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

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#361

Post by skeeter2020 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

margorczynski wrote: post #266

CharlieDigital wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are discounting sales, marketing, and branding. Take drop shipping for example: anyone can do this, but the successful ones are those that know how to brand and market the product well. Not to mention having the right mindset for startups and building a business. The code and product is maybe only 20% of the story.

I'm not. That edge eventually converges to 0 when you have 10+ competitors that offer the same for 10x less money. If you don't have some kind of cult following like Apple eventually you'll get margin-squeezed till death and all that marketing, sales, etc. will get cut down to stay afloat. Of course all of the above is just my theory how this will play out in the long run, I'm no oracle by any means.

Discounting Apple, their products and their customers to a cult is at best jealousy but still blatantly wrong. Lots of competition has been trying to out-Apple them for decades with no luck, and it's not because an iPhone customer is stupid & brain-washed.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#362

Post by skeeter2020 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

solumunus wrote: post #316

bodge5000 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? After months of hearing that people are producing software in months that would normally take years, the best examples of vibe coded software I've seen look like they would normally take months, not years. If you don't care how they're built or how long it took (which a user generally doesn't), much of the remaining shine comes off. If I'm wrong, I'd love to see it…

I’m building an ERP system, I’ve already been at it for a 3 years (full time, but half the system is already in production with two tenants so not all of my time is spent on completing the product, this revenue completely sustains the project). AI is now speeding this up tremendously. Maybe 2x velocity, which is a game changer but more realistic than what you hear. The post AI features are just as good and stable as…

I'm not discounting your experience, but purely from experiment design, you don't have any sort of pre/post AI control. You've spent 3 years becoming a subject-matter expert who's building software in your domain; I'm not surprised AI in it's current form is helpful. A more valuable comparison would be something like If you kept going without AI, how long would it take someone with similar domain experience who's just starting their solution to catch using AI?

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#363

Post by godzillabrennus » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC

MajidAliSyncOps wrote: post #330

godzillabrennus wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect you see the world this way because you are a software developer. People who know how to sell and understand the problems to solve do not routinely understand how to build software to solve those problems so they can sell them to customers. Now that the bar for building software is lowering, the world of building a startup is changing. A relatively newcomer to software is able to ship a medium complexity vibe…

I agree that the bar for building software has dropped significantly, but I think the harder part still shows up right after the first few customers. Shipping something workable is easier now, but understanding which problems are actually worth solving — and getting consistent feedback early — still seems to be the main separator between hobby projects and real businesses.

I totally concur. That said, technology is evolving fast, and I think it's clear that the bar for solving those problems with non-technical people will drop dramatically in the next 12 months.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#364

Post by Veelox » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #327

hnroo99 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50-100 PRs a week to me is insane. I'm a little skeptical and wonder how large/impactful they are. I use AI a lot and have seen significant productivity gains but not at that level lol.

50-100 is a lot, but 15 a week should be normal with continuous integration, you should be merging multiple times a day

Where have you worked? I have been at a lot of places and I have never seen people consistently checking in 2 PR/day every day.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#365

Post by zdragnar » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

lab14 wrote: post #334

margorczynski wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But eventually people will catch up you can basically create a working product alone with the help of AI. My prediction is that this will lead to a margin free-fall for many software products where the main moat is the software itself. And a lot of SaaS companies will also become redundant when the AI can code up a tailored solution in an hour for free.

Perhaps for extremely basic products. Most non-engineers can barely write and untangle their messy thoughts and you think they can just build a spec for an AI to build a product? Hopefully I'm wrong, but I doubt it.

This is what gets me... Even at companies with relatively small engineering teams compared to company size, actually getting coherent requirements and buy-in from every stakeholder on a single direction was enough work that we didn't really struggle with getting things done.

Sure, there was some lead, but not nearly enough to 2x the team's productivity, let alone 10x.

Even when presented with something, there was still lead time turning that into something actually actionable as edge cases were sussed out.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#366

Post by Syzygies » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #233

10-15 parallel Opus 4.5 instances running almost full-time? Even if you could get it, what would be the monthly bill for that?

One of my side projects has been to recover a K&R C computer algebra system from the 1980's, port to modern 64-bit C. I'd have eight tabs at a time assigned files from a task server, to make passes at 60 or so files. This nearly worked; I'm paused till I can have an agent with a context window that can look at all the code at once. Or I'll attempt a fresh translation based on what I learned.

With a $200 monthly Max subscription, I would regularly stall after completing significant work, but this workflow was feasible. I tried my API key for an hour once; it taught me to laugh at the $200 as quite a deal.

I agree that Opus 4.5 is the only reasonable use of my time. We wouldn't hire some guy off the fryer line to be our CTO; coding needs best effort.

Nevertheless, I thought my setup was involved, but if Boris considers his to be vanilla ice cream then I'm drinking skim milk.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#367

Post by ruszki » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #344

ruszki wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but there is a difference, between if at least one people at one point of time understood the code (or the specific part of it), and none. Also, there are different levels. Wildfly’s code for example is utterly incomprehensible, because the flow jumps on huge inheritance chains up and down to random points all the time; some Java Enterprise people are terrible with this. Anyway, the average for tools used by many is way better than that. So it’s definitely possible to make it worse. Blindly trusting AI is one possible way to reach those new lows. So it would be good to prevent it, before it’s too late, and not praising it without that, and even throwing out one of the (broken, but better than nothing) safeguard. Especially how code review is obviously dead with such amount of generated code per week. (The situation wasn’t great there either before) So it’s a two in one bad situation.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#368

Post by timcobb » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

falloutx wrote: post #230

timcobb wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm wondering where that is Not at work, elsewhere

I mean at work people are slowed down by management and getting alignment is even slower than before. As PMs and execs keep asking more to be done in the same-ish time, we are getting slow cooked. Extra productivity at work is not being used at fixing bugs as well.

Yeah work, despite management's best intentions, is really failing AI by being that much relatively slower than engineering potential now. It's a bummer.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#369

Post by stingraycharles » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

neomantra wrote: post #305

stingraycharles wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope self-promotion isn't frowned upon, but I've been spending the past months figuring out a workflow [1] that helps tackle the "more complicated problems" and ensure long-term maintainability of projects when done purely through Claude Code. Effectively, I try to: - Do not allow the LLM to make any implicit decisions, but instead confirm with the user. - Ensure code is written in such a way that it's easy to unde…

Thanks for sharing and taking the time to document your repo. I’m also sometimes unsure of “self-promotion” — especially when you don’t have anything to sell, including yourself. I sometimes don’t share links, due to this and then sometimes overshare or miss the mark on relevance. But sometimes when I do share people are excited about it, so I’ve leaned more to sharing. Worst is you get some downvotes or negative com…

hah thanks for the compliment.

yeah last time I shared it, I got a whole lot of hate for vibe coder self promotional BS so I decided to tread a bit more carefully this time.

I encourage you to try to prompt engineer skill! It’s one of the easiest to use, and you can literally use it on anything, and you’ll also immediately see how the “dynamic prompt workflow” works.

Re: The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

#370

Post by nerevarthelame » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

dbbk wrote: post #271

buggymcbugfix wrote: post #62

> [I'm] the creator of Claude Code. but also > Claude Code works great out of the box, so I personally don't customize it much. Am I the only one to notice the irony of this juxtaposition?

What’s ironic? He made a good product that works well without needing to configure it?

He doesn't need to configure it because he made his preferences the default.