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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

#491

Post by baq »

rglover wrote: post #488
baq wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always has been! Not sure what AI changes here.

It encourages developers to not worry about understanding the code they write. At least now, there's someone around (typically) who can figure things out. But as more developers rely on AI and their skills atrophy, if entire products are being built with AI, eventually no one will exist who can fix the software when it breaks. Not only that, but anything that requires knowledge outside the training of the AI will be…

You’re right, my point is for most software it doesn’t matter. I can envision some software not even checking code in to source control, just prompts, in essence jumping to a higher level of abstraction, just like we don’t analyze what the v8 jit does to js when it emits machine code. (There are some who do, and no doubt there will be people who will look and/or care, just like there will be software that needs to be written in an exact way in assembly today.)

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

#492

Post by theshrike79 »

prettyblocks wrote: post #428
theshrike79 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool!

I just spent last night working with Cursor and Claude Code, both support different styles of custom rules.

Then I got to work and was lamenting what my corp sponsored Copilot can't do the same - but turns out it can! :D

EDIT: Just tried it and Copilot is completely clueless. It can explain the file, but doesn't know how to generate one. Claude generates its own CLAUDE.md on startup. Cursor can create its own rulefiles pretty well, even better if you add a rule for generating rules.

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

#493

Post by jamil7 »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #264
jamil7 wrote: post #11

How does it compare to Aider with the same model?

I just posted as a top-level, but the biggest difference I see is that Claude Code does better at identifying which files to change than Aider does, and it's a lot more expensive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43315371

Thanks, super helpful. I tried it out and had similar observations, in my case, I also work on a Swift codebase but with a few internal dependencies that are in separate repos, Aider can handle this by pointing it to files in other repos with the read-only command. I wasn't able to get that working with Claude code. I also found the "magic" dependency resolution part of Claude code to be a little wasteful/poor, at least in my codebase in which it chewed through time and tokens searching for the correct files.

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

#494

Post by ddacunha »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #366
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…

Now, the billion dollar question is - how long would it take you to code that diff?

I recently made some changes to a website generated by a non-technical user using Dreamweaver. The initial state was quite poor, with inline CSS and what appeared to be haphazard copy-pasting within a WYSIWYG editor.

Although I’m not proficient in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, I have some understanding of what good code looks like. Through several iterations, I managed to complete the task in a single evening, which would have required me a week or two to relearn and apply the necessary skills. Not only the code is better organised, it’s half the size and the website looks better.

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

#495

Post by namaria »

csomar wrote: post #66
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…

Yeah, it's so bad now I only trust my eyes. Everyone is faking posts, tweets and benchmarks that the truth no longer exists. I'm using Claude 3.7 now and while it improved on certain areas, it degraded on others (ie: it randomly removes/changes things more now).

It's clear to anyone paying attention that LLMs hit a wall a while back. RAG is just expert systems with extra steps. 'Reasoning' is just burning more tokens in hopes it somehow makes the results better. And lately we've seen that a small blanket is being pulled that way or another.

LLMs are cool, machine learning is cooler. Still no 'AI' in sight.

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

#496

Post by escapecharacter »

philipswood wrote: post #201
escapecharacter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found AI to be useful on precisely-scoped tasks I might assign to a junior programmer to take a day to do, like "convert this exact bash script to a Powershell script". But in my own work, those tasks are pretty rare, like 3 times a month? Often I start working on something, and the scope and definition of success changes while I'm in the midst of it. Or it turns out to be harder than expected and it makes sense…

> you do actually want that (soft) pushback some of the time. Most modern LLMs will gleefully come up with a complete plan for how we're gonna get the square peg in the round hole. I once accidentally asked a local DeepSeek distilled model to do the wrong thing by accidentally copy pasting the wrong variable name. It told me how to do it, and then asked me if I was sure. My local DeepSeek R1 model (deepseek-r1:7b) sa…

That's nice!

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

#497

Post by huvin99 »

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…

Is this true even for Claude 3.7 Sonnet/3.7 Sonnet Thinking ?

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

#498

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#499

Post by throwawaymsft »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #366
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…

Now, the billion dollar question is - how long would it take you to code that diff?

Infinite, because the median counterfactual is never getting around to this P4 “nice to have” issue that’s languished in the backlog.

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

#500

Post by prettyblocks »

theshrike79 wrote: post #492
prettyblocks wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool! I just spent last night working with Cursor and Claude Code, both support different styles of custom rules. Then I got to work and was lamenting what my corp sponsored Copilot can't do the same - but turns out it can! :D EDIT: Just tried it and Copilot is completely clueless. It can explain the file, but doesn't know how to generate one. Claude generates its own CLAUDE.md on startup. Cursor can create its own r…

I have had success with having copilot generate the file for me with no issues. I use sonnet 3.5 or 3.7. I start by writing a paragraph describing the project and it does pretty well.
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