How Anthropic teams use Claude Code

https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-anthropic-teams-use-claude-code

by yurivish • 12 months ago

285 240 12 months ago

anthropic.com

buggy6257• 12 months ago

@dang looks like HN ate the leading “How” in the title.

kevmo314• 12 months ago

Yeah, I was about to say, I sure hope they do.

laborcontract• 12 months ago

fyi @dang doesn't actually flag dang. They've always advised emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

OJFord• 12 months ago

It's intentional. Imagine a blog post 'How I whizzed foobars to optimise my Home Assistant garbage collection' - it's unnecessary filler.

I agree it has times like this it doesn't work and makes the title worse though. The submitter can edit it, and this reformatting (and others) are not applied again.

NotMichaelBay• 12 months ago

why use many word, etc

ants_everywhere2• 12 months ago

I've been trying Claude Code for a few weeks after using Gemini Cli.

There's something a little better the tool use loop, which is nice.

But Claude seems a little dumber and is aggressive about "getting things done", often ignoring common sense or explicit instructions or design information.

If I tell it to make a test pass, it will sometimes change my database structure to avoid having to debug the test. At least twice it deleted protobufs from my project and replaced it with JSON because it struggled to immediately debug a proto issue.

jonstewart4• 12 months ago

The hilarious part I’ve found is that when it runs into the least bit of trouble with a step on one of its plans, it will say it has been “Deferred” and then make up an excuse for why that’s acceptable.

It is sometimes acceptable for humans to use judgment and defer work; the machine doesn’t have judgment so it is not acceptable for it to do so.

ants_everywhere2• 12 months ago

Oh yeah totally. It feels a bit deceptive sometimes.

Like just now it says "great the tests are consistently passing!" So I ran the same test command and 4 of the 7 tests are so broken they don't even build.

quintu5• 12 months ago

My favorite is when you ask Claude to implement two requirements and it implements the first, gets confused by the the second, removes the implementation for the first to “focus” on the second, and then finishes by having implemented nothing.

physix• 12 months ago

Talking about hilarious, we had a Close Encounter of the Hallucinating Kind today. We were having mysterious simultaneous gRPC socket-closed exceptions on the client and server side running in Kubernetes talking to each other through an nginx ingress.

We captured debug logs, described the detailed issue to Gemini 2.5 Flash giving it the nginx logs for the one second before and after an example incident, about 10k log entries.

It came back with a clear verdict, saying

"The smoking gun is here: 2025/07/24 21:39:51 [debug] 32#32: *5902095 rport:443 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream, client: 10.233.100.128, server: grpc-ai-test.not-relevant.org, request: POST /org.not-relevant.cloud.api.grpc.CloudEventsService/startStreaming HTTP/2.0, upstream: grpc://10.233.75.54:50051, host: grpc-ai-test.not-relevant.org"

and gave me a detailed action plan.

I was thinking this is cool, don't need to use my head on this, until I realized that the log entry simply did not exist. It was entirely made up.

(And yes I admit, I should know better than to do lousy prompting on a cheap foundation model)

mattigames• 12 months ago

"This task seems more appropriate for lesser beings e.g. humans"

stkdump• 12 months ago

Well I would say that the machine should not override the human input. But if the machine makes up the plans in the first place, then why should it not be allowed to change the plans? I think that the hilarious part in modifying tests to make them work without understanding why they fail is that it probably happens due to training from humans.

animex• 12 months ago

I just had the same thing happen. Some comprehensive tests were failing, and it decide to write a simple test instead rather than investigate why these more complicated tests were failing. I wonder if the team is trying to save compute by urging it to complete tasks more quickly! Claude seems to be under a compute crunch as often I get API timeouts/errors.

Fade_Dance2• 12 months ago

I even heard that it will aggressively delete your codebase and then lie about it. To your face.

victorbjorklund• 12 months ago

You are using version control so what is the issue?

adregan• 12 months ago

I’ve seen Claude code get halfway through a small sized refactor (function parameters changed shape or something like that), say something that looks like frustration at the amount of time it’s taking, revert all of the good changes, and start writing a bash script to automate the whole process.

In that case, you have put a stop to it and point out that it would already be done if it hadn’t decided to blow it all up in an effort to write a one time use codemod. Of course it agrees with that point as it agrees with everything. It’s the epitome of strong opinions loosely held.

maronato• 12 months ago

Claude trying to cheat its way through tests has been my experience as well. Often it’ll delete or skip them and proudly claim all issues have been fixed. This behavior seems to be intrinsic to it since it happens with both Claude Code and Cursor.

