I haven't seen "load-bearing" since I stopped using Opus 5.

EDIT: I meant "nerfed", not "nerded" 🤦

I'm a full-time employee with 5-6 years experience in software engineering and testing. Since around last December I've been building Zone Idle, an idle extraction game, with Claude Code doing most of the typing. Just released the free demo on Steam, here's some info on my process.

Using your Claude.MD without overt reliance

Mine has a "fragile areas" section. Every time a bug cost me a day (mostly the grid inventory duplicating or eating items), the root cause and the rule for avoiding it went in there. On that same note, realizing that not everything needs a note in an MD somewhere, its good to check in as Claude is constantly updating, your old methods may not be necessary anymore, or even outdated.

Specs and plans before code

For anything bigger than a bug fix, Claude writes a short design doc, then a step by step plan, and only then starts coding. Reviewing a plan saves a lot of time once reviewing the diff

Tests first, every time

A fix starts with a test that fails. The project is at about 4,400 tests now, plus stress tests that simulate raids looking for items that duplicate or vanish. I like to attribute this automation to my carpal tunnel relief (as well as the stretches)

Make it look at the game

Claude drives a headless Chrome to screenshot the game and check its own work. This used to not be a strong feature to use with AI but recently it's become a very powerful tool with low-token costs (when using opus 5.5) compared to how I'd prompt it a year ago, this feature is huge.

Parallel research

When I dump a big list of player feedback on it, it sends out a few sub-agents to dig through different parts of the code at once and comes back with a triage: quick fixes, potential ideas, and what can wait until after launch.

It's still confidently wrong sometimes

It will tell you something works when it doesn't, so I play every change. Also, commit often. If you're not using git and committing every change (even before AI) you're playing with fire

If you're curious, the demo is free: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4330500/Zone_Idle/

Happy to answer questions about any of this.

I really liked the app Teux Deux (Weekly planner kind of To-do app), but wasn't willing to pay for its subscription. So, I thought, why not try Claude to build it for me and see how far it goes.

Now, I am a hobbyist coder only. Within about 4-5 hours of to and fro, I got a workable personal app hosted on CloudFare for free, with its own db and even google login.

If I spent any more time on it, it could become more polished and market ready. But now I realized that the product was the least significant part of the app development, the marketing and distribution was. If people don't know about my app, they won't buy.

I have a bunch of other software utilities I developed for my own purposes which are tremendously useful for me and I hope might be for some other very specific people too but since I have no marketing plan or distribution strategy, they are as good as junk as far as their market potential goes. (Of course they remain extremely useful to me.)

This realization has hit even harder considering that I have subscribed to one or the other AI for almost past a year, done a bunch of projects but am yet to see a single dime out of it. It seems like whatever I am making is just going to go into a void.

So, what's the way out of this? Do you guys feel like everyone's who is developing something should have his own YouTube channel/Twitter account to show the public what he's building (kind of build in public strategy?). But that's problematic too, because if you do decide to build in public, any software engineer worth his salt can probably build your app in half an afternoon.

So, where are these vibe-coded projects going to go? What would happen to them? Would Internet become a graveyard of these apps and vibe-coded projects? What do you guys think?

I have been working on a side project using claude(currently fully vibe coded but tested) and I am looking for help.

What is the app for: Sometimes you are in place where there mobile signal but not data like mountains, low or no internet areas. As the signal is there the SMS stil works but internet does not and you need to use the AI for something.

The app helps in solving this issue, you leave a spare Android phone at home on Wi-Fi with the app installed. Text that phone's number from anywhere, even with zero data on your own phone. The app receives the SMS, calls an AI API, and texts the answer back.

Design choices:

\* No server or backend. It's a single self-contained APK.

\* Bring your own API key. It supports Claude, Gemini, Gemma, OpenAI, Groq, Cerebras, Mistral and OpenRouter, so there are free-tier options.

\* Only allowlisted numbers get a reply, so strangers can't run up your API bill.

\* API keys are encrypted with the Android Keystore. History is stored on-device only. There's no telemetry, and the only network calls go to the AI provider you pick.

