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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

#141
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…

Code is not the bottleneck.

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

#142
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell Claude to verify its work. I’m using it for data analysis tasks and I always have it check the raw data for accuracy. It was a whole different ballgame when I started doing that. Clear instructions go a long way, asking it to review work, asking it to debug problems, etc. definitely helps.

> You can tell Claude to verify its work Definitely - with ONE pretty big callout. This only works when a clear and quantifiable rubric for verification can be expressed. Case in point, I put Claude Code to work on a simple react website that needed a "Refresh button" and walked away. When I came back, the button was there, and it had used a combination of MCP playwright + screenshots to roughly verify it was working…

In general, using your own symbol forms for interactions rather than taking advantage of people’s existing mental models is a bad idea. Even straying from known libraries is shaky unless you’re a competent enough designer to understand what specific parts of a visual symbol signify that specific idea/action, and to whom. From a usability perspective, you’re much better off not using a symbol at all than using the wrong one.

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

#143
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…

Maybe this discrepancy is down to something like Claude code reducing the amount of brain power exhorted. If you have to do 80% less thinking to accomplish a task but the task takes just as long, you may (even rightfully) feel five times more productive even though output didn't change.

And is this a good thing since you can (in theory) multitask and work longer hours, or bad because you're acquiring cognitive debt (see "Your Brain on ChatGPT")?

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

#144

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.

I liked Claude Code when I used it initially to document a legacy codebase. The developer who maintains the system reviewed the documentation, and said it was spot-on.

But the other day I asked it to help add boundary logging to another legacy codebase and it produced some horrible, duplicated and redundant code. I see these huge Claude instruction files people share on social media, and I have to wonder...

Not sure if they're rationing "the smarts" or performance is highly variable.

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

#145

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.

> It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me. I have mixed feelings; because this means there’s really no business reason to ever hire a junior; but it also (I think) threatens the stability of senior level jobs long term, especially as seniors slowly lose their knowledge and let Claude take care of things. The result is basically: When did you get into this field, by year? I’m…

It's a junior engineer that doesn't learn - they make the same mistakes even after being corrected the second that falls out their context window (even often with "corrections" still there...), they struggle to abstract those categories of mistakes to avoid making similar ones in the future, and (by the looks of it) will never be "the senior". "Hiring a Junior" should really be seen as an investment more than immediate output.

I keep being told that $(WHATEVER MODEL) is the greatest thing ever, but every time I actually try to use them they're of limited (but admittedly non-zero) usefulness. There's only so many breathless blogs or comments I can read that just don't mesh with the reality I personally see.

Maybe it's sector? I generally work on Systems/OS/Drivers, large code bases in languages like C, C++ and Rust. Most larger than context windows even before you look at things like API documentation. Even as a "search and summarizer" tool I've found it completely wrong in enough cases to be functionally worthless as the time required to correct and check the output isn't a saving. But they can be handy for "autocompletion+" - like "here's a similar existing block of code, now do the same but with (changes)".

They generally seem pretty good at being like a template engine on non-templated code, so thing like renaming/refactoring or similar structure recognition can be handy. Which I suspect might also explain some of those breathless blog posts - I've seen loads which say "Any non-coder can make a simple app in seconds!" - but you could already do that, there's a million "Simple App Tutorial" codebases that would match whatever license you want, copy one, change the name at the top and you're 99% of the way to the "Wow Magic End Result!" often described.

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

#146

It's great for me. I have a claude.md at the root of every folder generally, outlined in piped text for minimal context addition about the rulesets for that folder, it always creates tests for what it's doing and is set to do so in a very specific folder in a very specific way otherwise it tries to create debug files instead. I also have set rules for re-use so that way it doesn't proliferate with "enhanced" class va…

Can you list some of your agent streams you have going? Very curious

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

#147
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure if I want to just toy around for fun.

Those are cool, but a production system is infinitely more complex.

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

#148
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.

[deleted]

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

#149

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.

> It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me. I have mixed feelings; because this means there’s really no business reason to ever hire a junior; but it also (I think) threatens the stability of senior level jobs long term, especially as seniors slowly lose their knowledge and let Claude take care of things. The result is basically: When did you get into this field, by year? I’m…

We are using probabilistic generators to output what should be deterministic solutions.

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

#150
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t get why I should want that. I’ve mentored and managed juniors. They’re usually a net negative in productivity until they are no longer juniors.

My current working theory is this: People who enjoy mentoring juniors are generally satisfied with the ROI of iterating through LLM code generation. People who find juniors sort-of-frustrating-but-part-of-the-job-sometimes have a higher denominator on that ROI calc, and ask themselves why they would keep banging their head against the LLM wall. The first group is probably wiser and more efficient at multiplying their…

I'm cynical person, and IME the former are some of the most annoying and usually the worst engineers I've met.

Most people who "mentor" other people (like, make it a pride and distinction part of their identity) are usually the last people you want to take advice from.

Actual mentors are the latter group, who juniors seek out or look up to.

In other words, the former group is akin to those people on YouTube who try to sell shitty courses.

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