Interestingly, it’s the only LLM I’ve seen behave that way. Others simply acknowledge the failure and, after a few hints, eventually get everything working.

Claude just hopes I won’t notice its tricks. It makes me wonder what else it might try to hide when misalignment has more serious consequences.

chubot• 12 months ago

I use Claude and like it, but this post has kind of a clunky and stilted style

So I guess the blog team also uses Claude

mepiethree• 12 months ago

Yeah this is kind of a stunning amount of information to provide but also basically like polished bullet points

vlovich123• 12 months ago

Must feel that way because that’s probably exactly what it is

jonstewart4• 12 months ago

You’re absolutely right!

AIPedant2• 12 months ago

I don't think the problem is using Claude - in fact some of the writing is quite clumsy and amateurish, suggesting an actual human wrote it. The overall post reads like a collection of survey responses, with no overarching organization, and no filtering of repetitive or empty responses. Nobody was in charge.

kylestanfield• 12 months ago

The MCP documentation site has the same problem. It’s basically just a list of bullet points without any details

maxnevermind• 12 months ago

Also started to suspect that, but I have a bigger problem with the content than styling:

"Instead of remembering complex Kubernetes commands, they ask Claude for the correct syntax, like "how to get all pods or deployment status," and receive the exact commands needed for their infrastructure work."

Duh, you can ask LLM tech questions and stuff. What is the point of putting something like that on the tech blog of the company which supposed to be working on beading edge tech.

politelemon• 12 months ago

I think this is meant to serve as a bit of an advert/marketing and bit of a signal to investors that look, we're doing things.

LeafItAlone4• 12 months ago

To get more people using it, and more. I’ve encountered people who don’t use it because they think that it isn’t something that will help them, even in tech. Showing how different groups find value in it might get people in those same positions using it.

Even with people who do use it, they might thinking about it narrowly. They use it for code generation, but might not think to use it for simplified man pages.

Of course there are people who are the exact opposite and use it for every last thing they do. And maybe from this they learn how to better approach their prompts.

minimaxir• 12 months ago

A repeated trend is that Claude Code only gets 70-80% of the way, which is fine and something I wish was emphasized more by people pushing agents.

This bullet point is funny:

Treat it like a slot machine
Save your state before letting Claude work, let it run for 30 minutes, then either accept the result or start fresh rather than trying to wrestle with corrections. Starting over often has a higher success rate than trying to fix Claude's mistakes.

That's easy to say when the employee is not personally paying the massive amount of compute running Claude Code for a half-hour.

throwmeaway222• 12 months ago

Thanks for the tip - we employees should run and re-run the code generation hundreds of times even if the changes are pretty good. That way, the brass will see a huge bill without many actual commits.

Sorry boss, it looks like we need to hire more software engineers since the AI route still isn't mathing.

mdaniel2• 12 months ago

we employees should run and re-run the code generation hundreds of times

Well, Anthropic sure thinks that you should. Number go up!

gmueckl2• 12 months ago

Data centers are CapEx, employees are OpEx. Building more data centers is cheap. Employees can always supervise more agents...

Graziano_M• 12 months ago

Don’t forget to smash the power looms as well.

godelski6• 12 months ago

Unironically this can actually be a good idea. Instead of "rerunning," run in parallel. Then pick the best solution.

  Pros:
   - Saved Time!
   - Scalable! 
   - Big Bill?

  Cons:
   - Big Bill
   - AI written code

bdangubic2• 12 months ago

That's easy to say when the employee is not personally paying the massive amount of compute running Claude Code for a half-hour.

you can do the same for $200/month

tough• 12 months ago

it has limits too, it lasted like 1-2 weeks without only (for me personally at least)

tomlockwood• 12 months ago

Yeah sweet what's the burn rate?

jonstewart4• 12 months ago

And just like a slot machine, it seems pretty clear that some people get addicted to it even if it doesn’t make them better off.

threatofrain• 12 months ago

This is an easy calculation for everyone. Think about whether Claude is giving you the a sufficient boost in performance, and if not... then it's too expensive. No doubt some people are in some combination of domain, legacy, complexity of codebase, etc., where Claude just doesn't cut it.

preommr• 12 months ago

A repeated trend is that Claude Code only gets 70-80% of the way, which is fine and something I wish was emphasized more by people pushing agents.

I have been pretty successful at using llms for code generation.

I have a simple rule that something is either 90%>ai or none at all (exluding inline completions, and very obvious text editing).