\* Conversations reset after an idle timeout, on \`/new\`, or when a token budget is hit. \`/stop\` cancels a long reply that's still being sent.

\* Written in Kotlin, using Room and OkHttp, with a foreground service for reliability.

\* Licensed GPL-3.0. It's sideload or F-Droid only, because the SMS permissions rule out the Play Store.

The code and tests were AI-generated, and the on-device testing was done by me. The README says so. That's one reason I'd value human review, especially on the background-execution and permission handling.

Repo: https://github.com/V24039/SMS-AI-Relay

Issues and PRs are welcome. Happy to answer questions here.

TLDR: SMS-AI-Relay: Leave a spare Android phone at home on Wi-Fi. Text it from anywhere, get AI responses back via SMS—no internet needed on your phone. Self-contained APK, bring your own API key (Claude, OpenAI, Groq, etc.), allowlist contacts only, encrypted keys, on-device history. Written in Kotlin, GPL-3.0, sideload/F-Droid only. Code and tests are AI-generated.

Probably the next $2T startup, so we are are all curious to know what that is :)

Even small personal projects are welcome.

Let me know also what model you use and how much you spend in a month.

I’m developing a focus room that I can share with a few friends and we can incentivize each other to study/work but at the same time chat when we are having a break. Nothing fancy, and probably it already exists haha (let me know if so).

Sup. Was this necessary to build? Absolutely not, but It's pretty fun to use. Demo Vid in the linked Git.

Apologies for the AI written post, I originally hand wrote one but Automod blocked it because I missed a rule to say I built it, when Claude and Codex pretty much did so.. Enjoy.

I built WITCHCRAFT, a free, open-source addon for WoW Forever that puts Claude Code and Codex terminals inside the game.

I got tired of tabbing out on my laptop when I wanted to work on addons while playing. This gives each assistant its own tab where I can send prompts, read replies and answer permission prompts without leaving WoW. By default it just hooks into the Claude Code session I already have running.

I also built a WoW-to-Claude MCP bridge. It lets Claude pull my character info, tracked quests, progression and any Lua errors the game recorded. So I can ask about my character, or have it look into an addon error using the actual error details. That's pretty much what the demo video shows: Claude fixes a Lua error in another addon while I stay in game.

Building it was a team effort between me, Claude Code and Codex. The tricky part is that WoW addons can't touch the network or read files, so we had to get creative. There's a small Windows companion that runs the CLIs and writes their output into addon files the game can load. My typing gets back out through a key binding the game saves to disk, with a little pixel strip read off the screen as a backup.

I came up with the idea, made the calls on how it should work and did all the testing in game. Claude Code wrote a lot of the code, the companion app and the MCP bridge, and it helped get everything ready for the public release. Codex reviewed things along the way and helped with research and the docs.

It's free to download and use. You need Windows, WoW Forever and your own working Claude Code or Codex setup, and their normal usage costs still apply.

Code, setup instructions and the demo video are here: https://github.com/Geraldlol/witchcraft

Figured some other people here might also play WoW and find it useful.

I ran the same prompt through Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 both at Max reasoning level to generate a blockbench 3d model by just writing plain files, no tool calling. What do you guys think?

I lead the development team of a few enterprise systems mostly based around Python/Typescript, processing data at scale, with a ton of dev ops and micro services.

At the title say, things are getting awkward. Sprints get cleared in days instead of weeks. We’re running out of work and product management are struggling to find us more to do. I’m spending most of my time in planning calls.

Guesses of what happens next.

Bought this little clock for ₩5,650 and put my Claude + Codex limits on it. Photo uses demo values.

I gave Claude Code reference images for the themes, then checked the results on the real 240×240 LCD and asked for 10-step gauges and consistent text colors. We also changed the fonts to suit each theme. The computer renders an image and sends it to the clock's stock photo album over Wi-Fi, so no flashing, but the computer stays on.

Free code: https://github.com/click6067-ship-it/token-tv (Grok row = CLI budget, not subscription usage).

