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My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

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

#71

Post by imiric »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #58
arealaccount wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sigh. As others have commented, over and over again in the last 6 months we've seen discussions on HN with the same basic variation of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase." I sympathize with both experiences and have had both. But I think we've reached the point where such posts (both positive and negative) are…

It's telling that you ask these details from a comment describing a negative experience, yet the top-most comment full of praises and hyperbole is accepted at face value. Let's either demand these things from both sides or from neither. Just because your experience matches one side, doesn't mean that experiences different from yours should require a higher degree of scrutiny.

I actually think it's more productive to just accept how people describe their experience, without demanding some extensive list of evidence to back it up. We don't do this for any other opinion, so why does it matter in this case?

> Let's try and move the discussion beyond that!

Sharing experiences using anecdotal evidence covers most of the discussion on forums. Maybe don't try to police it, and either engage with it, or move on.

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

#72

Post by toomuchtodo »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #52
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s the first time it really does feel like working with a junior engineer to me. I have mixed feelings; because this means there’s really no business reason to ever hire a junior; but it also (I think) threatens the stability of senior level jobs long term, especially as seniors slowly lose their knowledge and let Claude take care of things. The result is basically: When did you get into this field, by year? I’m…

> because this means there’s really no business reason to ever hire a junior aren't these people your seniors in the coming years? Its healthy to model an inflow and outflow.

The pipeline dries up when orgs would rather get the upfront savings of gen AI productivity gains versus invest in talent development.

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

#73

Post by hooverd »

kypro wrote: post #61

HN has flipped so quickly on saying how AI produces unreliable slop, to most people using it to replace junior devs at their org – something I was heavily criticised for saying orgs should be doing a few months back. Progress doesn't end here either, imo CC is more a mid-level engineer with a top-tier senior engineer's knowledge. I think we're getting to the point where we can begin to replace the majority of enginee…

Where do the juniors come from?

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

#74

Post by 0x457 »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #58
arealaccount wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sigh. As others have commented, over and over again in the last 6 months we've seen discussions on HN with the same basic variation of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase." I sympathize with both experiences and have had both. But I think we've reached the point where such posts (both positive and negative) are…

There are some tasks that it can fail and not, but a lot of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase." IMO is "i know how to use it" vs "I don't know how to use it" with a side of "I have good test coverage" vs "tests?"

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

#75

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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?

Claude Max, honestly. Worth it to me.

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

#76

Post by stavros »

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?

Are you using Opus?

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

#77

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bluetidepro wrote: post #27
terhechte wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you need the max plan to break free of most rate limits

I wish there was a Max trial (while on Pro) to test if this was the case or not. Even if it was just a 24 hour trial. Max is an expensive trigger to pull, and hope it just solves this.

FWIW I went Claude Max after Pro, and the trick is to turn off Opus. If you do that you can pretty much use Sonnet all working day in a normal session. I don't personally find Opus that useful, and it burns through quota at 5x the speed of Sonnet.

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

#78

Post by libraryofbabel »

imiric wrote: post #71
libraryofbabel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh. As others have commented, over and over again in the last 6 months we've seen discussions on HN with the same basic variation of "Claude Code [or whatever] is amazing" with a reply along the lines of "It doesn't work for me, it just creates a bunch of slop in my codebase." I sympathize with both experiences and have had both. But I think we've reached the point where such posts (both positive and negative) are…

It's telling that you ask these details from a comment describing a negative experience, yet the top-most comment full of praises and hyperbole is accepted at face value. Let's either demand these things from both sides or from neither. Just because your experience matches one side, doesn't mean that experiences different from yours should require a higher degree of scrutiny. I actually think it's more productive to…

I should have been clearer - I'd like to see this kind of information from positive comments as well. It's just as important. If someone is having success with Claude Code while vide-coding a toy app, I don't care. If they're having success with it on a large legacy codebase, I want them to write a blog post all about what they're doing, because that's extremely useful information.

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

#79

Post by cmrdporcupine »

2sk21 wrote: post #63
deeshee wrote: post #15

It's great to see even the most hardcore developers who are not fond of change being happy with the latest releases related to AI-assisted development. My workflow now boils down to 2 tools really - leap.new to go from 0 to 1 because it also generates the backend code w/ infra + deployment and then I pick it up in Zed/Claude Code and continue working on it.

I'm curious: Do you scrutinize every line of code that's generated?

At first I dd not. Now I have learned I have to.

You have to watch Claude Code like a hawk. Because it's inconsistent. It will cheat, give up, change directions, and not make it clear to you that is what it's doing.

So, while it's not "junior" in capabilities, it is definitely "junior" in terms of your need as a "senior" to thoroughly review everything it does.

Or you'll regret it later.

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

#80

Post by dawnerd »

taude wrote: post #42
arealaccount wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

By the time you do all of that you might as well just write code by hand.
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