Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

6 weeks of Claude Code

blog.puzzmo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 603 posts

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#391

Post by philbo »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #372
philbo wrote: post #362

As one of the curious minority who keeps trying agentic coding but not liking it, I've been looking for explanations why my experience differs from the mainstream. I think it might lie in this nugget: > I believe with Claude Code, we are at the > “introduction of photography” period of > programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t > have the same appeal anymore when a single > concept can just appear and you shape it…

> still people paint, still people pay for paintings But in what environment? It seems to me that most of the crafts that have been replaced by the assembly line are practiced not so much for the product itself, but for an experience both the creator and the consumer can participate in, at least in their imagination. You don't just order such artifacts on Amazon anonymously; you establish some sort of relationship wi…

I don't disagree with any of that. But as long as there are companies willing to pay me to write code the old-fashioned way, I'll keep doing it.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#392

Post by epolanski »

joks wrote: post #275
epolanski wrote: post #190

At this point I am 99% convinced that AI coding skeptics are nothing short of Luddites. They would be like "but a robot will never ever clean a house as well as I would", well, no shit, but they can still do the overwhelming majority of the work very well (or at least as good as you instruct them to) and leave you with details and orchestration.

If you get as much enjoyment out of problem-solving and programming as you do doing household chores, I'm not sure why you went into this career. I agree that the folks who are 100% anti-using-it-ever are overreacting, but IME replacing the overwhelming majority of the work with vibe-coding is both mind-numbing from a developer perspective and doesn't actually get you better results (or faster results, unless you're…

Vibe coding is when you don't check the output.

Instructing Claude Code to handle a circular dependency edge case in your code and write tests for it, while reviewing the work definitely does not quality as vibe coding.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#393

Post by jaggederest »

globular-toast wrote: post #380
jaggederest wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but that's like showing the compiled binary but not the source. With claude code prompt and config is everything.

This is the saddest part of this whole thing for me. You consider the prompts and config to be the real source code, but those are just completely lost into the ether. Even if you saved the prompts you can't reproduce their effects. Then there's the question of how do other developers contribute to the code. They don't have your prompts, they just have the code. So, no, prompts are not source code, that's why I ask f…

I have repos on github. I show the code.

I also make my design documents (roughly the prompts generated by the prompts) into committed markdown documents. So I show the second-tier prompts at least, you could consider those an intermediate language representation if you like.

> Then there's the question of how do other developers contribute to the code. They don't have your prompts, they just have the code.

I usually try to commit the initial prompts and adjustments. I don't commit trivial things like "That's not quite right, try doing X again" or "Just run the entire test suite"

> So, no, prompts are not source code

Hard disagree, but that's fine.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#394

Post by bravesoul2 »

arrowsmith wrote: post #101

The real power of Claude Code comes when you realise it can do far more than just write code. It can, in fact, control your entire computer. If there's a CLI tool, Claude can run it. If there's not a CLI tool... ask Claude anyway, you might be surprised. E.g. I've used Claude to crop and resize images, rip MP3s from YouTube videos, trim silence from audio files, the list goes on. It saves me incredible amounts of tim…

I got it to diagnose why my Linux PC was crashing. It did a lot of journalctl grepping on my behalf and was glad for its help. Think it may have helped fix it but will see.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#395

Post by calrain »

kelnos wrote: post #359
calrain wrote: post #338

Lets stop calling it Vibe Coding. I'm a heavy user of Claude Code and I use it like a coding assistant. How well you can manage a development team in real life has strong correlations on how much value you get out of an LLM based coding assistant. If you can't describe what success looks like, expect people to read your mind, and get angry at validating questions, then you will have problems both with coding assistan…

Calling what vibe coding, though? If you're reviewing, understanding, and testing everything that the coding assistant outputs, then you aren't vibe coding. If you're just letting the coding assistant do its thing, uncritically, and committing whatever results, then you're vibe coding. It sounds like you're not vibe coding. That's good. No need to throw away a useful term (even if it's a weird, gen-Z sounding term) t…

Yeah, maybe you're right.

The point that I'm probably missing (and others) is that we associate the phrase 'Vibe Coding' with 'Using an LLM to help with coding' and they're not the same.

Maybe the critics of Vibe Coding need to remember that all users of LLMs for coding support aren't about to regret their life choices.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#396

Post by exfalso »

Aurornis wrote: post #77
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…

> as a vibe coding skeptic, I was amazed. The interesting thing about all of this vibe coding skepticism, cynicism, and backlash is that many people have their expectations set extremely low. They’re convinced everything the tools produce will be junk or that the worst case examples people provide are representative of the average. Then they finally go out and use the tools and realize that they exceed their (extreme…

Hmm not my experience. I've been aggressively trying to use both Cursor and Claude Code. I've done maybe 20-30 attempts with Code at different projects, a couple of them personal small projects. All of them resulted in sub-par results, essentially unusable.

I tried to use it for Python, Rust and Bash. I also tried to use it for crawling and organizing information. I also tried to use it as a debugging buddy. All of the attempts failed.

I simply don't understand how people are using it in a way that improves productivity. For me, all of this is so far a huge timesink with essentially nothing to show for it.

The single positive result was when I asked it to optimize a specific SQL query, and it managed to do it.

Anyway I will keep trying to use it, maybe something needs to click first and it just hasn't yet.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#397

Post by skydhash »

conradfr wrote: post #387
js2 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also found it good at catching mistakes and helping write commit messages. "Review the top-most commit. Did I make any mistakes? Did I leave anything out of the commit message?" Sometimes I let it write the message for me: "Write a new commit message for the current commit." I've had to tell it how to write commit messages though. It likes to offer subjective opinions, use superlatives and guess at why something…

How long are you commit messages if you still are ahead after typing all this prompt?

My commits’description part, if warranted, is about the reason for the changes, not the specificity of the solution. It’s a little memo to the person reading the diff, not a long monograph. And the diff is usually small.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#398

Post by pmg101 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #328
giancarlostoro wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It already was the case wasn't it, that you could either get one senior dev to build your thing in a week, or give them a team of juniors and it would take the whole team 4 weeks and be worse.

Yet somehow companies continued to opt for the second approach. Something to do with status from headcount?

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#399

Post by ryuuseijin »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #273

Claude Code blows everything else out of the water for me. Which makes me certain I have a blind spot. Has anyone who’s gone decent at Clauding had matching success with other tools?

I've switched to opencode. I use it with Sonnet for targeted refactoring tasks and Gemini to do things that touch a lot of files, which otherwise can get expensive quickly.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#400

Post by luxuryballs »

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…

check out openrouter.ai you can pay for credits that get used per prompt instead of forking out a fixed lump sum and it rotates keys so you can avoid being throttled, you can even use the same credits on any model in their index
Post reply on HN