The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

It depends on the specifics of the tasks; I routinely work on 3-5 projects at once (sometimes completely different stuff), and having a tool like cloud code fits great in my workflow.

Also, the feedback doesnt have to be immediate: sometimes I have sessions that run over a week, because of casual iterations; In my case its quite common to do this to test concepts, micro-benchmarking and library design.

I don't think cheaper/easier software development can be the limiting success factor for many startups. Success is more about the skills and business aptitude of the founder(s), which is why VCs invest more in people than ideas, and don't seem to flinch when founders pivot to something completely different.

I could see AI coding leading to more attempted startups, and more people shipping initial products and attempting to get traction with them, but whether they do get traction and achieve PMF, and are able to actually grow it into a business is going to come down to the startup expertise of the founders, not how quickly/cheaply the code of the product was written.

I feel like it’s not talked about enough that the ultimate irony of software engineering is that, as an industry, it’s aiming to make itself obsolete as much as possible. I struggle to think of any other industry that, completely on their own accord, has actively pushed to put themselves out of work to such a degree.

I think so too. But in the meantime there is a quiet goldrush for people who spot niches where they can extract decent (or a lot) of value right now, and for long enough to be worthwhile. If they can get scale enough that thinner margins makes for a worthwhile business when the market catches up, great. If they can't, then we stay lean we might make off with decent ROI.

But that is also a reason to be cautious of chasing capital and think hard about whether you can spend it sensibly fast enough to improve your own ROI...

E.g. I have a project right now where I won't consider taking VC cash because I don't think I can spend it fast enough to buy me enough additional leverage to make enough additional money to compensate for the dilution and the other usual shenanigans before I expect margins will be squeezed out of the niche in question. It also means I don't think the opportunity will ever scale above a certain level, but that's fine - it'll be a quick attempt at grabbing what profit I can.

Also, while we of course shouldn't diminish the potential moat created by understanding the product in favour of only value the tech, we need to also consider that AI's are a levelling factor there too. Claude knows (I've verified what it's said) more about the niche I'm vaguely talking about than I do - it knows pricing, it knows positioning/marketing, it knows conventions and requirements of the niche, and while I'm sure I could have found all of it myself starting from scratch too it shortcircuited an enormous amount of effort to get an infodump that let me know precisely what to look for to verify it. A lot of tech companies will find the institutional knowledge they thought would shore up their moat is worth a lot less than they thought.

Yeah... I had a fairly in-depth conversation with Claude a couple of days ago about Claude Code and the way it works, and usage limits, and comparison to how other AI coding tools work, and the extremely blunt advice from Claude was that Claude Code was not suitable for serious software development due to usage limits! (props to Anthropic for not sugar coating it!)

Maybe on the Max 20x plan it becomes viable, and no doubt on the Boris Cherny unlimited usage plan it does, but it seems that without very aggressive non-stop context pruning you will rapidly hit limits and the 5-hour timeout even working with a single session, let alone 5 Claude Code sessions and another 5-10 web ones!

The key to this is the way that Claude Code (the local part) works and interacts with Claude AI (the actual model, running in the cloud). Basically Claude Code maintains the context, comprising mostly of the session history, contents of source files it has accessed, and the read/write/edit tools (based on Node.js) it is providing for Claude AI. This entire context, including all files that have been read, and the tools definitions, are sent to Claude AI (eating into your token usage limit) with EVERY request, so once Claude Code has accessed a few source files then the content of those files will "silently" be sent as part of every subsequent request, regardless of what it is. Claude gave me an example of where with 3 smallish files open (a few thousand lines of code), then within 5 requests the token usage might be 80,000 or so, vs the 40,000 limit of the Pro plan or 200,000 limit of the Max 5x plan. Once you hit limit then you have to wait 5 hours for a usage reset, so without Cherny's infinite usage limit this becomes a game of hurry up and wait (make 5 requests, then wait 5 hours and make 5 more).

You can restrict what source files Claude Code has access to, to try to manage context size (e.g. in a C++ project, let it access all the .h module definition files, but block all the .cpp ones) as well as manually inspecting the context all the time to see what is being sent that can be removed. I believe there is some automatic context compaction happening periodically too, but apparently not enough to prevent many/most people hitting usage time outs when working on larger projects.

Not relevant here, but Claude also explained how Cursor manages to provide fast/cheap autocomplete using it's own models by building a vector index of the code base to only pull relevant chunks of code into the context.