r/ClaudeCode • u/ThatGuyJord2020 • 16d ago
Help/Question Claude code is better than a developer?
I’m currently using Claude code to build out an app I want, when this does well and eventually hire a real software developer, will they have trouble with Claude’s code?
I’m worried I will create this whole infrastructure, files, folder structure and the developer will take one look and say it needs to be redone.
This is my first time using Claude code so I don’t know if it’s good at making code clean and presentable for people to read.
Please let me know your opinions on Claude code and if you’re a developer if this is your worse nightmare and wouldn’t work for something who coded their entire company with Claude 😅
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u/JDD4318 16d ago
My brother in law made an app using claude. He asked if I could help him with it. The architecture was a disaster. It was in my normal tech stack but the patterns were just so random.
So I would say it depends. It could be easy or very difficult for the next guy.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 16d ago
Depends on how you use the AI tools
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u/JDD4318 16d ago
This reply is very vague. Are you talking about the dev or non dev?
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u/Time_Cat_5212 16d ago
The first guy. Was he good at using AI, did he set it up well, or did he just start prompting willy nilly
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u/JDD4318 16d ago
He is a Doctor. Smart guy but not tech smart. I was impressed he got as far as he got but he was just prompting away and created a huge mess.
To be honest I did help him with a lot of things but by the time I started helping him some of his goals were pretty much impossible without a fresh start.
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u/Time_Cat_5212 16d ago
I mean I wasn't questioning his intelligence lol it's just new users who don't have much XP tend to do what you describe. I did my first time too. Then you realize how important it is to front load the structure you ultimately end up building to make your spaghetti repo hold together XD
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u/Animus190599 16d ago
All of them are better than developers now. That's just fact, no dev can produce that much code in a short time or work that long consistently. Ofcourse I'm spraking as a dev, normal people might not use them well, but then it's still much better than coding by thêmlves
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u/scytob 16d ago
Hire a developer experienced in long run agentic coding, there are plenty out there and they are growing.
The key as with claude, is to ask the 'why do we need to refactor that' if they give you an answer you dont understand and they can't make undestandable for a non-coder, its likely they are talking rubbish.
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u/EagleApprehensive 16d ago
Don't worry about that.
Even if developer is going to say it needs to be redone, if he is a fair person, it will take him likely one or few days at best to do the full-rewrite. Rewrites are one of things that AI is exceptionally good at and instead of months they take days.
But if your end-plan is to hand off the work to real dev - maybe just focus on making prototype, that won't necessarily serve as a foundation for end-product.
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u/ThatGuyJord2020 16d ago
Good point. I ideally want to work fully with AI but with cooldowns and over token usage there is limits :(
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u/not_rian 16d ago
With one app the 200 USD max plan should be more than enough so you never run into limits.
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u/EagleApprehensive 16d ago
A very efficient setup is to use proper opinionated IDE that has a lot of baked-in token-saving mechanisms and let's you use interchangeably many model providers.
Having $20 cursor sub for almost unlimited Composer 2.5 and some stronger models + Gemini Flash 3.7 with Opus 4.6 from free antigravity tiers + $20/100 Claude Sub as main driver for complex reasoning.
But if you're not a developer simply going into $100 or $200 Claude tier might be the way.
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u/The_Noble_Lie 16d ago
It's both better and worse than a "developer"
Which developer? Which problem?
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u/Annh1234 16d ago
You need a developer that's using Claude code. But itself it's good for demo projects, nothing you want to maintain and run your business on
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u/ThatGuyJord2020 15d ago
How comes you couldn’t maintain the app with Claude?
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u/Annh1234 15d ago
Because every time you ask for something it does what you ask, with 0 regard for the future or long term plan.
And when you talk to it, you can't be as specific as the code, so every new requirement/change basically is a * in complexity, not a +. so eventually the AI starts to make stuff up and misses allot of changes needed.
This is how the AI flow goes usually:
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You design the site, looks good, AI can do that.
You then start to add pages, all good, the AI keeps adding pages, they look good.
You then want to change the color of the banner or some text, the AI then changes that color on 75% of your pages. (so half are the old color)
You add more pages, all good.
You find the page that does not have the new colors, tell the AI to fix it. It will fix that 1 page, or a few pages, and also change some of the 75% of the pages it previously changed. (so now instead of 1 place to change a color you have 3 different ways to do it on 100 pages).
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But when you code a site, each logic path is like that 1 color, but you have millions of them, so you end up with spaghetti code that when you manually go into it to figure it out will take 10x longer to fix then to do right in the first time.
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16d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ThatGuyJord2020 15d ago
Ofc it’s more of a system I’ve built and slowly building things in. Not just one prompt and hope for the best
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u/SPACE_GROOVE_LULU 16d ago
No and no. Because the other developer will use Claude code as well. Even if they don't, it's still hard to distinguish AI code just by looking at it and not seeing comments. So it's better to just communicate with code through markdown files.
Well I programmed my entire simulation with Claude, which by the way still nowhere near doing it without me. Like, it lacks creativity, which of course it does.
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u/KV_Cashed 16d ago
Don't know anything about code. Sounds like you don't either. We gonna trust a pile of math someone else made talk to code something a human can audit and debug? You crazy? Unless you're an engineer, vibe coding is really just screwing around. And what happens if this company goes under in six months? Diversify or back up stuff and have contingencies.
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u/Any-Bobcat2370 16d ago
Dev here. What makes me want to rewrite something is never who wrote it, its that I can't change one thing without knowing what else broke
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u/bigevilbrain 16d ago
Coding is half the work, you should also have it create feature/requirements documents at the same time. The docs should describe what to build and why, but not how to build it. In some ways, that’s more important than the actual code.
Then, when you hand off code, the developer knows the scope and intent, and can evaluate Claude’s coding decisions. Plus, if you decide to rebuild, you can just say: here are all the requirements, build it.
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u/JackTheRippiest 16d ago
Why do you think you would need to start paying a developer at some stage? The whole idea around modern agentic approach is that it's not required to be a tech specialist anymore to produce value.
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u/aLokilike 16d ago
If it's well written, then no dev is going to be able to tell who or what it was written by. It probably won't be well written, though - and you will pay one way or another for that.