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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

#31

Post by deeshee »

ardit33 wrote: post #21
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 wel…

I agree. But it's also a mindset game. Experienced devs often approach AI with preconceptions that limit its utility - pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism can prevent seeing where AI truly shines. I've found letting go of those instincts and treating AI as a thought partner rather than just a code generator be super useful. The psychological aspects of how we interact with these tools might be as important as the technical ones.

Bunch of comments online also reflect how there's a lot of "butthurt" developers shutting things down with a closed mind - focusing only on the negatives, and not letting the positives go through.

I sound a bit philosophical but I hope I'm getting my point across.

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

#32

Post by manmal »

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?

Try giving it a repomap, eg by including it in CLAUDE.md. It should pull in less files (context) that way. Exactly telling it which files you suspect need editing also helps. If you let it run scripts, make sure to tell it to grep out only the relevant output, or pipe to /dev/null.

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

#33

Post by mike1o1 »

wrs wrote: post #9

There is a VS Code extension for Claude Code. It's hardly more than a terminal window really, but that in itself is pretty handy. If you do /ide to connect up the extension it does a few things, but not yet anything resembling the Cursor diff experience (much less the Cursor tab experience, which is the reason I still use it).

Claude Code has pretty much replaced Copilot overnight for me, though I wish the VS Code plugin was a bit more integrated, as it's only a little bit more than a terminal, though I guess that's the point. I was hoping for syntax highlighting to match my editor and things like that (beyond just light/dark theme).

What I'd really want is a way to easily hide it, which I did quite frequently with Copilot as its own pane.

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

#34

Post by thegrim33 »

pragmatic wrote: post #13
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.

Could you elaborate a bit on the tasks,languages,domain etc you’re using it with? People have such widely varying experiences and I’m wondering why.

I find it pretty interesting that it's a roughly 2,500 word article on "using Claude Code" and they never once actually explain what they're using it for, what type of project they're coding. It's all just so generic. I read some of it then realize that there was absolutely no substance in what I just read.

It's also another in my growing list of data points towards my opinion that if an author posts meme pictures in their article, it's probably not an article I'm interested in reading.

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

#35

Post by 0x_rs »

arealaccount wrote: post #12
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.

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…

Some great advice I've found that seems to work very well: ask it to keep a succinct journal of all the issues and roadblocks found during the project development, and what was done to resolve or circumvent them. As for avoiding bloating the code base with scatterbrained changes, having a tidy architecture with good separation of concerns helps leading it into working solutions, but you need to actively guide it. For someone that enjoys problem-solving more than actually implementing them, it's very fun.

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

#36

Post by apwell23 »

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.

half the posts on hackernews is same discussion over and over about coding agent usefulness or lack of

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

#37

Post by ctoth »

blub wrote: post #29
ctoth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I asked my contractor to install a door over the back stairs opening outward, came back, and it was installed opening inward. He told me he tried to figure out a way he could do it in-code, but there wasn't one, so that's what he had to do. I was slightly miffed he didn't consult me first, but he did the pragmatic thing.

This actually happened to me Monday.

But sure, humans are deterministic clockwork mechanisms!

Are you now going to tell me how I got a bad contractor? Because that sure would sound a lot like "you're using the model wrong"

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

#39

Post by ndr_ »

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 had success through Amazon Bedrock on us-east1 during European office hours. Died 9 minutes before 10 a.m. New York time, though.

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

#40

Post by financltravsty »

deeshee wrote: post #31
ardit33 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wel…

I agree. But it's also a mindset game. Experienced devs often approach AI with preconceptions that limit its utility - pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism can prevent seeing where AI truly shines. I've found letting go of those instincts and treating AI as a thought partner rather than just a code generator be super useful. The psychological aspects of how we interact with these tools might be…

What's your track record. What is your current scope of work for Claude Code?

This conversation is useless without knowing the author's skillset and use-case.

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