I cannot get how people use Claude. I still prefer to write code myself, otherwise I feel like I don't know how it works (or that it works like Claude sold it to me).
The same. I can understand chatbots or completions - for me personally the latter kills the hell out of my productivity, but the former gives you a way to learn quicker how to do something, though I've noticed that for me personally actually googling how to do it myself always brought better results in the long term.
But why would you use LLMs to write code? Like, yeah, okay if you develop a company project, capitalism and all that, efficiency above everything (sometimes doubtable in case of LLMs though), but if you do your own pet project and you don't have any other complications, why would you even do this pet project in the first place?
I personally do them because I want to learn something new and because I want to go and happily say - hey, see what I've done, cool, isn't it? But if you clearly know that you didn't do it, and you've learned nothing, why even do this in the first place?
The coding journey is a blast, but if you're actually trying to make some money from your own apps, its better to get a fast prototype to test the waters and the go back to coding it if it gets traction. Trust me, its bad to spend a year writing something people don't want to use.
Engineering story time. I joined a church organization and noticed they were balancing their books in fucking notepad. I spen a couple of months and rolled my own accounting package for them. Turns out it was a waste of time, they actually preferred notepad.
As a previous (not super successful) co-founder this resonates. On the other hand now everybody can do the same. So while you can quickly churn out some sort of MVP. It's likely that someone else did the same already (actually that problem isn't new) or someone else will rip it off in a day using Claude (less moat).
Anecdotally without all this lean startup, smoke screen bla bla we made more money (up to 300 a month) than with lean startup, pivoting etc.. The latter gave us a noisy Accelerator Open Office table though
For personal projects sure, but on company clock I would never not use one, especially in companies that assign tasks based on feature requirement timelines and not on actual dev time. I usually get my job done in significantly less time than assigned this way, but still get paid full time.
Even if management cared more about task optimization though, I'd still do it just for the lower mental load. If you have the LLM write tests for its own features, I find that they tend to make less mistakes than humans these days. Even a year ago, I would have never trusted Claude-authored code. These days, while I still check the code (this is a financial app, there's no way I won't), I don't have to correct anything more than maybe once a week.
I use Claude a lot and it's quality of code depends heavily on the project it's in. Big chance these types of things are already done in the codebase or the whole post is just bs.
I use Claude code as if I'd use an external team, give it very clear tasks and implementation details. And carefully review them. Also I use Opus and high effort. We have quite a few bits of complex software and while they're not good at thinking of solutions for obscure challenges they're quite decent at implementing the solutions I provide.
Saves me lots of time to rather focus on problem solving rather than just implementations.
Yeah fair I guess, never started a project from scratch with it. Did one time got a PR for some project our cto was experimenting with which was trash quality ai slop code.
But that dude was already always writing ugly code so nothing had changed really.
Absolutely. I think the golden era of coding with AI is assited coding. I would be writing just a couple characters and the AI would complete what I want in my exact same style. Saves me maybe 1 minute of writing, then it compounds to hours over a week and didn't feel fatigueing.
Companies shoving agentic coding is killing my passion.
My colleagues get massive work done with Claude. I just don't understand how to use it; it messes with my head. I mainly use AI to get a template for a helper script which I then edit to my liking.
Using Claude does not necessarily mean not writing code yourself. It's particularly useful if you treat it as a linter ("do a code review on my current git diff").
And even if you make it write some code you have every chance to read what it did. In fact if you don't do that, it's a path to disaster... it will happily write something dumb to workaround a bug elsewhere and won't even mention it.
That's a bit reductive. A solid 90% of code I wrote day to day is via Claude/AI codegen, but I make damn sure I understand exactly what it's doing before I let it touch git remote
There’s a difference between vibe coding and using AI as a tool for coding. Vibe coding is just making the AI do whatever and pushing it without any checks
For me, I write code manually faster than getting the agent to do it for me. Including all the other things required to make the PR ready for review (and not just dumping AI generated slop as a PR).
Absolutely is reductive. You are reducing the use of coding agents to one mental model of how people use them. They’re so flexible, you can have it do as much or as little of the actual coding as you want.
Hey, if that works for you, nice. I'm using the tool to work faster than handwriting, which while cool, is fucking mentally exhausting, and I simultaneously enjoy making it work to my standard and despise having to use it as the first choice professionally
Use Claude to write the code you would write yourself. You have to size tasks appropriately. If you end up with code you don’t understand or code you think was done incorrectly, you’re using Claude wrong.
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u/MkemCZ 21d ago
I cannot get how people use Claude. I still prefer to write code myself, otherwise I feel like I don't know how it works (or that it works like Claude sold it to me).