The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup • Hacker News Board

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#341

Post by iLoveOncall » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #329

iLoveOncall wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a FAANG and I'm the top reviewer in my team (in terms of number of PRs reviewed). I work on an internal greenfield project, so something really fast moving. For ALL of 2025 I reviewed around 400 PRs. And that already took me an extreme amount of time. Nobody is reviewing this many PRs. I've also raised around 350 PRs in the same year, which is also #1 for my team. AI or not, nobody is raising upwards of 3,…

Reviewing PRs should be for junior engineers, architectural changes, brand new code, or broken tests. You should not review every PR; if you do, you're only doing it out of habit, not because it's necessary. PRs come originally from the idea that there's an outsider trying to merge code into somebody's open source project, and the Benevolent Dictator wants to make sure it's done right. If you work on a corporate SWEn…

It seems like LLMs really have made people insane.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#342

Post by pc86 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

mikkupikku wrote: post #320

15155 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't just buying software, you're offloading liability of continued support and functionality.

Sure, but there's a whole lot of businesses already using custom solutions made with excel/access/etc that are held together with duct tape and chicken wire, so I think the adventurous spirit necessary is there.

There have always been hundreds or thousands of companies that want software engineers but simply don't have the revenue to support them. My first dev job was a small private company in exactly this spot. They basically paid me my salary for six months to figure out WordPress and PHP on the job having only ever done very basic programming stuff on my own in high school ~6 years prior.

The median dev salary across the entire US is something like $130k/yr. There are huge numbers of new or self-taught software devs in low cost of living areas of the country making $50-60k/yr.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#343

Post by losvedir » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

TeodorDyakov wrote: post #97

CraigJPerry wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem In most of these kinds of posts, that's still you. I don't believe i've come across a pro-faster-keyboard post yet that claims AGI. Despite the name, LLMs have no agency, it's still all on you. Once you've defined the next most important problem, you have a smaller problem - translate those requirements into code which accurately meets them. That's…

Why do you assume AGI needs to have agency?

Call it what you want, but people are going to call the LLM with tools in a loop, and it will do something. There was the AI slop email to Rob Pike thing the other day, which was from someone giving an agent the instruction to "do good", or some vague high level thing like that.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#344

Post by linsomniac » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:25 PM UTC

ruszki wrote: post #198

northern-lights wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he is working on a product that is hot and has demand from the users for new features/bug fixes/whatnot and also gets visibility on getting such things delivered. Most of us don't work on products that have that on a daily basis.

In other words, nobody cares that the generated code is shit, because there is no human who can review that much code. Not even on high level. According to the discussion here, they don’t even care whether the tests are real. They just care about that it’s green. If tests are useless in reality? Who cares, nobody has time to check them! And who will suffer because of this? Who cares, they pray that not them!

>nobody cares that the generated code is shit

That is the case, whether the code is AI generated or not. Go take a look at some of the source code for tools you use ever day, and you'll find a lot of shit code. I'd go so far as to say, after ~30 years of contributing to open source, that it's the rare jewel that has clean code.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#345

Post by fantasizr » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

tkel wrote: post #182

rdiddly wrote: post #157

I feel like it's time for me to hang up this career. Prompting is boring, and doing it 5 times at once is just annoying multitasking. I know I'm mostly in it for the money, but at least there used to be a feeling of accomplishment sometimes. Now it's like, whose accomplishment is it?

Agreed, the author basically says that coding is not required anymore, the job is reviewing code. Do engineers not actually want to build things themselves anymore? Where is the joy and pride in the craft? Are we just supposed to maximize productivity at the expense of our life's experience? Are we any different than machines at that point?

prompting in my experience is boring and/or frustrating. Why anyone would want to do more of that without MASSIVE financial incentives is unthinkable. No composer or writer would ever want to prompt a "work".

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#346

Post by dangus » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:40 PM UTC

tmerr wrote: post #65

This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works. I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem. I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work. I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 thing…

Let’s not forget the massive bias in the author: for all we know this post is a thinly veiled marketing pitch for “how to use the most tokens from your AI provider and ramp up your bill.”

