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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

#21

Post by ardit33 »

deeshee wrote: post #15

It's great to see even the most hardcore developers who are not fond of change being happy with the latest releases related to AI-assisted development. My workflow now boils down to 2 tools really - leap.new to go from 0 to 1 because it also generates the backend code w/ infra + deployment and then I pick it up in Zed/Claude Code and continue working on it.

1.So far, it is great if you know what you want, and tell it exactly how you want it, and AI can help you on that (basically intern level work).

2. When you are in a new area, but you don't want to dive deep and just want something quick and it is not core of the app/service.

But, if you are experienced, you can see how AI can mess things up pretty quickly, hence for me it has been best used to 'fill in clear and well defined functionality' at peacemeal. Basically it is best for small bites, then large chunks.

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

#22

Post by yakz »

jm4 wrote: post #14
arealaccount wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I second this and would add that you really need an automated way to do it. For coding, automated test suites go a long way toward catching boneheaded edits. It will understand the error messages from the failed tests and fix the mistakes more or less by itself.

But for other tasks like generating reports, I ask it to write little tools to reformat data with a schema definition, perform calculations, or do other things that are fairly easy to then double-check with tests that produce errors that it can work with. Having it "do math in its head" is just begging for disaster. But, it can easily write a tool to do it correctly.

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

#23

Post by bluetidepro »

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

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

#24

Post by terhechte »

bluetidepro wrote: post #23

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

you need the max plan to break free of most rate limits

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

#25

Post by simlevesque »

whatever1 wrote: post #6
ctoth wrote: post #5

Sometimes, you'll just have a really productive session with Claude Code doing a specific thing that maybe you need to do a lot of. One trick I have gotten some milage out of was this: have Claude Code research Slash commands, then make a slash command to turn the previous conversation into a slash command. That was cool and great! But then, of course you inevitably will interrupt it and need to do stuff to correct i…

I find amazing all the effort that people put trying to program a non deterministic black box. True courage.

Our brains are non deterministic black box. We just don't like to admit it.

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

#26

Post by tomashubelbauer »

bluetidepro wrote: post #23

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

I have the same issue and in recent days I seem to have gotten an extra helping of overload errors which hit extra hard when I realize how much this thing costs.

Edit: I see a sibling comment mention the Max plan. I wanna be clear that I am not talking about rate limits here but actual models being inaccessible - so not a rate limit issue. I hope Anthropic figures this out fast, because it is souring me on Claude Code a bit.

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

#27

Post by bluetidepro »

terhechte wrote: post #24
bluetidepro wrote: post #23

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

you need the max plan to break free of most rate limits

I wish there was a Max trial (while on Pro) to test if this was the case or not. Even if it was just a 24 hour trial. Max is an expensive trigger to pull, and hope it just solves this.

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

#28

Post by mbrumlow »

bluetidepro wrote: post #23

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

No clue. I use it for hours on end. Longest run cost me $30 in tokens. I think it was 4 hours of back and forth.

Here is an example of chat gpt, followed by mostly Claude that finally solved a backlight issue with my laptop.

https://github.com/mbrumlow/lumd

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

#29

Post by blub »

ctoth wrote: post #8
whatever1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find amazing all the effort that people put trying to program a non deterministic black box. True courage.

Oh do let me tell you how much effort I put into tending my non-deterministic garden or relationships or hell even the contractors I am using to renovate my house! A few small markdown documents and putting in the time to understand something interesting hardly seems a steep price!

The contractors working on my house sometimes paint a room bright pink for no particular reason.

When I point that out, they profusely apologize and say that of course the walls must be white and wonder why they even got the idea of making them pink in the first place.

Odd, but nice fellows otherwise. It feels like they’re 10x more productive than other contractors.

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

#30

Post by gjsman-1000 »

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.

> 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 actually almost afraid I need to start crunching Leetcode, learning other languages, and then apply to DoD-like jobs where Claude Code (or other code security concerns) mean they need actual honest programmers without assistance.

However, the future is never certain, and nothing is ever inevitable.

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