The model has an inherent understanding of some problems due to it's training data (e.g. setting up a web server with little to no deps in golang), that it can do with almost 100% certainty, where it's really easy to blaze through in a few minutes, and then I can setup the architecture for some very flat code flows. This can genuinely improve my output by 30%-50%

randmeerkat• 12 months ago

I have a simple rule that something is either 90%>ai or none at all…

10% is the time it works 100% of the time.

MPSimmons• 12 months ago

Agree with your experiences. I've also found that if I build a lightweight skeleton of the structure of the program, it does a much better job. Also, ensuring that it does a full fledged planning/non-executing step before starting to change things leads to good results.

I have been using Cline in VSCode, and I've been enjoying it a lot.

benreesman• 12 months ago

The slot machine thing has a pretty compelling corollary: crank the formal systems rigor up as high as you can.

Vibe coding in Python is seductive but ultimately you end up in a bad place with a big bill to show for it.

Vibe coding in Haskell is a "how much money am I willing to pour in per unit clean, correct, maintainable code" exercise. With GHC cranked up to `-Wall -Werror` and some nasty property tests? Watching Claude Code try to weasel out with a mock goes from infuriating to amusing: bam, unused parameter! Now why would the test suite be demanding that a property holds on an unused parameter...

And Haskell is just an example, TypeScript is in some ways even more powerful in it's type system, so lots of projects have scope to dabble with what I'm calling "hyper modern vibe coding": just start putting a bunch of really nasty fastcheck and generic bounds on stuff and watch Claude Code try to cheat. Your move, Claude Code, I know you want to check off that line on the TODO list like I want to breathe, so what's it gonna be?

I find it usually gives up and does the work you paid for.

kevinventullo• 12 months ago

Interesting, I wonder if there is a way to quantify the value of this technique. Like give Claude the same task in Haskell vs. Python and see which one converges correctly first.

AzzyHN• 12 months ago

Not to mention, if an employee could usually write pretty good code but maybe 30% of the time they wrote something so non-functional it had to be entirely scrapped, they'd be fired.

melagonster• 12 months ago

But what if he only want 20$/per month?

TrainedMonkey• 12 months ago

$200 per month will get you roughly 4-5 hours of non-stop single-threaded usage per day.

A bigger issue here is that the random process is not a good engineering pattern. It's not repeatable, does not drive coherent architecture, and struggles with complex problems. In my experience, problem size correlates inversely with generated code quality. Engineering is a process of divide-and-conquer and there is a good reason people don't use bogo (random) sort in production.

More specifically, if you only look at the final code, you are either spending a lot of time reviewing the code or accepting the code with less review scrutiny. Carefully reviewing semi random diffs seems like a poor use of time... so I suspect the default is less review scrutiny and higher tech debt. Interestingly enough, higher tech debt might be an acceptable tradeoff if you believe that soon Code Assistants will be good enough to burn the tech debt down autonomously or with minimal oversight.

On the other hand, if the code you are writing is not allowed to fail, the stakes change and you can't pick the less review option. I never thought to codify it as a process, but here is what I do to guide the development process:

- Start by stating the problem and asking Claude Code to: analyze the existing code, restate the problem in a structured fashion, scan the codebase for existing patterns solving the problem, brainstorm alternative solutions. An enhancement here could be to have a map / list of the codebase to improve the search.

- Evaluate presented solutions and iterate on the list. Add problem details, provide insight, eliminate the solutions that would not work. A lot of times I have enough context to pick a winner here, but if not, I ask for more details about each solution and their relative pros and cons.

- Ask Claude to provide a detailed plan for the down-selected solution. Carefully review the plan (a significantly faster endeavor compared to reviewing the whole diff). Iterate on the plan as needed; after that, tell Claude to save the plan for comparison after the implementation and then to get cracking.

- Review Claude's report of what was implemented vs. what was initially planned. This step is crucial because Claude will try dumb things to get things working, and I've already done the legwork on making sure we're not doing anything dumb in the previous step. Make changes as needed.

- After implementation, I generally do a pass on the unit tests because Claude is extremely prolific with them. You generally need to let it write unit tests to make sure it is on the right track. Here, I ask it to scan all of the unit tests and identify similar or identical code. After that, I ask for refactor options that most importantly maximize clarity, secondly minimize lines of code, and thirdly minimize diffs. Pick the best ones.

Yes, I accept that the above process takes significantly longer for any single change; however, in my experience, it produces far superior results in a bounded amount of time.

