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What makes Claude Code so damn good

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Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#271

Post by pglevy »

gervwyk wrote: post #35

We’re considering building a coding agent for Lowdefy[1], a framework that lets you build web apps with YAML config. For those who’ve built coding agents: do you think LLMs are better suited for generating structured config vs. raw code? My theory is that agents producing valid YAML/JSON schemas could be more reliable than code generation. The output is constrained, easier to validate, and when it breaks, you can act…

Mine is a much simpler use case but sharing in case it's useful. I wanted to be able to quickly generate and iterate on user flows during design collaboration. So I use some boilerplate HTML/CSS and have the LLM generate an "outline" (basically a config file) and then generate the HTML from that. This way I can make quick adjustments in the outline and just have it refresh the code when needed to avoid too much back forth with the chat.

Overall, it has been working pretty well. I did make a tweak I haven't pushed yet to make it always writes the outline to a file first (instead of just terminal). And I've also started adding slash commands to the instructions so I can type things like "/create some flow" and then just "/refresh" (instead of "pardon me, would you mind refreshing that flow now?").

https://github.com/pglevy/breadboarding-kit

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#272

Post by PessimalDecimal »

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #259
dotancohen wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase "so damn good" implies a benchmark, which itself is implied to be the average of comparable tools. Without these premises, one could state that the 1996 Yugo was so damn good. I mean, it was better than a horse.

I dunno, horses are pretty great.

What makes horses so damn good?

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#273

Post by escapecharacter »

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #259
dotancohen wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase "so damn good" implies a benchmark, which itself is implied to be the average of comparable tools. Without these premises, one could state that the 1996 Yugo was so damn good. I mean, it was better than a horse.

I dunno, horses are pretty great.

nowhere in your comment do you compare them to anime cat buses though

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#274

Post by tomashubelbauer »

dtagames wrote: post #252
brokegrammer wrote: post #205

I don't get it. The title says "What makes Claude Code so damn good", which implies that they will show how Claude Code is better than other tools, or just better in general. But they go about repeating the Claude Code documentation using different wording. Am I missing something here? Or is this just Anthropic shilling?

The difference between Claude Code and Cursor is that one is a command line tool and the other an IDE. You can use Claude models in both and all these techniques can be applied with Cursor and its rules, too. It's Coke vs. Pepsi.

There is also Cursor Agent CLI which is a TUI exactly like CC. I switched to it because I don't like GUI AI assistants, but I also couldn't stand CC always being overloaded and having many bugs that were affecting me. I'm not on Cursor Agent CLI with GPT5 and happy to have an alternative to CC.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#276

Post by [deleted] »

tcoff91 wrote: post #208
riazrizvi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ChatGPT, and I have used Claude several times. I’ve not found Claude to be better. I’ve come to the conclusion that all these posts asking why Claude is so good at coding, are all part of some marketing approach. I think it’s tied to how Claude prefers to hook into repos, I think maybe it’s tied to a business strategy of acquiring a mega code dataset. So they are especially motivated to push this narrative vs s…

If you aren’t using a client that automatically uses the context of your repos then you don’t understand why people like Claude. You need to use the Claude Code CLI in order to really get the best results.

[deleted]

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#277

Post by riazrizvi »

tcoff91 wrote: post #208
riazrizvi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ChatGPT, and I have used Claude several times. I’ve not found Claude to be better. I’ve come to the conclusion that all these posts asking why Claude is so good at coding, are all part of some marketing approach. I think it’s tied to how Claude prefers to hook into repos, I think maybe it’s tied to a business strategy of acquiring a mega code dataset. So they are especially motivated to push this narrative vs s…

If you aren’t using a client that automatically uses the context of your repos then you don’t understand why people like Claude. You need to use the Claude Code CLI in order to really get the best results.

I’m not in the market for a solution where I need to trust some company with my IP. I understand that Claude also wants to serve my use case, so I take these headlines at face value as also applying to me, since they don’t qualify themselves with ‘Claude Code CLI’.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#278

Post by gedy »

donperignon wrote: post #212
alex1138 wrote: post #5

What do people think of Google's Gemini (Pro?) compared to Claude for code? I really like a lot of what Google produces, but they can't seem to keep a product that they don't shut down and they can be pretty ham-fisted, both with corporate control (Chrome and corrupt practices) and censorship

Personally gemini has been giving me better results. Claude keeps trying to generate react code even when the whole context and my command is svelte, and failing constantly to give me something that can at least run, gemini, on the other hand has been pretty good with styling, and useful with the bussines logic. I dont get all the hype around claude.

Claude Code is just a nicer dev experience, especially with simpler stuff. I've seen Gemini do much better with Svelte as well.

Re: What makes Claude Code so damn good

#280

Post by ath3nd »

The hype from hype fanboys? /s

In all seriousness, at the times of LLMs I am not surprised to see an article that can basically be summarized into: "This product is good because it's good and I am not gonna compare it to others because why do you expect critical thinking in the era of LLMs"

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