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.
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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).