P.S. if you got this far please leave some feedback on how I can improve the flow.

bavell2• 12 months ago

Very nice, going to try this out tomorrow on some tough refactors Claude has been struggling with!

nightshift1• 12 months ago

I agree with that list. I would also add that you should explicitly ask the llm to read the whole files at least once before starting edits because they often have tunnel vision. The project map is auto generated with a script to avoid reading too many files but the files to be edited should be fresh in the context imo.

maerch• 12 months ago

A repeated trend is that Claude Code only gets 70-80% of the way, which is fine and something I wish was emphasized more by people pushing agents.

Recently, I realized that this applies not only to the first 70–80% of a project but sometimes also to the final 70-80%.

I couldn’t make progress with Claude on a major refactoring from scratch, so I started implementing it myself. Once I had shaped the idea clearly enough but in a very early state, I handed it back to Claude to finish and it worked flawlessly, down to the last CHANGELOG entry, without any further input from me.

I saw this as a form of extensive guardrails or prompting-by-example.

golergka• 12 months ago

That’s why I like using it and get more fulfilment from coding than before: I do the fun parts. AI does the mundane.

bavell2• 12 months ago

I need to try this - started using Claude code a few days ago and have been struggling to get good implementations with some high-complexity refactors. It keeps over engineering and creating more problems than it solves. It's getting close though, and I think your approach would work very well for this scenario!

paulddraper• 12 months ago

Who is paying?

Should be the same party as is getting the rewards of the productivity gains.

FeepingCreature• 12 months ago

Yeah my most common aider command sequence is

    > /undo
    > /clear
    > ↑ ↑ ↑ ⏎

jordanb• 12 months ago

And this is the marketing pitch from the people selling this stuff. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

oc1• 12 months ago

Funny thing their recommendation to save state as claude code has still no ability for restore checkpoints (like cline has) despite being many times requested. Who are they kidding.

mdaniel2• 12 months ago

Oh, come on https://www.anthropic.com/news/how-anthropic-teams-use-claud... is not "for legal"

- Custom accessibility solution for family members

- The team created prototype "phone tree" systems to help team members connect with the right lawyer at Anthropic

- Team coordination tools

- Rapid prototyping for solution validation

So, not legal

jasonthorsness2• 12 months ago

Claude Code works well for lots of things; for example yesterday I asked it to switch weather APIs backing a weather site and it came very close to one-shotting the whole thing even though the APIs were quite different.

I use it at home via the $20/m subscription and am piloting it at work via AWS Bedrock. When used with Bedrock APIs, at the end of every session it shows you the dollar amount spent which is a bit disconcerting. I hope the fine-grained metering of inference is a temporary situation otherwise I think it will have a chilling/discouraging effect on software developers, leading to less experimentation and fewer rewrites, overall lower quality.

I imagine Anthropic gets to consume it unmetered internally so I they probably completely avoid this problem.

lumost3• 12 months ago

once upon a time - engineers often had to concern themselves with datacenter bills, cloud bills, and eventually SaaS bills. We'll probably have 5-10 years of being concerned about AI bills before the AI expense is trivial compared to the human time.

achierius• 12 months ago

"once upon a time"? Engineers concern themselves with cloud bills right now, today! It's not a niche thing either, probably the majority of AWS consumers have to think about this, regularly.

nextworddev2• 12 months ago

You will start seriously worrying about coding AI bills within 6 months

philomath_mn2• 12 months ago

AI bills are already trivial compared to human time. I pay for claude max, all I need to do is save an hour a month and I will be breaking even.

whatever1• 12 months ago

This guy has not been hit with a 100k/mo cloudwatch bill

lovich• 12 months ago

I use it at home via the $20/m subscription and am piloting it at work via AWS Bedrock. When used with Bedrock APIs, at the end of every session it shows you the dollar amount spent which is a bit disconcerting. I hope the fine-grained metering of inference is a temporary situation otherwise I think it will have a chilling/discouraging effect on software developers, leading to less experimentation and fewer rewrites, overall lower quality.

I’m legitimately surprised at your feeling on this. I might not want the granular cost put in my face constantly but I do like the ability to see how much my queries cost when I am experimenting with prompt setup for agents. Occasionally I find wording things one way or the other has a significantly cheaper cost.

