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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

#431
post #355
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first half is correct, but the conclusions shouldn’t be ‘we’re replicating our software engineers with Claude today’, they’re ‘our experienced engineers just 10x their productivity, we’ll never need to hire an intern’

You mean "our experienced engineers just 10x'd their productivity, so we can fire 90% of them"

Accurate only for companies who think today “I have exactly as much engineering talent as I’ll ever need.”

Which is approximately zero companies.

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

#432

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. Alt…

Aider is amazing. You can even use it in copypaste mode with web-based AI:s.

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

#433

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…

That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less

Not everybody works in USA.

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, I did a few small taks with Claude Code after seeing this discussion here and is too expensive for me. A small change to create a script file (20 LoC) was 10cts, a quick edit to a README was 7ct Yes yes engineers make more than that blah blah but the cost would quickly jump out of control for bigger tasks. I’d easy burn through $10-20 upwards a day with this, or upwards $100-$300 a month. Unless you have a…

> Yes yes engineers make more than that blah blah but the cost would quickly jump out of control for bigger tasks. Also (most) engineers don't hallucinate answers. Claude still does regularly. When it does it in chat mode via a flat rate Pro plan I can laugh it off and modify the prompt to give it the context it clearly didn't understand but if its costing me very real money for the LLM to over-eagerly over-engineer…

> Also (most) engineers don't hallucinate answers.

They absolutely do, where do you think bugs come from? The base rate is typically just lower than current AIs.

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

#435

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…

it rarely returns the right answer

One of the biggest difficulties AI will face is getting developers to unlearn the idea that there's a right answer, and that of the many thousands of possible right answers, 'the code I would have written myself' is just one (or a few if you're one of the few great devs who don't stop thinking about approaches after your first attempt.)

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

#436
post #354

I tried this vs Cline/Aider/Lovable. For full stack, I would say Lovable is the best, for complexity, I think Cline is the best. Claude Code with the several request I gave it just produced code that didn't run. I think it has a long way to go.

+1 Cline is the best. I've tried it with openrouter!

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

#437

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…

I think this core business model question is happening at all levels in these companies. Each time the model goes in the wrong direction, and I stop it - or I need to go back and reset context and try again - I get charged. The thing is, this is actually a useful and productive way to work sometimes. Like when pairing with another developer, you need to be able to interrupt each other, or even try something and fail.

I don't mind paying per-request, but I can't help but think the daily API revenue graph at Cursor is going up whenever they have released a change that trips up development and forces users to intervene or retry things. And of course that's balanced by churn if users get frustrated and stop or leave. But no product team wants to have that situation.

In the end I think developers will want to pay a fair and predictable price for a product that does a good job most of the time. I don't personally care about switching models, I tend to gravitate towards the one that works best for me. Eventually, I think most coding models will soon be good at most things and the prices will go down. Where will that leave the tool vendors?

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

#438

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…

I cannot tell if the original tweet is sarcasm or not. Sections like this make me think yes? It's got to be at least tongue-in-cheek.

My take is it's a mix of both sarcasm and not sarcasm, even in the same sentence. It's a post truth future with a ton of upvotes.

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

#439

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…

Unfortunately the opposite is happening: Cursor is going to pay-per-use model:

https://x.com/ericzakariasson/status/1898753771754434761

https://old.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1j5kvun/cursor_0470...

I am afraid that the endgame of programming will be who has the biggest budget for an LLM, further consolidating programming to megacorps and raising barrier to entry.

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

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a steal? Engineers are paid much more to do much less

I know this is not really in the spirit of the room here, but before I ever dreamed of getting paid to code, I only learned to at all because I was cheap and/or poor cook/grad student that wanted to make little artsy musical things on the computer. I remember the first time I just downloaded pure data. No torrent, no cracks, it was just there for me and all it asked for was my patience. The only reason I ever got int…

The sounds like the best way to get into coding. (For me it was wanting to realize game ideas to entertain myself.)

Money for a computer when I was getting into it was the credit-card part of it — there were no cheap Chromebooks then. (A student loan took care of the $1200 or so I needed for a Macintosh Plus.)

I suspect that's always the way of it though. There will be an easier way throwing money at a thing and there will be the "programming finds a way" way.

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