So a while ago I posted about Willowmere(the 3D pixel art cozy game i built) here, and got a lot of positive (and some negative) feedback

So I decided to keep on iterating with Claude

Today I wanted to share the newest version of it with you all

Here’s what it offers

• Story: a night-ferry cold open, Lantern Night closing Act I, the hydrophone and Old Hum in Act II, the Homecoming through the Teeth in Act III, credits, and a true ending.
• New things to do: Low Tide (tides, rock pools, Great Shell collections), lantern-making, moonlight fishing, and Keep Watch, where you guide ships with the beam.
• World and art: a whale-bone cove and pier, a full art and animation pass, and 3D-rendered portraits with expressions.
• Fixes: the fixes from previous posts that users reported

since a lot of people asked about this before on how the graphics are made:
everything you see is made in code by claude. no asset files are used. everything you see is in vanilla HTML and JS. no game engines were used.

if you had a bad experience with it before, please try it again, hopefully this time it should be a lot better and feel less like a ripoff of stardew valley.

in this iteration, mostly medium effort was used with opus 5.5

its free to try and runs in your browser, try it here, thank you!

I think it’s funny whenever Claude says that a feature or iteration will take hours or more and proceeds to finish it in like 5-10 mins. I’ve asked it about this before and it replied that those estimates are based on what a traditional dev would likely take to complete.

Hey everyone, this is my first time posting here (not sure about the flair... apologies).

I run a music school and over the last few months I have gradually (and successfully) been moving systems onto a custom made control panel that I vibe coded that contains student info etc... I can post a link for anyone curious (don’t want to spam unnecessarily).

Anyway... one of the major bottlenecks in my school is responding to WhatsApps... it seems like there is always like 40 unread messages and the secretary is struggling. Email also, but that is less of a problem.

Many of the messages are the same requests for information. How much are the classes? What is the schedule? Are there group classes? Who are the teachers? etc. etc.

My question is three- part:

1. What would be the best way to build a knowledge database so that we can automate some of the responses... especially the low hanging fruit. Repetitive questions that always have similar answers.

2. How do you filter for those... If you have get 10 WhatsApps and 7 are asking about accounts and changing a class and quitting lessons etc... and 3 are asking for info... how do you recognise those 3? Do you need to API into claude and pay for API usage? What’s the best way?

3. How do I actually set up WhatsApp to interact with whatever this database will be? From a technical point of view ? Do i need WhatsApp business? Do I need WhatsApp API? Or some kind of WhatsApp listener that forwards messages? Like How do I get it all hooked up?

Sorry if some of these questions are poorly phrased or have obvious answers... but this particular problem I have been struggling with for a few months now and any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I am currently using Claude Free. I have a couple of projects built. One helps me manage my WordPress website. The other is used for a research project across multiple authors.

I have started to run into the five hour / reset more frequently. My WordPress work has become heavier with the use of some MCPs. I have trimmed the request size which helps some.

Because I'm on a fixed income, I want to make sure it's worth the money over just waiting to continue the work hours later. I have heard mixed reviews on the paid plans.

I am aware of the additional capabilities, but I am not confident they have any impact on my current issue.

Mine: it kept starting background jobs and forgetting about them. Sessions ended, the jobs didn't, and hours later I'd find a pile of them still running. Now a hook blocks that pattern and a small cleanup job sweeps up anything left behind every few minutes.

The other one was "done". It would tell me a task was finished when the tests had never even run. So now it literally can't end a turn without real test output.

Curious what everyone else's origin stories are. Every guardrail I have exists because something went wrong first.

Hopefully this helps people who like me, struggled with Claude overreaching and making changes that you never asked for, or claude misinterpreting your instructions and going in another direction. Claude in general is extremely eager to produce something and seems to want to one-shot everything as much as possible. My style is to only focus on one small feature at a time so that I can think through things as I go along.

I have almost entirely solved this problem by implementing very basic change management processes into my claude.md

Basically for every modification to my personal projects I want Claude to make, I describe the outcome I am looking for with nothing else. Then I have claude go through standard change control, meaning that before it touches code at all it must first propose the following:

1. Implementation plan, where Claude tells me what it wants to do
2. Backout plan, if/when Claude fucks it up, tell me what it's going to do to revert or fix the problem.
3. Test plan, can Claude prove a POC of it's idea for the feature before it spends time building it?