Why do you think it will lead to a chilling effect instead of the normal effect of engineers ruthlessly innovating costs down now that there is a measurable target?

jasonthorsness2• 12 months ago

I think it’s easy to spend _time_ when the reward is intangible or unlikely, like an evening writing toy applications to learn something new or prototyping some off-the-wall change in a service that might have an interesting performance impact. If development becomes metered in both time and to-the-penny dollars, I at least will have to fight the attitude that the rewards also need to be more concrete and probable.

mwigdahl• 12 months ago

I’ve seen it firsthand at work, where my developers are shy about spending even a single digit number of dollars on Claude Code, even when it saves them 10 times that much in opportunity cost. It’s got to be some kind of psychological loss aversion effect.

spike021• 12 months ago

a couple weekends ago i handed it the basic MLB api and asked it to create some widgets for MacOS to show me stuff like league/division/wildcard standings along with basic settings to pick which should be shown. it cranked out a working widget in like a half hour with minimal input.

i know some swift so i checked on what it was doing. for a quick hack project it did all the work and easily updated things i saw issues with.

for a one-off like that, not bad at all. not too dissimilar from your example.

duped• 12 months ago

Meanwhile I ask it to write what I think are trivial functions and it gets them subtly wrong, but obvious in testing. I would be more suspicious if I were you.

theshrike798• 12 months ago

Ask it to write tests first and then implement based on the tests, don't let it change the tests.

corytheboyd3• 12 months ago

it shows you the dollar amount spent which is a bit disconcerting

I can assure you that I don’t at all care about the MAYBE $10 charge my monster Claude Code session billed the company. They also clearly said “don’t worry about cost, just go figure out how to work with it”

neom2• 12 months ago

Wouldn't it be a bit unusual if that wasn't true? We build our coding agent...with our coding agent... feeling like this is table steaks.

tkzed49• 12 months ago

mmmm... table steak

readthenotes1• 12 months ago

I bet your dog really loves you if steak is your idea of dogfooding ;)

chrisweekly• 12 months ago

FYI the idiom comes from card games, not restaurants. It's "table stakes", as in "the minimum amount required to commit to the game to be allowed to play".

neom2• 12 months ago

I'm bad at speeling. :(

pton_xd• 12 months ago

Yeah that'd be a big misteak

arrowsmith• 12 months ago

The actual title is "How Anthropic teams use Claude Code". HN automatically strips the "How" from any title that starts with it, for dubious reasons — and this thread is a great example of the drawbacks.

wgjordan• 12 months ago

Completely agree- this is a very well-done, A1 argument I can certainly sink my teeth into.

bilsbie• 12 months ago

We passed a milestone with little fanfare. AI is now improving itself.

AIPedant2• 12 months ago

By this standard we passed the milestone in the 60s when Lisp was used to build better Lisp compilers.

By a more honest standard we are still a very long way away from AI suggesting new ANN architectures, new approaches to managing RLHF, better training data, new benchmarks, etc etc. LLMs are nowhere close to being able to improve themselves.

energy123• 12 months ago

It's not binary. Your example is recursive self improvement, just a weak kind because the productivity bump was small. But now we have AlphaEvolve which can likely come up with new architectures. The productivity bumps are much larger and will keep growing.

mhrmsn• 12 months ago

It'd be more interesting if they shared actual examples of complete prompts, CLAUDE.md files, settings and MCP servers to achieve certain things.

The documentation is good, but is kept relatively general and I have a feeling that the quality of Claude Code's output really depends on the specific setup and prompts you use.

qaq• 12 months ago

Wonder what the context window is for Claude Code for internal users

kordlessagain2• 12 months ago

Not as much as the $200 month account, that's for fucking certain.

Shopper0552• 12 months ago

It's funny since Anthropic asked their job candidates not to use AI [0]. I know it's not the same as actually working at Anthropic already, but I just thought it was funny.

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/02/04/anthropic-tells-job-candidate...

bgwalter2• 12 months ago

They want cracked developers and sell the slop generator to script kiddies.

symfoniq• 12 months ago

Anthropic are trailblazers and this will be everywhere soon. It happened to me tonight with a different company. "We use AI to do our actual work, but please don't use AI for this coding challenge."

esafak• 12 months ago

They've relaxed their ban on AI: https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance

jonstewart4• 12 months ago

Create self-sufficient loops Set up Claude to verify its own work by running builds, tests, and lints automatically.

I’ve got much better at using Claude.md and plan files, etc., but it still goes off the rails so quickly when I try to get it to follow a normal TDD test/edit/build/commit workflow. It will report success, and then the unit tests will fail or the working copy is dirty or there are build errors, etc. An LLM may be great for figuring out what code to write and what weird tool incantation to run to debug something, but I am fed up enough I want to write my own agent, because all I want is a switch-statement state machine to manage workflow.

ycombinatornews• 12 months ago

Using slash commands that describe engineering/task workflow (steps) and /clear once it’s done solves this.

ojbyrne• 12 months ago

I used to say that the last 10% of software takes 90% of the effort. All the 70 percents and 80 percents in that article reminded me of that.

bgwalter2• 12 months ago

So this style of articles is the future? Pages of unconnected bullet points that mention the word "Claude" at least 100 times. No real information and nothing to remember.

joe_the_user• 12 months ago

Yeah, I don't think all the information in the article is useful but it seems like disorganized dump - or a melding together of several article - boiler plate "we use Claude for all good things" and specific useful tips all run together.

