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6 weeks of Claude Code

blog.puzzmo.com

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Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#91

Post by Aurornis »

asdev wrote: post #75
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

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 feel like Cursor gives the same experience without having to be in the terminal. I don't see how Claude Code is so much better

I haven’t found massive performance between tools that use the same underlying LLM

The benefit of Claude Code is that you can pay a fixed monthly fee and get a lot more than you would with API requests alone.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#92

Post by rane »

macNchz wrote: post #72
KronisLV wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aider is much nicer, from the standpoint that you can add the files you need it to know about, and send it off to do its thing. As a user, I don't want to sit there specifying about 15-30 files, then realize that I've missed some and that it ruins everything. I want to just point the tool at the codebase and tell it: "Go do X. Look at the current implementation and patterns, as well as the tests, alongside the docs…

I think it makes sense to want that, but at least for me personally I’ve had dramatically better overall results when manually managing the context in Aider than letting Claude Code try to figure out for itself what it needs. It can be annoying, but I think it both helps me be more aware of what’s being changed (vs just seeing a big diff after a while), and lends itself to working on smaller subtasks that are more li…

You get much better results in CC as well if you're able to give the relevant files as a starting point. In that regard these two tools are not all that different.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#93

Post by cmrdporcupine »

GiorgioG wrote: post #73
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not setting good enough boundaries or reviewing what it's doing closely enough. Police it, and give it explicit instructions. Then after it's done its work prompt it with something like "You're the staff engineer or team lead on this project, and I want you to go over your own git diff like it's a contribution from a junior team member. Think critically and apply judgement based on the architecture of the proj…

Ah yes…the old “you’re holding it wrong”. The problem is these goddamn things don’t learn, so you put in the effort to police it…and you have to keep doing that until the end of time. Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.

It's just a tool, not an intelligence or a person.

You use it to make your job easier. If it doesn't make your job easier, you don't use it.

Anybody trying to sell you on a bill of goods that this is somehow "automating away engineers" and "replacing expensive software developers" is either stupid or lying (or both).

I find it incredibly useful, but it's garbage-in, garbage-out just like anything else with computers. If your code base is well commented and documented and laid out in a consistent pattern, it will tend to follow that pattern, especially if it follows standards. And it does better in languages (like Rust) that have strict type systems and coding standards.

Even better if you have rigorous tests for it to check its own work against.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#94

Post by MattGaiser »

asdev wrote: post #75
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

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 feel like Cursor gives the same experience without having to be in the terminal. I don't see how Claude Code is so much better

I put Cursor as 4th of the tools I have tried. Claude Code, Junie, and Copilot all do work that I find much more acceptable.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#95

Post by j45 »

buffer1337 wrote: post #84

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…

Letting Claude manage docker has been really good.

I’m working my way through building a guide to my future self for packaging up existing products in case I forget in 6 months.

At the same time frontier models may improve it, make it worse, or it stays the same, and what I’m after is consistency.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#96

Post by j45 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

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 was the same and switched t the first max plan. It’s very efficient with token usage for what I’ve been trying so far.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#97

Post by achierius »

buffer1337 wrote: post #84

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. Monolithic with docker orchestration: I essentially 10x'd when I started letting Claude itself manage docker containers, check their logs for errors, rm them, rebuild them, etc. Now I can get an entirely new service online in a docker container, from zero to operational, in one Claude prompt.

This is very interesting. What's your setup, and what kind of prompt might you use to get Claude to work well with Docker? Do you do anything to try and isolate the Claude instance from the rest of your machine (i.e. run these Docker instances inside of a VM) or just YOLO?

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#98

Post by MattGaiser »

GiorgioG wrote: post #73
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not setting good enough boundaries or reviewing what it's doing closely enough. Police it, and give it explicit instructions. Then after it's done its work prompt it with something like "You're the staff engineer or team lead on this project, and I want you to go over your own git diff like it's a contribution from a junior team member. Think critically and apply judgement based on the architecture of the proj…

Ah yes…the old “you’re holding it wrong”. The problem is these goddamn things don’t learn, so you put in the effort to police it…and you have to keep doing that until the end of time. Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.

They don't learn by themselves, but you can add instructions as they make mistakes that are effectively them learning. You have to write code review feedback for juniors, so that s not an appreciable difference.

> Better off training someone off the street to be a software engineer.

And that person is going to quit and you have to start all over again. They also cost at least 100x the price.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#99

Post by libraryofbabel »

iwontberude wrote: post #2

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.

You aren't the first person I have heard say this. It's an under-appreciated way in which these tools are a game-changer. They are a wonderful gift to those of us prone to RSI, because they're most good at precisely the boilerplate repetitive stuff that tends to cause the most discomfort. I used to feel slightly sick every time I was faced with some big piece of boilerplate I had to hammer out, because of my RSI and also because it just makes me bored. No longer. People worry that these tools will end careers, but (for now at least) I think they can save the careers of more than a few people. A side-effect is I now enjoy programming much more, because I can operate at a level of abstraction where I am actually dealing with novel problems rather than sending my brain to sleep and my wrists to pain hell hammering out curly braces or yaml boilerplate.

Re: 6 weeks of Claude Code

#100

Post by risyachka »

baq wrote: post #66
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #57

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…

Fascinating since I found the recent Claude models untrustworthy for writing and editing SQL. E.g. it'd write conditions correctly, but not add parens around ANDs and ORs (which gemini pro then highlighted as a bug, correctly.)

I bet it highly depends on the work you do.

It is very useful for simpler tasks like writing tests, converting code bases etc where the hard part is already done.

When it comes to actually doing something hard - it is not very useful at least in my experience.

And if you do something even a bit niche - it is mostly useless and its faster do dig into topic on your own that try to have Claude implement it.

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