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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

#361

Post by actinium226 »

0x_rs wrote: post #35
arealaccount wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For someone that enjoys problem-solving more than actually implementing them, it's very fun.

So, is Claude just something you use for fun? Would you use it for work?

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

#362

Post by actinium226 »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #283
darkwater wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you actually know that those 20k line of codes have no glaring bugs, or bugs that you can find yourself, or be able to understand it completely at some point?

How do you know your own handwritten 20k lines of code have no bugs, or that 20k lines of code written by coworkers have no bugs?

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I have a lot more confidence in my own 20k lines of code than an AIs. I've built up skills to write performant, readable, functional, maintainable code. I build it up slowly and I can anticipate bugs as I write. I'm not perfect, but when bugs do arise, since I've built up the code, I have some idea of where to look and where not to look in order to fix them.

As for coworkers, I would really try to get them to work in chunks smaller than 20k loc. But at some point you have an expectation that coworkers will be accountable for their area of responsibility. If there's a bug in their code, they're expected to fix it. If there's a bug in the AIs code, I'm expected to fix it....

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

#363

Post by actinium226 »

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 really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me.

I agree. It reminds me of this one junior engineer I worked with who produced awful code, and it would take longer to explain stuff to him than to just do it myself, let alone all the extra time I had to spend reviewing his awful PRs. I had hoped he would improve over time, but he took my PR comments personally and refused to keep working with me. At least Claude doesn't have an attitude.

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

#364

Post by actinium226 »

serf wrote: post #107
dawnerd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time you do all of that you might as well just write code by hand.

that's really just a scale question. Yes, I would write a 4 line bash script by myself. But if you're trading a 200 line comprehensive claude.md document for a module that might be 20k LoC? it's a different value proposition.

And are you willing to stand behind those 20k loc? Like, whoever you're submitting it to, you can say "this is my work, it is done to a level of quality I find acceptable"?

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

#365

Post by actinium226 »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #58
arealaccount wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I'm not convinced that "we know they work really well for some people." So far I just see people really excited about the potential and really impressed at what it's capable of, but I think people are extrapolating poorly. It's like, yes it's impressive that it can make a video game with a few prompts, but that doesn't mean that with a few more prompts it'll turn into a AAA game.

I'm on board with some limited AI autocompletion, but so far agents just seem like gimmicks to me.

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

#366

Post by cco »

muzani wrote: post #240
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…

From what I see, you have to get your claude.md instructions right, and most of it is using planning mode. The CLI is exactly how you interact with it. It's less vibe code and what I'd call supervisory code. It's less about writing code, more about building an engine that codes. It's hands off but unlike Cursor, it's not as eyes-off. You do observe and interrupt it. It is great for full on TDF - it figures out the fe…

Cursor does the exact same thing? Just in a GUI where you can see it all happen.

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

#367

Post by treyd »

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 don't care what anyone says about Cursor's workflow, I will never install anything based on VS Code, it's just a nonstarter. That's enough for me.

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

#368

Post by smoody07 »

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 used Cursor daily for about six months before switching to CC and it took awhile. TUI is not my first choice. But their tools and prompts make it work fare more coherently, and I've had far fewer train wrecks in my code since fully switching a few weeks ago. The IDE extension helps.

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

#369

Post by Imanari »

upcoming-sesame wrote: post #250
nikcub wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The recent Kimi-K2 supposedly works great. My own experience is that it is below sonnet and opus 4.0 on capability - but better than gemini 2.5 pro on tool calling. It's really worth trying if you don't want to spend the $100 or $200 per month on Claude Max. I love how succinct the model is. > you can use CC with any model via Anthropic should just open source Claude Code - they're in a position to become the VS Co…

Where do you host Kimi-K2 ?

You can use it via openrouter.ai
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