It definitely has a "we use AI enough that we've lost the ability to communicate coherently" vibe to it.

kylestlb• 12 months ago

I'm assuming there was a directive from comms or someone else requiring each cost center write up examples/demos of what they use Claude Code for. Then dogfooded and turned into what you see here.

ipnon2• 12 months ago

The future is that articles will generally be read by machine intelligences more often than human ones. You have to optimize for your audience.

syntaxbush2• 12 months ago

I found if you are tightly in the loop, keep the code highly modular, and are developing new functionality alongside tests, Claude works much better.

corytheboyd3• 12 months ago

Yeah me too, keeping the code modular being a huge part of it. In the same vein is actually finishing feature flags and removing the old code, killing off truly dead code, tests, documentation… basically eliminate as much noise as you can, so that it reads as much exemplary code as possible.

syntaxbush2• 12 months ago

Good point. I tell Claude in the claude.md to use a linter and formatter which helps it get rid of its own dead code while it develops.

mixdup• 12 months ago

The first example was helping debug k8s issues, which was diagnosed as IP pool exhaustion, and Claude helped them fix it without needing a network expert

But, if they had an expert in networking build it in the first place, would they have not avoided the error entirely up front?

danielbln3• 12 months ago

Experts make mistakes too. In fact, all humans do.

apwell232• 12 months ago

they don't make dumb mistakes like claude

mfrye05• 12 months ago

My optimization hack is that I'm using speech recognition now with Claude Code.

I can just talk to it like a person and explain the full context / history of things. Way faster than typing it all out.

onprema2• 12 months ago

The SuperWhisper app is great, if you use a Mac.

mfrye05• 12 months ago

I checked that one out. The one that Reddit recommended was Voice Type. It's completely offline and a one-time charge:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voice-type-local-dictation/id6...

The developer is pretty cool too. I found a few bugs here and there and reported them. He responds pretty much immediately.

jwr• 12 months ago

There is also MacWhisper which works very well. I've been using it for several months now.

I highly recommend getting a good microphone, I use a Rode smartlav. It makes a huge difference.

sipjca2• 12 months ago

Open source and cross platform one: https://handy.computer

theshrike798• 12 months ago

So you sit in a room, talking to it? Doesn't it feel weird?

I type a lot faster than I speak :D

jon-wood• 12 months ago

Not only do I type faster than I speak I'm also able to edit as I go along, correcting any mistakes or things I've stumbled over and can make clearer. Half my experience of using even basic voice assistants is starting to ask for something and then going "ugh, no cancel" because I stumbled over part of a sentence and I know I'll end up with some utter nonsense in my todo list.

mfrye05• 12 months ago

Haha yeah, it does feel a bit weird.

I often work on large, complicated projects that span the whole codebase and multiple micro services. So it's often a blend of engineering, architectural, and product priorities. I can end up talking for paragraphs or multiple pages to fully explain the context. Then Claude typically has follow-up questions, things that aren't clear, or issues that I didn't catch.

Honestly, I just get sick of typing out "dissertations" every time. It's easier just to have a conversation, save it to a file, and then use that as context to start a new thread and do the work.

foob• 12 months ago

I've been pretty happy with the python package hns for this [1]. You can run it from the terminal with uvx hns and it will listen until you press enter and then copy the transcription to the clipboard. It's a simple tool that does one thing well and integrates smoothly with a CLI-based workflow.

[1] https://github.com/primaprashant/hns

mfrye05• 12 months ago

I'll check that one out.

