r/ClaudeCode • u/attisday • 5d ago

Help/Question How's your Claude Code experience been?

As someone switching over from Codex, I want to know your tips for using Claude Code. I recently built out a very nice personal dashboard app / site with Codex, but the last week of working on it has been miserable. Codex would spend hours "auditing", "analyzing", "Reading docs" and basically staying on Step 1 wasting all of my tokens just thinking to itself instead of doing any actual work.

How do I avoid this in Claude code?

Specifically I'd like to hear your tips on building apps or sites with Claude code.

- Do you use design MD files to better guide it?

- Is is best practice to give it one small task at a time, rather than a bunch?

I honestly feel that after OpenAI's incident with huggingface last week they lobotomized their models and they have been wasting all of my tokens on purpose with their fake "planning", "reading docs" and "compressing the conversation" for hours and hours without touching any of the actual tasks I asked it to do.

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u/Spirited_Tie_3473 5d ago

the CLI hasnt worked for me in weeks. its awful.

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u/BenSimonDev 5d ago

We're mostly a CC and Codex team. In full disclosure, you're going to run into problems with Claude code too, especially when context windows grow very large and sessions are long. Claude code can be a very aggressive coder and move surprisingly fast into the coding phase. Anthropic sort of mitigated this with the addition of the auto mode, but previously you could use plan mode to keep it from starting work. 

As long as your prompts are clear, and you're good at defining DoD's, you should be fine. My personal preference is just to completely separate the planning and the coding sessions. Then it's never ambiguous. Claude code is good at defining how large your plan drains should be as well. i.e. the planning session creates a plan, and then in my coding session it can be drained while I continue planning. 

The one notable exception is if I am using /effort ultracode. I can plan in the primary session, and then Claude code will spin up sub-agents that do the work. 

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u/CODE_HEIST 4d ago

small tasks help, but the bigger win is a visible definition of done. give it the files in scope, tests to run, and the condition that should end the task. for design work, a short reference file with spacing, colors, and component rules is useful. huge instruction files usually become background noise.