This isn’t about being the most productive or having the best workflow, it’s about maximizing how much Claude is a part of your workflow.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#347

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #241

crystal_revenge wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial response to reading this post was "wow, I think I'd rather just write the code". I also remain a bit skeptical because, if all of this really worked (and I mean over a long time and scaling to meet a range of business requirements), even if it's not how I personally want to write code, shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay are…

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this. I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a conside…

[deleted]

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#348

Post by dangus » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #310

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of the middle of the year, there was no increase in publicly available indicators of new startups at all [0]. No change in the trend in steam releases, domain name registrations, app store releases, etc. People might be able to keep the fact that they're a one person team that built the app with AI secret, but they wouldn't be able to keep the fact that they made an app secret. Unless someone has evidence that's c…

Can't speak for anyone else, but I personally know 3. 2 of the 3 existed as entities for more than a year already, but pivoted at least once (both were VC-funded but now doing something very different than what they started with when I first met founders) and ultimately let go of their offshore and contract engineers once AI became good enough some time early last year. Founders basically realized that the quality of…

Those companies weren’t multiple person teams. They were one person teams with contract work. Maybe you know the details of the kind of money they were paid or how involved they were with the work but that could mean so many things.

I’d have to say when I hire someone in Fiverr to make a logo for my app I’m not suddenly a multi-person team. If I use AI to make my logo instead of paying a human $50 to make one I didn’t exactly experience a productivity revolution.

The other thought that popped into my head is that offshore contractors have access to AI, too. So shouldn’t we see their output go up and prices go down? Again we have another facet of this lack of market indicators.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#349

Post by senordevnyc » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

crystal_revenge wrote: post #169

tmerr wrote: post #65

This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works. I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem. I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work. I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 thing…

My initial response to reading this post was "wow, I think I'd rather just write the code". I also remain a bit skeptical because, if all of this really worked (and I mean over a long time and scaling to meet a range of business requirements), even if it's not how I personally want to write code, shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay are…

I'm a 1-person startup doing pretty well.

I got laid off in the first half of 2025 and decided to use my severance to see if I could go full-time with my side project. Over the last six months I've gone from zero to about $200k in ARR, and 75% of that was in the last three months. My average customer is paying about $250 / month.

I have zero help, I do everything myself: coding, design, marketing, sales, etc. The product uses AI to replace humans in a niche industry, so the core of the product is AI, but I also increasingly build it with AI. I rarely code manually these days, I'm just riding herd on agents, often in between sales calls, dealing with customer support, etc. I may eventually hire a VA-type person to help with admin and customer support stuff where it changes often enough that it's not worth it to build an AI workflow for, but even there...I don't know. If we get reliable computer use models in 2026 or 2027, I probably won't ever hire anyone.

I've never talked openly in tech circles about this product, nor will I. The technical challenges are non-trivial, so I don't think it'd be easy to replicate for another engineer, but my competitors are all dinosaurs and getting customers to switch to me is incredibly easy. The last thing I need is another engineer spinning up a competitor.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#350

Post by lunar_mycroft » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #337

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't speak for anyone else, but I personally know 3. I'm not saying your three friends/acquaintances don't exist, I'm saying the evidence suggests they aren't representative of a trend. This is consistent with the other evidence we have (e.g. studies which show that LLMs produce at best relatively modest gains in productivity, not enough for a one person team to do the work of even two people. > I'd also point out…

I'm not saying it's evidence for some larger trend; I'm presenting the reason why single-person teams might not advertise why they are single person and that these teams are not necessarily starting as single person teams, but sometimes collapsing down to single person teams.

Except in context that was very much what was suggested. The implication of the comment I replied to is that there actually are "a ton of 1 person startups" (and by implication, that LLMs do enable the massive increases in productivity that their proponents like to claim), but that they just keep the fact that they are quiet.