The copy aspect was the main value prop for the app I chose: Voice Type. You can do ctrl-v to start recording, again to stop, and it pastes it in the active text box anywhere on your computer.

apwell232• 12 months ago

any options for ubuntu ?

sipjca2• 12 months ago

as above, open source and cross platform, should work on Ubuntu

https://handy.computer

bionhoward• 12 months ago

Anthropic goes hard on the virtue signalling but I still don’t get how anyone manages to satisfy “Customer may not and must not attempt to (a) access the Services to build a competing product or service”

So I just avoid it and generally think the whole thing isn’t serious, because nobody seems to care enough about the safety implications of building AGI with legal terms which are logically impossible to satisfy to demonstrate appropriate attention to detail (aka, yall are noobs)

umanwizard• 12 months ago

Are you trying to build an AI platform to compete with anthropic? If not, why does that line matter?

astrange• 12 months ago

That seems pretty problematic to me. Anthropic makes and sells Claude Code, so basically any developer productivity tool is a competitor!

kordlessagain2• 12 months ago

That's reason enough to leave, if them having one 9 of reliability of the service is not enough.

amacneil• 12 months ago

It’s a funny post because our team wanted to use Claude Code, but the team plan of Claude doesn’t include Claude Code (unlike the pro plan at a similar price point). Found this out after we purchased it :( We’re not going to ask every engineer to purchase it separately.

Maybe before boasting about how your internal teams use your product, add an option for external companies to pay for it!

Industry leading AI models but basic things like subscription management are unsolved…

baby• 12 months ago

Why not ask them to purchase it separately?

theshrike798• 12 months ago

It's a billing nightmare pretty much.

The only reason why "team" plans exist is to have centralised billing and licensing.

onprema2• 12 months ago

When Kubernetes clusters went down and weren't scheduling new pods, the team used Claude Code to diagnose the issue. They fed screenshots of dashboards into Claude Code, which guided them through Google Cloud's UI menu by menu until they found a warning indicating pod IP address exhaustion. Claude Code then provided the exact commands to create a new IP pool and add it to the cluster, bypassing the need to involve networking specialists.

This seems rather inefficient, and also surprising that Claude Code was even needed for this.

ktzar• 12 months ago

They're subsidizing a world where we need ai instead of understanding or, at the very least, knowing who can help us. Eventually for us to be so dumb we are the ai slaves.

moomoo112• 12 months ago

Not really.

Is it really value add to my life that I know some detail on page A or have some API memorized?

I’d rather we be putting smart people in charge of using AI to build out great products.

It should make things 10000x more competitive. I’m for one excited AF for what the future holds.

If people want to be purists and pat themselves on the back sure. I mean people have hobbies like arts.

whycombagator• 12 months ago

Yes. This is what id expect from an intern or very junior engineer (which could be the case here)

skeeter2020• 12 months ago

This post had to have been written in a large part by their model, right?

ku1ik• 12 months ago

It certainly feels so.

seba_dos1• 12 months ago

I could already tell that they do by watching how often and how badly their canvas integration breaks.

dzikibaz• 12 months ago

Why is everyone so careless about letting Claude Desktop upload their source code and/or private data to its servers? Or maybe I'm too paranoid for caring about where data go.

drak0n1c• 12 months ago

VeniceAI is great for privacy focused hosting of open-source models. Hopefully they add Qwen 3 Coder (which appears to be on par with Claude 4 for coding) to their API, then I can use my tools with it.

linkage• 12 months ago

The codebase I am paid to work on is a dog's breakfast, largely agglomerated over many months by offshore contractors. If Anthropic includes it in their training set, it's their own funeral.

corytheboyd3• 12 months ago

Because my employer tells me it’s fine so long as we’re using it with AWS Bedrock. Do I believe that Amazon then wouldn’t be siphoning all this as model training data? It’s a fun conspiracy…

fumeux_fume• 12 months ago

Wholesale use of and/or dependence on Claude Code feels like a Faustian bargain from a personal and even a business point of view.

grensley• 12 months ago

Claude Desktop is one of the buggier applications I've ever used and one of our jokes internally is that it seems like it was very clearly vibe coded.

zuInnp• 12 months ago

I prefer to use Claude code like a smart rubber ducky while I write most the code in the end. I added rules to make claude first explain what it want to do in chat (and code changes should only be implemented if I ask for it). I like it to talk about ideas, discuss solutions and approaches. But I am in control of it - in the end, I am the person repsonsible for the code.

Since I don't like it to automatically do changes to files, I copy&paste the code from terminal to the IDE. That seems slow at first, but it allows me to correct the bigger and smaller issues on the fly faster than prompting Claude to my preffered solution. In my opinion, this makes more sense since I have more control and it is easier to spot problematic code. When fixing such issues, I point Claude to changes afterwards to add to its context.

For me Claude is like a very (over) confident junior developer. You have to keep an eye on them and if it is faster do it yourself, then just do it and explain them why you did it. (That might be a bad approach for Juniors, but for Claude it works for me)

Btw, can we talk about that this blog post is written by the company that tries to sell the tool? So we should take it with a huge grain of salt... . Like all what these AI companies are telling us, should probably be ignored for 90 % of time. They either want to raise money or or getting bought by some other company in the end ...

theshrike798• 12 months ago

Just keep it in plan mode and it won't change anything?

