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I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

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Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#421

Post by sgarland »

lqstuart wrote: post #340
TheDong wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works. Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work. Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages…

I think this spirit is totally lost on most people in this field. It’s tempting to say younger generations but it’s everyone. It always amazes me when I meet someone who has spent 10+ years in this field and doesn’t even care how anything but their shitty Kafka-Flink pipelines work.

If that; I’ve met plenty who only care that they work, not how they work.

As someone who works in infra and dabbles in coding, this is a continual bugbear, because often I’ll find an optimization while troubleshooting “my” problem, and the dev team is disinterested in implementing it. Their endpoints are meeting their SLO, so who cares?

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#422

Post by [deleted] »

WD-42 wrote: post #121
slooonz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided to try seriously the Sonnet 3.7. I started with a simple prompt on claude.ai ("Do you know claude code ? Can you do a simple implementation for me ?"). After minimal tweaking from me, it gave me this : https://gist.github.com/sloonz/3eb7d7582c33e95f2b000a0920016... After interacting with this tool, I decided it would be nice if the tool could edit itself, so I asked (him ? it ?) to create its next version.…

So you’re telling me you spent 20 dollars and an entire day for 200 lines of JavaScript and 75 lines of python and this to you constitutes a working re-creation of Claude Code? This is why expectations are all out of whack.

[deleted]

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#423

Post by someothherguyy »

sixQuarks wrote: post #319

All I see here is coping by developers. You all are so blind to what’s coming. Let’s not forget, if you relied on hacker news to give you accurate takes on things, you would’ve never bought bitcoin at one cent.

What is coming? AGI that will destroy any notion of property rights or freedom that you ever held? Or something better?

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#424

Post by firtoz »

coffeecantcode wrote: post #420
firtoz wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently pay around $200-300 to a combination of Cursor + Anthropic through the API. I have both a full time job and freelance work. It pays for itself. I end up reviewing more than manual coding, to ensure the quality of the results. Funnily, the work I did through this method has received more praise than my usual work.

Did you outgrow the vase 500 searches that Cursor gives you per month and connect your API key for usage based pricing? I’m having a hard time coming close to the 500 included in the monthly subscription and I use it like, a lot. Just curious how you’re hitting that 200-300 mark unless you’re talking about paying Anthropic outside of cursor. Which I just now realized is probably the case.

I ran out of fast requests and using my own API key

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#426

Post by inciampati »

I'm impressed by how many people who are working with Claude Code seem to have never heard of its open source inspiration, aider: https://aider.chat/

It's exactly what Yegge describes. It runs in the terminal, offering a retro vision of the most futuristic thing you can possibly be doing today. But that's been true since the command line was born.

But it's more than Claude Code, in that it's backend LLM agnostic. Although sonnet 3.7 with thinking _is_ killing the competition, you're not limited to it, and switching to another model or API provider is trivial, and something you might do many times a day even in your pursuit of code that vibes.

I've been a vim and emacs person. But now I'm neither. I never open an editor except in total desperation. I'm an aider person now. Just as overwhelmingly addicted to it as Yegge is to Claude Code. May the future tooling we use be open source and ever more powerful.

Another major benefit of aider is its deep integration with git. It's not "LLM plus coding" it's really like an interface between any LLM (or LLMs), git, and your computer. When things go wrong, I git branch, reset to a working commit, and continue exploring.

note: cross-posted from the other (flagged) thread on this

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#427

Post by lolinder »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #255

I decided to check this out after seeing the discussion here. I had previously misunderstood that it required a Claude.ai plan, but it actually just uses your API keys. I did a comparison between Claude Code and Aider (my normal go-to): I asked it to do clone a minor feature in my existing app with some minor modifications (specifically, a new global keyboard shortcut in a Swift app). Claude Code spent about 60 secon…

I think that tools like this have to operate on a subscription model like Cursor does in order to make any kind of sense for most users. The pay as you go model for agentic code tools makes you responsible for paying for:

* Whatever context the agent decides to pull in.

* However many iterations the model decides to run.

* Any result you get, regardless of how bad it is.

With pay as you go, the tool developer has no incentive to minimize any of these costs—they get paid more if it's inefficient, as long as it's not so inefficient that no one uses it. They don't even need it to be especially popular, they just need some subset of the population to decide that costs don't matter (i.e. those with Silicon Valley salaries).

With Cursor's model of slow and fast queries, they are taking responsibility for ensuring that the agents are as cost efficient as possible. The more efficient the agent the larger their cut. The fewer times that people have to ask a question a second time, the larger their cut. This can incentivize cutting corners, but that somewhat balanced out by the need to keep people renewing their subscription, and on the whole for most users it's better to have a flat subscription price and a company that's optimizing their costs than to have a pay-as-you-go model and a company that has no incentive to improve efficiency.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#428

Post by prettyblocks »

theshrike79 wrote: post #361
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My workflow for that kind of thing goes something like this (I use Sonnet 3.7 Thinking in Cursor): 1. 1st prompt is me describing what I want to build, what I know I want and any requirements or restrictions I'm aware of. Based on these requirements, ask a series of questions to produce a complete specification document. 2. Workshop the specification back and forward until I feel it's complete enough. 3. Ask the agen…

I need to steal the specification idea. Cursor w/ Claude has a habit of running away on tangents instead of solving just the one problem, then I need to reject its changes and even roll back to a previous version. With a proper specification as guideline it might stay on track a bit better.

Copilot supports this somewhat natively:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/customizing-copilot/addin...

The first thing I do for a new project is ask Copilot to create a custom-instructions.md for me and then as I work on my projects, I ask it to update the instructions every now and then based on the current state of my project.

Much less misses this way in my experience.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#429

Post by someothherguyy »

abxyz wrote: post #26
develoopest wrote: post #4

I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more. All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the…

I think it's probably the difference between "code" and "programming". An LLM can produce code and if you're willing to surrender to the LLMs version of whatever it is you ask for, then you can have a great and productive time. If you're opinionated about programming, LLMs fall short. Most people (software engineers, developers, whatever) are not "programmers" they're "coders" which is why they have a positive impres…

> If you think about code as a means to an end, and focus on the end

The problem with this is that you will never be able to modify the code in a meaningful way after it crosses a threshold, so either you'll have a prompt only modification ability, or you will just have to rewrite things from scratch.

I wrote my first application ever (equivalent to a education CMS today) in the very early 2000s with barely any notion of programming fundamentals. It was probably a couple hundred thousand lines of code by the time I abandoned it.

I wrote most of it in HTML, JS, ASP and SQL. I was in high school. I didn't know what common data structures were. I once asked a professor when I got into late high school "why arrays are necessary in loops".

We called this cookbook coding back in the day.

I was pretty much laughed at when I finally showed people my code, even though it was a completely functional application. I would say an LLM probably can do better, but it really doesn't seem like something we should be chasing.

Re: I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

#430

Post by bakies »

trescenzi wrote: post #86

I’m sorry what is happening with this paragraph: > As long as the bank authorizations keep coming through, it will push on bug fixes until they're deployed in production, and then start scanning through the user logs to see how well it's doing. I enjoy using these tools. They help me in my work. But the continual hype makes the discussion around them impossible to be genuine. So I ask, genuinely, did I miss the confi…

Yes it will, I wrote a quick script for local deployment (and then had claude improve it) and then quickly write documentation (and have claude improve it) on how to deploy & gather logs. It will do those things and follow the logs while I'm clicking around in the app. When starting a new session it will read the docs and know how to deploy and check logs. If something failed in the docker build that script output is read by claude since it ran it.

haven't tried PR stuff yet though

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