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6 weeks of Claude Code

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Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#321

Post by kelnos »

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…

My experience has been similar, over perhaps 4-6 weeks of Claude Code. My first few days were a bit rough, and I was tempted to give up and proclaim that all my skeptic's opinions were correct and that it was useless. But there is indeed a learning curve to using it. After a month I'm still learning, but I can get it to give me useful output that I'm happy committing to my projects, after reviewing it line by line.

Agreed that context and chunking are the key to making it productive. The times when I've tried to tell it (in a single prompt) everything I want it to do, were not successful. The code was garbage, and a lot of it just didn't do what I wanted it to do. And when there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, CC has trouble making targeted changes to fix issues one by one. Much better is to build each small chunk, and verify that it fully works, before moving on to the next.

You also have to call its bullshit: sometimes it will try to solve a problem in a way you know is wrong, so you have to stop it and tell it to do it in another way. I suppose I shouldn't call it "bullshit"; if we're going to use the analogy of CC being like an inexperienced junior engineer, then that's just the kind of thing that happens when you pair with a junior.

I still often do find that I give it a task, and when it's done, realize that I could have finished it much faster. But sometimes the task is tedious, and I'm fine with it taking a little longer if I don't have to do it myself. And sometimes it truly does take care of it faster than I would have been able to. In the case of tech that I'm learning myself (React, Tailwindcss, the former of which I dabbled with 10 years ago, but my knowledge is completely out of date), CC has been incredibly useful when I don't really know how to do something. I'm fine letting CC do it, and then I read the code and learn something myself, instead of having to pore over various tutorials of varying quality in order to figure it out on my own.

So I think I'm convinced, and I'll continue to make CC more and more a part of my workflow. I'm currently on the Pro plan, and have hit the usage limits a couple times. I'm still a little shy about upgrading to Max and spending $100/mo on a dev tool... not sure if I'll get over that or not.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#322

Post by lifthrasiir »

dimal wrote: post #297
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…

Technically you’re not vibe coding. You’re using AI to do software engineering. Vibe coding is specifically the process of having AI produce code and plowing ahead without understanding it. I know I’m being pedantic, but people mean very different things when they talk about this stuff, and I don’t think any credence should be given to vibe coding.

To some extent, OP is still vibe coding because one has to trust Claude's every single decision which can't be easily verified at the first glance anyway. Agreed that we need a new word for heavily AI-assisted software development though, I once used a word "vivid coding" for this kind of process.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#323

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Love that these folks are enhancing team productivity - not just individual - making it easier to do prototypes.

When more ideas make it further you get more shots on goal. You are almost certain to have more hits!

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#324

Post by oceanplexian »

dimal wrote: post #297
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…

Technically you’re not vibe coding. You’re using AI to do software engineering. Vibe coding is specifically the process of having AI produce code and plowing ahead without understanding it. I know I’m being pedantic, but people mean very different things when they talk about this stuff, and I don’t think any credence should be given to vibe coding.

I vibe code quite a bit and will plow through a lot of front end code despite being a backend engineer. In my case, it's on personal projects where I'm ambitious and asking the LLM to "replace an entire SaaS" sort of thing. At work most of the code is a couple lines here or there and trivial to review.

When I try the more complex things I will do multiple passes with AI, have 2-3 LLMs review it and delete deprecated code, refactor, interrogate it and ask it to fix bad patterns, etc. In an evening I can refactor a large code base this way. For example Gemini is meh compared to Claude Opus at new code, but somewhat decent for reviewing code that's already there, since the 1M context window allows it to tie things together Claude wouldn't be able to fit in 256k. I might then bounce a suggestion back from Gemini -> Claude -> Grok to fix something. It's kind of like managing a team of interns with different specialties and personalities.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#325

Post by adastra22 »

brulard wrote: post #246
msikora wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These tools and LLMs differ in quality, for me Claude Code with Claude 4 was the first tool that worked well enough. I tried Cursor before, it's been a 6+ months ago though, but I wasn't very impressed.

Same for me. Cursor was a mess for me. I don't know why and how it works for other people. Claude code on the other hand was a success from day one and I'm using it happily for months now.

I used Cursor for about 5 months before switching to Claude Code. I was only productive with Cursor when I used it in a very specific way, which was basically me doing by hand what Claude Code does internally. I maintained planning documents, todo lists, used test driven development and linting tools, etc. My .cursorrules file looks like what I imagine the Claude system prompt to be.

Claude Code took the burden of maintaining that off my shoulders.

Also Cursor was/is utterly useless any all non-Anthropic models, which are the default.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#326

Post by sitkack »

willsmith72 wrote: post #284
channel_t wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, can confirm that as a senior developer who has needed to spend huge amounts of time reviewing junior code from off-shore contractors with very detailed and explicit instructions, dabbling in agentic LLM coding tools like Claude Code has felt like like a gift from heaven. I also have concerns about said junior developers wielding such tools, because yes, without being able to supply the right kind of context and…

Totally agree with the off-shore component of this. I'm already going to have to break a task down into clear detail and resolve any anticipated blocker myself upfront to avoid multi-timezone multi-day back and forth. Now that I'm practiced at that, the off-shored part is no longer valuable

The unemployment in India is going to be catastrophic. Geopolitical.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#327

Post by wordofx »

sergiotapia wrote: post #294
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…

I haven't used Claude Code - but have been using Amp a lot recently. Amp always hits on target. They created something really special. Has anyone here used both Claude Code and Amp and can compare the two's effectiveness? I know one is CLI and the other an editor extensions. I'm looking for comparisons beyond that. Thanks!

I don’t know why amp isn’t talked about more. It’s better than Claude code.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#328

Post by ChuckMcM »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #169
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…

If you are a Senior Developer, who is comfortable giving a Junior tips, and then guiding them to fixing them (or just stepping in for a brief moment and writing where they missed something) this is for you. I'm hearing from Senior devs all over thought, that Junior developers are just garbage at it. They product slow, insecure, or just outright awful code with it, and then they PR the code they don't even understand.…

An observation. If we stipulate that this is true that a 'senior developer' benefits from Claude Code but a junior developer do not. Then I'm wondering if that creates this gap where you have a bunch of newly minted '10x' engineers who are doing the work that a bunch of junior devs helped with, and now you're not training any new junior devs because they are unemployable. Is that correct?

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#329

Post by afro88 »

Being able to do big refactors quickly in the moment really helps in a solo dev environment, but in a team it puts a lot of review (and QA) burden on them. It makes me wonder if we're moving towards a teams model where individuals own different parts of the system, rather than everyone reviewing each others code and working together

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#330

Post by sitkack »

bonzini wrote: post #188
msikora wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

> wrote almost 100 lines of code to compare version numbers

Oh boy, it was almost sentient. That is a deep mathematical proof!

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