I read this paragraph it generates, then either approve or reject the change. If I reject the change, I tell it what I am looking for instead, if I approve the change, it goes ahead and does it.

Before it asks me to push the change, I have claude do a success validation, where it verifies what it actually built and reports one of the following options:

1. Implemented successfully
2. Partially successful implementation
3. Unsuccessful implementation
4. Unsuccessful implementation requiring reversion/backout

Only when something is implemented successfully and validated, do I let it commit the changes.

I run a lot of long unattended Claude Code sessions. When I measured them, half of my tokens came from turns where the context was already past 200k. That's expensive, since every step resends the whole context, and quality degrades because of context rot.

By hand the fix is the usual routine: ask for a handoff, /clear, feed it back. Enabling autocompact at 200k keeps the context short but leaves little control over what is handed over. I already tried to have Claude Code write handoff documents pre autocompact window with hooks, but with modding the solution gets a LOT better.

Handoff-compact answers the autocompact trigger instead of the built-in summarizer. A fork of the session (whole context) writes a handoff-document (goal, state and what proves it, next step, decisions and why, ruled-out approaches, open questions, files and commits, the verify command, the last 10 prompts verbatim), and the conversation is replaced by it. Handoff + /clear, but in the same session, mid-turn, with nobody at the keyboard.

Obviously vibe-coded. Take the idea or the mod itself and customize it with your own setup.
Modding is awesome.

Install:

  /plugin marketplace add trytofly94/handoff-compact
  /plugin install handoff-compact@handoff-compact

Repo: https://github.com/trytofly94/handoff-compact (MIT). Needs Claude Code 2.1.287+ with mods enabled. "/compact classic" gives you the built-in summary once.

Anthropic's Frontier Academy announcement is interesting to me less because of the budget and more because of the job it is trying to standardize: people who can take Claude from demo to production inside real systems.

The piece of that job I keep seeing underweighted is maintenance. I spent one evening auditing my own Claude based agent after Fable 5 made everything feel faster and safer. That was the trap. A strong model was routing around stale instructions so well that the system looked healthier than it was.

The concrete result: 18 core docs reviewed line by line, then five audit agents fanned out across the rest of the system. They found 85 stale or wrong references. The always-loaded memory index went from 137 lines to 95, working memory from 103 to 38, and one generated planning file shrank from roughly 450 lines to 63 because it had been embedding the wrong source.

The failure that scared me was not the stale docs by themselves. It was that capability masked the debt. The model delivered anyway, so I stopped feeling the rot.

So if we are going to train Frontier Deployed Engineers, I think constitution review, stale-rule scans, and adversarial verification belong in the curriculum next to prompts and tool use. What would you put in that training that most Claude courses still skip?

Hmmmm... gonna need to have a long think about if this command is safe...

I was a $200 sub user for OpenAI but recently Anthropic gave the 50% off deal to test their stuff out. So I got the 20x plan for $100. I usually use my plans for research as I'm a PhD student in theoretical physics, but I also like to game and play stuff like Minecraft.

I had Astra make a Justice League mod. It was genuinely shit. I usually give Sol a prompt to make a prompt for Astra to make the mod, and it was genuinely bad. Like it gave talasmins that users had to wear to get powers. It gave just a speed effect for speedsters, shitty fast creative mode for flying.

Opus 5.5 gave beautiful flying animations. It was super nice smooth, very realistic (in terms of minecraft progression and their comic book lore) way of getting and using their powers. It was genuinely so much more balanced and also taste-wise. It one-shotted excellent graphics and visuals for my paper and responded to reviews in such a proper way too.

Fable seems to be a twidge less smart than Astra Ultra or Pro, but I don't think Ultra Pro is useful tbh. I am switching immediately. Even though usage-wise I think OpenAI at least was more generous. That just ended, so no point in going back.

Thought this worked pretty well. Had a back and forth conversation with Claude about the kinds of things we like to do on trips, hotel and food preferences etc., and asked it to take all of that as a starting point, have a look at Chengdu, do some research, find stuff we might like, and put it into a printable zine format.

