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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

#351

Post by ModernMech »

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.

When I read these LLM in coding discussions, I'm reminded a lot of online dating discussions. Someone will post "I'm really having a tough time dating. I tried X (e.g. a dating app) but I had a tough experience." Someone will respond "I tried X and had great success. Highly recommended." Seems confounding, but when you click into their profiles to see pictures of each person, it becomes abundantly clear why these people report different experiences.

Not to dog the author too hard, but a look at their Github profile says a lot about the projects they've worked on and what kind of dev they are. Not much there in terms of projects or code output, but they do have 15k followers on Twitter, where they post frequently about LLMs to their audience.

They aren't talking about the tasks and the domains they're using because that's incidental; what they really want to do is just talk about LLMs to their online audience, not ship code.

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

#352

Post by ModernMech »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30
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.

> It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me. I have mixed feelings; because this means there’s really no business reason to ever hire a junior; but it also (I think) threatens the stability of senior level jobs long term, especially as seniors slowly lose their knowledge and let Claude take care of things. The result is basically: When did you get into this field, by year? I’m…

DoD will probably be requiring use of Mechahitler soon enough.

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

#353

Post by muzani »

imiric wrote: post #71
libraryofbabel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. As others have commented, over and over again in the last 6 months we've seen discussions on HN with the same basic variation of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase." I sympathize with both experiences and have had both. But I think we've reached the point where such posts (both positive and negative) are…

It's telling that you ask these details from a comment describing a negative experience, yet the top-most comment full of praises and hyperbole is accepted at face value. Let's either demand these things from both sides or from neither. Just because your experience matches one side, doesn't mean that experiences different from yours should require a higher degree of scrutiny. I actually think it's more productive to…

They're tools. To a fluent tool user, the negative anecdotes sound like,

"I prefer typewriters over word processors because it's easier to correct mistakes."

"I don't own any forks because knives are just better at cutting bread."

"Bidets make my pants wet, so I'll keep to toilet paper."

I think there's an urge to fix misinformation. Whereas if someone loves Excel and thinks Excel is better than Java at making apps, I have no urge to correct that. Maybe they know something about Excel that I don't.

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

#354

Post by graphememes »

leonidasv wrote: post #120
graphememes wrote: post #87

It's great for me. I have a claude.md at the root of every folder generally, outlined in piped text for minimal context addition about the rulesets for that folder, it always creates tests for what it's doing and is set to do so in a very specific folder in a very specific way otherwise it tries to create debug files instead. I also have set rules for re-use so that way it doesn't proliferate with "enhanced" class va…

Which models do you use instead of Anthropic ones? I've only tried Claude Code with an external model once (Kimi K2) but it performed poorly.

I'm using fine-tuned models some with 600b+ parameters and some with 1t+ kimi base / deepseek base and others are general purpose that are from huggingface but I use those through mcp tools

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

#355

Post by LeafItAlone »

Waterluvian wrote: post #267
ianberdin wrote: post #232

Reading all these glowing reviews of Claude Code, I still get the feeling that either everyone’s been paid off or it’s just the die-hard fans of terminal windows and editors like Emacs and Vim. Using the terminal is right up their alley—it’s in their DNA. Every time I read comments saying Claude Code is far better than Cursor, I fire it up, pay for a subscription, and run it on a large, complex TypeScript codebase. F…

I think it’s because a lot of people deeply misunderstand what the hard parts of software development actually are. Most of the time, programs won’t involve novel or complicated algorithms or whatnot. It’s mostly just gluing ideas together. But that all comes after the specification, design, architecture, planning, etc. I think it can also be deceptive the same way it can be in basically any trade: it’s easy for the…

>it’s easy for the job to get “done” and work. It’s hard to do it properly in a way that it has a lasting durability. With A.I. we can spit out these programs that work and look done. And for prototypes or throwaways and such, that’s probably wonderful! But that’s not going to fly if you’re building a house to spec for people who are going to live in it for 30 years.

