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6 weeks of Claude Code

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Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#181

Post by UltraSane »

baq wrote: post #66
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…

Fascinating since I found the recent Claude models untrustworthy for writing and editing SQL. E.g. it'd write conditions correctly, but not add parens around ANDs and ORs (which gemini pro then highlighted as a bug, correctly.)

Claude Sonnet 4 is very good at generating Cypher queries for Neo4j

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#182

Post by pixl97 »

apples_oranges wrote: post #149
Aurornis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. The interesting thing about all of this vibe coding skepticism, cynicism, and backlash is that many people have their expectations set extremely low. They’re convinced everything the tools produce will be junk or that the worst case examples people provide are representative of the average. Then they finally go out and use the tools and realize that they exceed their (extreme…

In case some people having realized it by now: it’s not just the code, it’s also/mostly the marketing. Unless you make something useful that’s hard to replicate.. I have recently found something that’s needed but very niche and the sort of problem that Claude can only give tips on how to go about it.

I guess I'm not sure why people think AI is going to be very useful on niche problem without spending a massive computation budget.

Any niche problem requires original work or deep searching for something that can complete it. There is no free lunch.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#183

Post by danielbln »

esafak wrote: post #54

Coding agents are empowering, but it is not well appreciated that they are setting a new baseline. It will soon not be considered impressive to do all the things that the author did, but expected. And you will not work less but the same hours -- or more, if you don't use agents. Despite this, I think agents are a very welcome new weapon.

Within agent use skill/experience there will be a spectrum as well. Some that wield them very effectively, others maybe less so.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#184

Post by blackqueeriroh »

I have nearly 20 years of experience in technology, and have been writing toy scripts or baby automations for most of my career. I started out in a managed services help desk and took that route many folks take across and around the different IT disciplines.

I mostly spend my days administering SaaS tools, and one of my largest frustrations has always been that I didn’t know enough to really build a good plugin or add-on for whatever tool I was struggling with, and I’d find a limited set of good documentation or open source examples to help me out. With my limited time (full time job) and attendant challenges (ADHD & autism + all the fun trauma that comes from that along with being Black, fat and queer), I struggled to ever start anything out of fear of failure or I’d begin a course and get bored because I wasn’t doing anything that captured my imagination & motivation.

Tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and even the Claude app have absolutely changed the game for me. I’m learning more than ever, because even the shitty code that these tools can write is an opportunity for debugging and exploration, but I have something tangible to iterate on. Additionally, I’ve found that Claude is really good at giving me lessons and learning based on an idea I have, and then I have targeted learning I can go do using source docs and tutorials that are immediately relevant to what I’m doing instead of being faced with choice paralysis. Being able to build broken stuff in seconds that I want to get working (a present problem is so much more satisfying than a future one) and having a tool that knows more than I do about code most of the time but never gets bored of my silly questions or weird metaphors has been so helpful in helping me build my own tools. Now I think about building my own stuff first before I think about buying something!

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#185

Post by phito »

justlikereddit wrote: post #128
risyachka wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its all great until >> I thought I would see a pretty drastic change in terms of Pull Requests, Commits and Line of Code merged in the last 6 weeks. I don’t think that holds water though The chart basically shows same output with claude than before. Which kinda represents what I felt when using LLMs. You "feel" more productive and you definitely feel "better" because you don't do the work now, you babysit the model a…

I've been exploring vibe coding lately and by far the biggest benefit is the lack of mental strain. You don't have to try to remember your code as a conceptual whole, what your technical implementation of the next hour of code was going to be like at the same time as a stubborn bug is taunting you. You just ask Mr smartybots and it deliver anything between proofreading and documentation and whatnot, with some minor f…

It's alright until you have a bug the LLM can't solve, then you have to go in the code yourself and you realize what a mess it has made.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#186

Post by mrmincent »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #184

I have nearly 20 years of experience in technology, and have been writing toy scripts or baby automations for most of my career. I started out in a managed services help desk and took that route many folks take across and around the different IT disciplines. I mostly spend my days administering SaaS tools, and one of my largest frustrations has always been that I didn’t know enough to really build a good plugin or ad…

ADHD here, and Claude code has been a game changer for me as well. I don’t get sidetracked going lost in documentation loops, suffer decision paralysis, or forget what I’m currently doing or what I need to do next. It’s almost like I’m body doubling with Claude code.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#187

Post by pixl97 »

wredcoll wrote: post #176
rane wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe our brains are wired different but reading and reviewing code is way faster for me than writing it.

There's very few objective ways to measure review 'performance'. Coding is easy, it works or doesn't.

Or it works till it doesn't. There is a lot of code that will work until some condition is met.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#188

Post by bonzini »

msikora wrote: post #159
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

I have about two weeks of using Claude Code and to be honest, as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. It has a learning curve. You need to learn how to give it proper context, how to chunk up the work, etc. And you need to know how to program, obviously. Asking it to do something you don't know how to do, that's just asking for a disaster. I have more than 25 years of experience, so I'm confident with anything Claude…

Just a few months ago I couldn't imagine paying more than $20/mo for any kind of subscription, but here I am paying $200/mo for the Max 20 plan! Similarly amazed as an experienced dev with 20 YoE (and a fellow Slovak, although US based). The other tools, while helpful, were just not "there" and they were often simply more trouble than they were worth producing a lot of useless garbage. Claude Code is clearly on anoth…

When I first tried letting Cursor loose on a relatively small code base (1500 lines, 2 files), I had it fix a bug (or more than one) with a clear testcase and a rough description of the problem, and it was a disaster.

The first commit towards the fix was plausible, though still not fully correct, but in the end not only it wasn't able to fix it, each commit was also becoming more and more baroque. I cut it when it wrote almost 100 lines of code to compare version numbers (which already existed in the source). The problem with discussing the plan is that, while debugging, you don't yourself have a full idea of the plan.

I don't call it a total failure because I asked the AI to improve some error messages to help it debug, and I will keep that code. It's pretty good at writing new code, very good at reviewing it, but for me it was completely incapable of performing maintainance.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#189

Post by adregan »

arrowsmith wrote: post #112
danielbln wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the automators dream come true. Anything can be automated, anything scripted, anything documented. Even if we're gonna use other (possibly local) models in the future, this will be my interface of choice. It's so powerful.

Yes, Claude has killed XKCD 1319: https://xkcd.com/1319/ Automation is now trivially easy. I think of another new way to speed up my workflow — e.g. a shell script for some annoying repetitive task — and Claude oneshots it. Productivity gains built from productivity gains.

The is not the xkcd I thought it would be. This is the xkcd that Claude code makes me think of:

https://xkcd.com/1205/

I don’t feel Claude code helps one iota with the issue in 1319. If anything, it has increased the prevalence of “ongoing development” as I auto mate more things and create more problems to solve.

However, I have fixed up and added features to 10 year old scripts that I never considered worth the trade off to work on. It makes the cost of automation cheaper.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#190

Post by epolanski »

At this point I am 99% convinced that AI coding skeptics are nothing short of Luddites.

They would be like "but a robot will never ever clean a house as well as I would", well, no shit, but they can still do the overwhelming majority of the work very well (or at least as good as you instruct them to) and leave you with details and orchestration.

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