My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #18

jm4 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell Claude to verify its work. I’m using it for data analysis tasks and I always have it check the raw data for accuracy. It was a whole different ballgame when I started doing that. Clear instructions go a long way, asking it to review work, asking it to debug problems, etc. definitely helps.

> You can tell Claude to verify its work Definitely - with ONE pretty big callout. This only works when a clear and quantifiable rubric for verification can be expressed. Case in point, I put Claude Code to work on a simple react website that needed a "Refresh button" and walked away. When I came back, the button was there, and it had used a combination of MCP playwright + screenshots to roughly verify it was working…

[deleted]

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

#42

Post by taude » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:02 PM UTC

arealaccount wrote: post #12

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.

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…

do you create the claude.md files at several levels of your folder structure, so you can teach it how to do different things? Configuring these default system prompts is required to get it to work well.

I'd definitely watch Boris's intro video below [1]

[1] Boris introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eBSHbLKuN0 [2] summary of above video: https://www.nibzard.com/claude-code/

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

#43

Post by kraftman » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

thegrim33 wrote: post #34

pragmatic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it pretty interesting that it's a roughly 2,500 word article on "using Claude Code" and they never once actually explain what they're using it for, what type of project they're coding. It's all just so generic. I read some of it then realize that there was absolutely no substance in what I just read. It's also another in my growing list of data points towards my opinion that if an author posts meme pictures in…

Yeah I got about half way through before thinking "wow theres no information in this" and giving up.

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

#44

Post by _se » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

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.

It's always POC apps in js or python, or very small libraries in other popular languages with good structure from the start. There are ways to make them somewhat better in other cases (automated testing/validation/linting being a big one), but for the type of thing that 95% of developers are doing day to day (working on a big, sprawling code base where none of those attributes apply), it's not close to being there.

The tools really do shine where they're good though. They're amazing. But the moment you try to do the more "serious" work with them, it falls apart rapidly.

I say this as someone that uses the tools every day. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the "you don't get it, they're amazing at everything" people just aren't working on anything even remotely complicated. Or it's confirmation bias that they're only remembering the good results - as we saw with last week's study on the impact of these tools on open source development (perceived productivity was up, real productivity was down). Until we start seeing examples to the contrary, IMO it's not worth thinking that much about. Use them at what they're good at, don't use them for other tasks.

LLMs don't have to be "all or nothing". They absolutely are not good at everything, but that doesn't mean they aren't good at anything.

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

#45

Post by ToJans » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC

Whenever I'm rate limited (pro max plan), I stop developing.

For anything but the smallest things I use claude code...

And even then...

For the bigger things, I ask it to propose to me a solution (when adding new features).

It helps when you give proper guidance: do this, use that, avoid X, be concise, ask to refactor when needed.

All in all, it's like a slightly autistic junior dev, so you need to be really explicit, but once it knows what to do, it's incredible.

That being said, whenever you're stuck on an issue, or it keeps going in circles, I tend to rollback, ask for a proper analysis based on the requirements, and fill in the details of necessary.

For the non-standard things (f.e. detect windows on a photo and determine the measurement in centimetres), you still have to provide a lot of guidance. However, once I told it to use xyz and ABC it just goes. I've never written more then a few lines of PHP in my life, but have a full API server with an A100 running, thanks to Claude.

The accumulated hours saved are huge for me, especially front-end development, refactoring, or implementing new features to see if they make sense.

For me it's a big shift in my approach to work, and I'd be really sad if I have to go back to the pre-AI area.

Truth to be told, I was a happy user of cline & Gemini and spent hundreds of dollars on API calls per month. But it never gave me the feeling Claude code gave me, the reliability for this thing is saving me 80% of my time.

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

#46

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC

deeshee wrote: post #31

ardit33 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.So far, it is great if you know what you want, and tell it exactly how you want it, and AI can help you on that (basically intern level work). 2. When you are in a new area, but you don't want to dive deep and just want something quick and it is not core of the app/service. But, if you are experienced, you can see how AI can mess things up pretty quickly, hence for me it has been best used to 'fill in clear and wel…

I agree. But it's also a mindset game. Experienced devs often approach AI with preconceptions that limit its utility - pride in "craftsmanship, control issues, and perfectionism can prevent seeing where AI truly shines. I've found letting go of those instincts and treating AI as a thought partner rather than just a code generator be super useful. The psychological aspects of how we interact with these tools might be…

[deleted]

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

#47

Post by singron » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #28

bluetidepro wrote: post #23

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

No clue. I use it for hours on end. Longest run cost me $30 in tokens. I think it was 4 hours of back and forth. Here is an example of chat gpt, followed by mostly Claude that finally solved a backlight issue with my laptop. https://github.com/mbrumlow/lumd

I haven't used Claude Code a lot, but I was using about $2-$5/hour, but it varied a lot. If I used it 6 hours/day and worked a normal 21 workday month (126 hours), then I would rack up $250-$630/month in API costs. I think I could be a more efficient with practice (maybe $1-$3/hour?). If you think you are seriously going to use it, then the $100/month or $200/month subscriptions could definitely be worth it as long as you aren't getting rate limited.

If you aren't sure whether to pull the trigger on a subscription, I would put $5-$10 into an API console account and use CC with an API key.

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

#48

Post by SwiftyBug » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

bluetidepro wrote: post #23

How are people using this without getting rate limited non stop? I pay for Claude Pro and I sometimes can’t go more than 5 prompts in an hour without it saying I need to wait 4 hours for a cooldown. I feel like I’m using it wrong or something, it’s such a frustrating experience. How do you give it any real code context without using all your tokens so quickly?

I've been using it pretty heavily and never have I been rate limited. I'm not even on the Pro Max plan.

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

#49

Post by dontlaugh » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

ToJans wrote: post #45

Whenever I'm rate limited (pro max plan), I stop developing. For anything but the smallest things I use claude code... And even then... For the bigger things, I ask it to propose to me a solution (when adding new features). It helps when you give proper guidance: do this, use that, avoid X, be concise, ask to refactor when needed. All in all, it's like a slightly autistic junior dev, so you need to be really explicit…

I still don’t get why I should want that.

I’ve mentored and managed juniors. They’re usually a net negative in productivity until they are no longer juniors.

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

#50

Post by erentz » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 9:28 PM UTC

There must at this point be lots and lots of actual walkthroughs of people coding using Claude Code, or whatever, and producing real world apps or libraries with them right? Would be neat to have a list because this is what I want to read (or watch), rather than people just continuously telling me all this is amazing but not showing me it’s amazing.