Let’s be honest, that’s what most companies pay good salaries for most software developers for.

When staring at a new job or project, do you more find yourself praising the architecture and quality? Or wondering how it got to this point?

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

#356

Post by 827a »

ianberdin wrote: post #232

Reading all these glowing reviews of Claude Code, I still get the feeling that either everyone’s been paid off or it’s just the die-hard fans of terminal windows and editors like Emacs and Vim. Using the terminal is right up their alley—it’s in their DNA. Every time I read comments saying Claude Code is far better than Cursor, I fire it up, pay for a subscription, and run it on a large, complex TypeScript codebase. F…

IMO: The people who are obsessed with Claude Code are the people who weren't really engineers to begin with. For them, any level of productivity is "extremely impressive" and "going to kill engineering jobs" because they never really understood what software engineers do, and had no sense of what the demarcations on the scale of productivity even should be.

The reason why they like Claude Code specifically over Cursor isn't because they were fans of terminal windows; on the contrary, its because CC is simpler. Cursor is complicated, and its interface communicates to the user that eventually you might be grabbing the wheel. Of course, experienced engineers want to grab the wheel; working together with the AI toward some goal. But these CC-stans don't. All that extra stuff in the UI scares them, because they wouldn't know what to do with it if they had to do something with it.

Its this particular kind of person that's also all over /r/ClaudeAI or /r/Cursor complaining about rate limits. If you've ever used these products, you'd realize very quickly: The only way you're hitting rate limits so quickly on the paid plans is if the only code that's being outputted is from the AI, nonstop, for eight hours a day, using only the most expensive and intelligent models. The only people who do this are the people who have no brain of their own to contribute to the process. Most CC/Cursor users don't hit rate limits, because they're working with the AI, like a tool, not managing it like a direct report.

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

#357

Post by Waterluvian »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #355
Waterluvian wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s because a lot of people deeply misunderstand what the hard parts of software development actually are. Most of the time, programs won’t involve novel or complicated algorithms or whatnot. It’s mostly just gluing ideas together. But that all comes after the specification, design, architecture, planning, etc. I think it can also be deceptive the same way it can be in basically any trade: it’s easy for the…

>it’s easy for the job to get “done” and work. It’s hard to do it properly in a way that it has a lasting durability. With A.I. we can spit out these programs that work and look done. And for prototypes or throwaways and such, that’s probably wonderful! But that’s not going to fly if you’re building a house to spec for people who are going to live in it for 30 years. Let’s be honest, that’s what most companies pay go…

Moving fast isn’t necessarily always the wrong choice. Often it’s the right choice… for a time…

Maybe AI will disrupt the rush to market phase. Maybe that makes complete sense, tbh. But there’s a whole realm of sober engineering that still needs to be done properly.

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

#358

Post by ikrenji »

filoeleven wrote: post #264
ookblah wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this sounds like a cop out, but honestly you will probably see the most vocal on both sides of this here while vast majority are just quietly doing working and doing their stuff (ironic i'm writing this). i feel like some kind of shill, but honestly i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks. the main benefit is that i can reduce a lot of cognitive load on tasks where they are either 1) exploratory 2) throwaway 3…

> i'm anywhere from 1.5x to 10x on certain tasks By your own reckoning. There was that recent study showing how senior devs using AI thought they were 20% faster, when they were objectively 20% slower.

i wouldn't draw broad conclusions on this based on one study. especially since it's going against what many people self-report. studies are often flawed.

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

#359

Post by Herring »

swader999 wrote: post #266

My biggest problem at the moment is that I am more inclined to talk to Claude and GPT O3 than the other more junior devs on my team. I just get more done. I'm not being facetious here, I really don't like that about the way I've been the past few days. I have to use the new free time I have to work more with them I guess.

Yeah I noticed the same. I would much rather have sensitive discussions (eg US foreign policy) with Gemini pro rather than with a human.

I was recently watching Seinfeld, and apparently in the 90s, picking up a friend from the airport was an important social contract. Today we just uber.

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