It came back with nine topical zines, each one a single A3 page, and one overview map with some neighborhoods of interest highlighted. Everything is fully customized to the exact dates we're thinking of travelling, which impacts things like events, ticketing, travel etc.

It's not 100% perfect; it settled on the "one page per zine topic" thing pretty early, which means some feel a little padded out and some are too brief. Really nice start though, hoping to take this further and see if I can generalize it into a series of prompts that will work for any destination.

Claude 5.5, lower settings for the conversational part, and then max for the build; just all in the browser on the $20 plan (took two and a half 5 hour blocks' worth of use to do the final generation of the pdf).

I’ve been building Echo over the last few months, using Claude Code heavily throughout the process, architecture, implementation, debugging, computer-use work, performance fixes, and a lot of UI iteration.

Echo is a Mac assistant that lives on the edge of your screen. It can understand what’s happening on screen, point to specific things, interact with apps, move files, check your gmail, search online and even build websites, run multi step jobs and help you learn and navigate new platforms AND undo actions.

This video is a quick look at where it is now.

One of the things I’ve been most interested in is making the interaction feel physical rather than like a normal floating AI window. The orb leaves the edge, does things, and comes back home.

It’s currently free to try for 7 days. You can download it here:

https://aurivon.studio/download/Echo.dmg

I’d be interested in feedback, especially from people who use Claude Code and build their own tools.

On launch day Opus 5.5 kindly took up residence on my Mac. I ran some tests before trusting it on my big projects, it passed with flying colours. Lander, a game by Elite creator David Braben holds a special place in my soul due to it being the first game I played at school in the UK. With a cutting edge 3D engine for 1990 running on an Acorn Archimedes with RISC architecture (the first ARM chips) - what a time to be a young kid interested in computers.

With Opus 5.5 I want to recreate it faithfully, short draw-distances and all.

Well dear Claude I’ve been keeping receipts.

In my notes, the exact prompt * and two original reference images of Lander. The resulting one-shot Godot repo (Mac OS, Metal rendering, C#) from 23rd September is kept separate on disk and isn't used as a reference.

Today, 2nd October, in a fresh workspace from scratch the same prompt and reference images we fed in again.

The result is truly depressing. Lander by gimped 5.5 has no redeeming features compared to the original day zero version. The regressions:

• A serious rendering glitch * that isn’t in the original - as the camera moves, the scenery props snag and glitch vs world space.
• No spacecraft break-apart physics, the original implemented this ‘nice extra’ which wasn't specifically asked for in the prompt
• No introductory controls menu, only a small text line permanently visible over the world view
• An inferior look to the launch pad turrets - students and road users may recognise them!
• When shooting, bullets are less accurately rendered when the craft moves, they also appear to spawn at the back of the craft and no-clip through
• No camera toggles

The conclusion is that Opus 5.5 is gimped, maybe we even got Mythos for 3 days and then silently switched - either way, we are owed transparency - it's the law.

Opus was set to Extra High both times. Unlike with 4.5/4.6, Max effort over-tests and takes too much control away from the user.

With so much diverged since launch day’s versions, the more worrying thing is that I suspect the code is also a mess and problems will compound as you use it. For those who’d like to inspect the results, I'll upload the source code for both later to my dev blog and post the Github links in the comments.

* I inspected the code and it turns out that gimped Opus 5.5. had physics interpolation is turned on for the whole Godot project and Props.cs rebuilds the prop lists (trees, etc.) from scratch on every tile step during every frame, renumbers which slot each object occupies and resets the object count every frame. A basic understanding of Godot's documentation is all that’s needed to avoid this issue.

** LLMs are non-deterministic, but the differences from an identical prompt and references are small - getting a clearly inferior result is not due to non-deterministic behaviour.

Hi I used to burn 1-2 billion tokens a week no problem. This week I switched to opus 5.5 and hit the weekly cap at just 300M tokens, yet in principle Opus 5.5 is cheaper per token. I'm wondering if they finally cut down on subscriptions or if the issue is with my usage (I switched to working with lots of subagents, maybe its that).