Unlike Gemini CLI which will just rush into implementation without hesitation :D

ipnon2• 12 months ago

LLMs need documentation for semantic instructions and testing for formal verification. In the past efficient human teams could forego both of these and rely on tacit understanding. But this does not exist with LLMs so we will continue to see proliferation of elaborate documentation bases and test bases.

It is very interesting to me how the differences in our intelligences is physically manifested in text. It is one argument against hard-takeoff: the bioneuron can encode information in a sweet spot that cannot be targeted by the perceptron, by the so-called neuralese, by any amount of distillation.

forgotmypw176• 12 months ago

I’ve implemented and maintained an entire web app with CC, and also used many other tools (and took classes and taught workshops on using AI coding tools).

The most effective way I’ve found to use CC so far is this workflow:

Have a detailed and also compressed spec in an md file. It can be called anything, because you’re going to reference it explicitly in every prompt. (CC usually forgets about CLAUDE.md ime)

Start with the user story, and ask it to write a high-level staged implementation plan with atomic steps. Review this plan and have CC rewrite as necessary. (Another md file results.)

Then, based on this file, ask it to write a detailed implementation plan, also with atomic stages. Then review it together and ask if it’s ready to implement.

Then tell Claude to go ahead and implement it on a branch.

Remember the automated tests and functional testing.

Then merge.

stillsut4• 12 months ago

Great advice, matches up to my experience. Personally I go a little cheaper and dirtier on the first prompt, then revise as needed. By the way what classes / workshops did you teach?

I've written a little about some my findings and workflow in detail here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/a...

forgotmypw176• 12 months ago

Thank you for sharing. I taught some workshops on AI-assisted development using Cursor a Windsurf for MIT students (we built an application and wrote a book) and TAed another similar for-credit course. I’ve also been teaching high schoolers how to code, and we use ChatGPT to help us understand and solve leetcode problems by breaking them down into smaller exercises. There’s also now a Harvard CS course on developing with GenAI which I followed along with. The field is exploding.

eagerpace• 12 months ago

Do you have an example of this you could share?

stillsut4• 12 months ago

I can share my own ai-generated codebase:

- there's a devlog showing all the prompts and accepted outputs: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...

- and you can look at the ai-generated tests (as is being discussed above) and see they aren't very well thought out for the behavior, but are syntactically impressive: https://github.com/sutt/agro/tree/master/tests

- check out the case-studies in the docs if you're interested in more ideas.

Nimitz14• 12 months ago

We're all gonna be PMs.

forgotmypw176• 12 months ago

That’s basically what it amounts to, being a PM to a team of extremely cracked and also highly distractable coders.

AstroBen3• 12 months ago

Is working this way actually faster, or any improvement than just writing the code yourself?

forgotmypw176• 12 months ago

Much, much faster, and I’d say the code is more formal, and I’ve never had such a complete test suite.

The downside is I don’t have as much of a grasp on what’s actually happening in my project, while with hand-written projects I’d know every detail.

amedviediev• 12 months ago

This matches my experience as well. But what I also found is that I hate this workflow so much that I would almost always rather write the code by hand. Writing specs and user stories was always my least favorite task.

rs186• 12 months ago

Does anyone else find the article difficult to read? I was at 30% and just couldn't withstand it any more. No doubt it was created/heavily revised by LLM, but the whole thing just isn't like anything that a human writes, and definitely unlike those well-structured, interesting and engaging blog articles I have read in the past.

seaports• 12 months ago

Yeah, it was unreadable. Constant start-stoppage

mvieira382• 12 months ago

I'm surprised they let it generate the tests. Aren't the tests precisely what you want to have fine control over, moreso than the code itself? Letting it write them itself feels like yielding control over what is considered "correct" code

danielbln3• 12 months ago

Unpopular take: I couldn't give a single damn about the code. If it passes the spec and tests (that I review) and the feature works, that is good enough for me. I'm in the business of automation, and in the business of solving problems. Writing perfect, beautiful code is not what I'm in the business of. Now of course, good enough doesn't mean "complete horse shit spaghetti code", but it also doesn't mean I give a damn if some function is maybe not pure enough or whatever.

netpaladinx• 12 months ago

Which database is behind Claude Code? Cursor built on top of object storage. They failed with Yugabytes and Postgres

Adifounder• 12 months ago

I wonder if claude code would benefit from a ui?

itsafarqueue• 12 months ago

You’re absolutely right!

How Anthropic teams use Claude Code

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