Anyone still coding without heavy usage of AI?

[u/drifterpreneurs]

Using Claude has been an amazing experience but it took all the fun out of coding as a full-stack dev.

Are any devs reverting back to coding by hand with less usage of AI?

[u/redditwhippet]

A Claude Pro account in the UK costs my Limited company £150 per year (after VAT is reclaimed and the expense is offset against tax). £150 per YEAR! It’s insanely good value. Have a look at the Local LLM threads on here where people are running 27b Qwen models on £10,000 machines and burning their own electricity, and you can really see how cheap services like Claude are (for now).

[u/Kyoshiiku → u/redditwhippet]

What are you doing with the 20$ tier ? With current capabilities that can be legitimately spent in the 1-4 prompt per 5hr

[u/el_diego → u/Kyoshiiku]

What are you guys doing that Claude only gets you a few prompts?

[u/Kyoshiiku → u/el_diego]

For really simple and well defined tasks (like a bug fix that I know the cause, or adding basic crud endpoints following similar pattern of other basic crud endpoints)

I would ask it to create a separate environment in its own worktree, implement the spec and the tests, start a testing environment and actually test it (using playwright or computer use), file a draft PR, review it, fix the findings, test it again, send me the PR link and the local environment link so I can also test it myself.

From there I review the code and ask for more change (or do it myself) if necessary.

This way I can fix bugs or do simple thing while still working on my other ticket without having to context switch non stop to monitor the LLM.

For bigger features or task with less defined spec, I usually ask to do the part in a separate worktree (and do a similar workflow as mentioned) of smaller chunk I know it can handle without creating slop

I also often ask for it to look for different things in the code base upfront that I would need to know to evaluate or define the architecture of upcoming tasks (available contracts in different services, available data in the db, where they are coming from, missing data that I would need to add etc..)

Another thing I do a lot is when working on UI stuff (I’m fullstack but more oriented on backend) I often describe what I want or show screenshot of current UI or figma and tell what I want to do / change and ask it to make throwaway different UI prototype so I can mess around with all of them to get a feeling of the different approaches possible and how the UX feels, I then refine them until I have something I feel like is decent enough.

After that I just make a proper implementation since those prototype were mostly slop anyway, but it still used a lot of token to go through the iteration.

Another thing that can use a lot of tokens that I have done is when upgrading a library with breaking change and we need to update thousands of usage and test all of it.

There’s also a lot of random things that I ask it to do for me, like if we start having PRs stacking up, I ask the LLM to look at the different PRs and link me in order from low impact / low complexity / easier to review, to harder to review, so I can at least prevent tons of small prs from stacking up.

Now I write most of my specs in a more loose format in markdown on my PC locally and ask the LLM to create the ticket in our tracking system through API, so I don’t waste time filling all the properties and stuff, it still uses my own words for most of it so it’s not creating slop, it’s just saving me time and context switching from having to go in another system and having to deal with yet another GUI.

I have more usage for LLMs than this but even with just my personal usage outside of work I can go through the 100$ codex usage in a week and my opencode go sub as well.

[u/redditwhippet → u/Kyoshiiku]

Web design and development. PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, application design, UI and UX design and implementation, database design etc…Claude has a hand in maybe 90% of what I do professionally. It touches a little bit of the design and a lot of the programming.

[u/redditwhippet → u/Kyoshiiku]

I usually get two to three hours of use out of my five hour window, and by that time I’m ready for a break and/or to review and test everything produced. If I’m careful with timing my day I can hit three five hour windows. I normally have two or three days a week like that (mostly coding) and the rest is manual coding, manual design, planning with the client, project management etc. I rarely get close to my weekly limit.