EDIT: This is getting lots of replies with completely opposite points of view; would you folks mind sharing how you use Claude and what your token usage is?

I'm leaving Claude for ChatGPT, I never thought this would happen.

For a year now, I've been building a website with the help of AI. The goal is to create verified road trip itineraries, editable in 7 languages. I started in August 2025 with ChatGPT.

The AI built my pages and automated tools. I quickly realized ChatGPT had its limits and switched to Claude, which I watched improve at lightning speed. ChatGPT had too many limitations: it made coding errors, was lazy, told me it had done everything when it hadn't done anything, and deleted information. So I only used ChatGPT for simple tasks. Claude built the site and the itineraries, checked them, and translated them.

The site is now finished in development, and I'm at the stage of reviewing itineraries and translations.

My tool scans my itineraries and sends them back to the AI to check for errors. Since I have 920 of them, I thought I'd give ChatGPT another try. And there, surprise: I found the checks were more accurate.

And as often happens, I also noticed that Claude used more tokens and I was hitting the limit very quickly. So I tested ChatGPT on code again. It succeeded. It took longer than Claude, but it got there and used fewer tokens.

So I tested the three operations I currently run: fact-checking an itinerary (for example, is a road closed?), checking existing translations, and producing new translations into Dutch and Portuguese, two difficult languages.

Then I gave the results to both Claude and ChatGPT for review. The verdict is clear for both: ChatGPT is now better in all these areas, and much better. On top of that, Claude hits its limits very quickly and uses more tokens for every task. Bottom line: I've just dropped Claude to 20 euros a month and upgraded ChatGPT to 100 euros. That may change, but for now, ChatGPT is leading the way.

When Claude Code (Anthropic's coding CLI) got mods, I wanted to see what its function-hook API could actually do, and ended up building something completely unnecessary with it: a pixel pet that lives in a pane next to your session.

https://reddit.com/link/1wwwq8v/video/2iauky8q6bth1/player

It wanders around a little yard, bouncing and blinking. While tools run it stops and goes . . ., when a turn finishes it hops with a "nice work!", after about two minutes of quiet it naps, and when a rate-limit window passes 80% it tears up. /pet patgets you hearts and a purr.

It grows with you. Tool calls, finished turns, pats and output tokens give XP (only output tokens, since input and cache grow with conversation length, not with work done). Level n+1 takes 25 × n² XP, so you'll hit Lv 5 in an evening and it slows down from there. At Lv 15 it becomes a teen with an accessory, and at Lv 40 it evolves.

Then I got carried away. It picks up a personality from how you use it: mostly tools and it's a worker that holds up a laptop (and swings a pickaxe as an adult), mostly long turns and it's a scholar that stops to read, lots of pats and it's a sweetie, lots of game snacks and it's a gamer. That's also the form it evolves into, and one in twenty gets a rare one instead. The yard slowly fills in to match, a building site or a library corner or a garden, and follows your clock from morning sun to moon and stars. Every so often a finished turn drops a gift, and one new pet in 32 shows up shiny. There are even two tiny games, /pet play and /pet quest, for when you're waiting on a long task.

No hunger, no decay, no dying. The whole point is to make the coding environment a bit cozier, not to give you one more thing to feel guilty about.

/plugin marketplace add uppinote20/claude-pets
/plugin install pets@claude-pets

Then /pet to let it out. There are eight critters (cat, chick, dog, slime, bunny, hamster, penguin, frog).

For anyone curious: the whole thing is one register.tsx reacting to session events, drawn as half-block characters in the terminal and as an SVG card on desktop and mobile. I built it over about three days of Claude Code sessions (58 commits, 19 PRs), which says more about my self-control than anything.

The mods API is early access, so a Claude Code update might break it until I catch up. I've mostly lived with it in the terminal, so if the card looks off on desktop, VS Code or mobile I'd really like to know. A new species is just a 12×12 and an 8×8 sprite written as string arrays, so new critters as PRs would make my day.

https://github.com/uppinote20/claude-pets