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6 weeks of Claude Code

blog.puzzmo.com

431–440 of 603 posts

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#431
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is the best thing about AI, it allows you to do and try so much more in the limited time you have. If you have an idea, build it with AI, test it, see where it breaks. AI is going to be a big boost for education, because it allows for so much more experimentation and hands-on.

By using AI, you learn how to use AI, not necessarily how to build architecturally sound and maintainable software, so being able to do much more in a limited amount of time will not necessarily make you a more knowledgeable programmer, or at least that knowledge will most likely only be surface-level pattern recognition. It still needs to be combined with hands-on building your own thing, to truly understand the nut…

If you end up with a working project where you understand all the moving parts, I think AI is great for learning and the ultimate proof whether the learning was succesful if whether you can actually build (and ship) things.

So human teachers are good to have as well, but I remember they were of limited use for me when I was learning programming without AI. So many concepts they tried to teach me without having understood themself first. AI would have likely helped me to get better answers instead of, "because that is how you do it" when asking why to do something in a certain way.

So obviously I would have prefered competent teachers all the time and also now competent teachers with unlimited time instead of faulty AIs for the students, but in reality human time is limited and humans are flawed as well. So I don't see the doomsday expectations for the new generation of programmers. The ultimate goal, building something that works to the spec, did not change and horrible unmaintainable code was also shipped 20 years ago.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the tail end of my 35+ year developer career, but one thing I always do with any LLM stuff is this: I'll ask it to solve something generally I know I COULD solve, I just don't feel like it. Example: Yesterday I was working with an Open API 3.0 schema. I know I could "fix" the schema to conform to a sample input, I just didn't feel like it because it's dull, I've done it before, and I'd learn nothing. So I aske…

I'm looking forward to the day that LLMs automatically put knowledge like this into Anki or something like it.

I made tools for Open-webui to add to anki. They work well I think. There are probably MCP tools too.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with the off-shore component of this. I'm already going to have to break a task down into clear detail and resolve any anticipated blocker myself upfront to avoid multi-timezone multi-day back and forth. Now that I'm practiced at that, the off-shored part is no longer valuable

The unemployment in India is going to be catastrophic. Geopolitical.

You know senior developers can also be off-shored, right?

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#434

I've been using Claude code 12-16 hours a day since I first got it running two weeks ago. Here's the tips I've discovered: 1. Immediately change to sonnet (the cli defaults to opus for max users). I tested coding with opus extensively and it never matches the quality of sonnet. 2. Compacting often ends progress - it's difficult to get back to the same quality of code after compacting. 3. First prompt is very importan…

5. it's not just docker, give it playwright MCP server so it can see what it is implementing in UI and requests 6. start in plan mode and iterate on the plan until you're happy 7. use slash commands, they are mini prompts you can keep refining over time, including providing starting context and reminding it that it can use tools like gh to interact with Github not sure I agree on 1. 2. compact when you are at a good…

> give it playwright MCP server

Or just `$ playwright`. Skip the MCP ceremony (and wasted tokens) and just have CC use CLI tools. Works remarkably well.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#435

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…

I completed my degree over 20 years ago and due to dot com bust and the path I took never coded as a full time role, some smallbits of dev and scripting but nothing where I would call myself a developer. I've had loads of ideas down through the years but never had the time work to complete them or learn the language/stack to complete them. Over the last 3 weeks I've been working on something small that should be ready for a beta release by the end of August. The ability to sit down and work on a feature or bug when I only have a spare 30 mins and be immediately productive without having to get in the zone is a game changer for me. Also while I can read and understand the code writing it would be at least 10 times slower for me. This is a small codebase that will have less than 5k lines and is not complicated so github copilot is working well for me in this case.

I could see me paying for higher tiers given the productivity gains.

The only issue I can see is that we might end up with a society where those that can afford the best subscriptions have more free time, get more done, make more money and are more successful in general. Even current base level subscriptions are too expensive for huge percentage of the global population.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#436

I wish I got this level of productivity. I think every article should list exactly what they asked the LLM to do because I'm not getting as much use from it and I don't know if it's because what I work on is rare compared to say website front and backend code and/or if I just suck at prompts/context or I'm using the wrong services or don't have the correct MCPs etc....

Is it possible to view the prompt history? I’ve had extreme levels of productivity and would love to list out how I’ve been using it generally for an article like this but it would be incredibly impractical to log it on the side.

With Claude Code at least, all of the chats you've had are stored in jsonl files on your computer in ~/.claude - I made a little TUI for exploring these in https://github.com/orta/claude-code-to-adium

Personally, I'm less sold on tracking prompts as being valuable both for production cases (imo if a human should read it, a human should have wrote/fully edited it applies to commits/PRs/docs etc) and for vibe cases where the prompts are more transitory

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#437
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…

A more apt metaphor is moving from hand-tools to power-tools.

The painting/photography metaphor stretches way too far imo - photography was fundamentally a new output format, a new medium, an entirely new process. Agentic coding isn't that.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#438

I stopped writing as much code because of RSI and carpal tunnel but Claude has given me a way to program without pain (perhaps an order of magnitude less pain). As much as I was wanting to reject it, I literally am going to need it to continue my career.

I find it very effective to use a good STT/dictation app since giving sufficient detailed context to CC is very important, and it becomes tedious to type all of that.

I’ve experimented with several dictation apps, including super whisper, etc., and I’ve settled on Wispr Flow. I’m very picky about having good keyboard shortcuts for hands-free dictation mode (meaning having a good keyboard shortcut to toggle recording on and off), and of course, accuracy and speed. Wispr Flow seems to fit all my needs for now but I’d love to switch to a local-only app and ditch the $15/mo sub :)

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#439
post #313

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.…

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…

This is insane to me.

Review your own code. Understand why you made the changes. And then clearly describe why you made them. If you can't do that yourself, I think that's a huge gap in your own skills.

Making something else do it means you don't internalize the changes that you made.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#440
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically you’re not vibe coding. You’re using AI to do software engineering. Vibe coding is specifically the process of having AI produce code and plowing ahead without understanding it. I know I’m being pedantic, but people mean very different things when they talk about this stuff, and I don’t think any credence should be given to vibe coding.

To some extent, OP is still vibe coding because one has to trust Claude's every single decision which can't be easily verified at the first glance anyway. Agreed that we need a new word for heavily AI-assisted software development though, I once used a word "vivid coding" for this kind of process.

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