point. Investing into these techniques [2] enables you to do unhinged things. Such as building a compiler whilst you are AFK [1].

[1] https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1OyJALVOnEzGb

[2] https://ghuntley.com/ralph

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#126

Post by leptons »

arealaccount wrote: post #12
iambateman wrote: post #7

Claude Code is hard to describe. It’s almost like I changed jobs when I started using it. I’ve been all-in with Claude as a workflow tool, but this is literally steroids. If you haven’t tried it, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

Weirdly enough I have the opposite experience where it will take several minutes to do something, then I go in and debug for a while because the app has become fubar, then finally realize it did the whole thing incorrectly and throw it all away. And I reach for Claude quite a bit because if it worked as well for me like everyone here says, that would be amazing. But at best it’ll get a bunch of boilerplate done after…

Have you tried vibing harder?

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#127

Post by magicalist »

ookblah wrote: post #121
erentz wrote: post #50

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.

this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this). i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3…

> this sounds like a cop out

This may sound more mean than I intend, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing the GP post was describing as useless yet ubiquitous.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#128

Post by leptons »

imiric wrote: post #71
libraryofbabel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. As others have commented, over and over again in the last 6 months we've seen discussions on HN with the same basic variation of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase." I sympathize with both experiences and have had both. But I think we've reached the point where such posts (both positive and negative) are…

It's telling that you ask these details from a comment describing a negative experience, yet the top-most comment full of praises and hyperbole is accepted at face value. Let's either demand these things from both sides or from neither. Just because your experience matches one side, doesn't mean that experiences different from yours should require a higher degree of scrutiny. I actually think it's more productive to…

>But I think we've reached the point where such posts (both positive and negative) are _completely useless_, unless they're accompanied with a careful summary of at least:

They did mention "(both positive and negative)", and I didn't take their comment to be one-sided towards the AI-negative comments only.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#129

Post by ookblah »

magicalist wrote: post #127
ookblah wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this). i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3…

> this sounds like a cop out This may sound more mean than I intend, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing the GP post was describing as useless yet ubiquitous.

i mean i get it, but at some point you have to either assume everyone is lying or we are all bots or something. it's probably the same feeling i get when i read someone having trouble and my first thought is like "they aren't using it right". i'm sure the reverse is something like "they aren't a real programmer" LOL.

Re: My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

#130

Post by aniforprez »

TheRoque wrote: post #88
erentz wrote: post #50

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.

100% agree, I have been looking for a YouTube video or stream of someone leveraging AI to get their productivity boost, but I haven't found anything that made me think "okay, that really speeds up things"

It was extremely telling to me that the Zed editor team put out a video about using their AI interface and I don't remember what model they used but they asked it to add a new toggle for a feature and then spent half they video demonstrating their admittedly excellent review workflow to accept or reject the AI generated code and you could directly see how useless it was down to adding completely superfluous new lines randomly and the explanation was "it just does that sometimes"

I'm really not seeing these massive gains in my workflow either and maybe it's the nature of my general work but it's baffling how every use case for programming I'm seeing on YouTube is so surface level. At this point I've given up and don't use it at all

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