[srvmshr]

Not the OP but in a similar boat. Curious to understand how do you make sure that Claude code cli tool does not break existing code functionality?

My hesitation to adopt stems from the events where Claude.ai WebUI ignorantly breaks the code, but since I can visibly verify it - I iterate it until it seems reasonable syntactically & logically, and then paste it back.

With the autonomous changing of the code lines, I'm slightly nervous it would/could break too many parts concurrently -- hence my hesitation to use it. Any best practices would be insightful

[theonething]

By default, it shows you a diff of what it plans to do and ask you for permission before making the change.

[ekidd]

Claude Code will happily and enthusiastically do horrible things to your code. But it always asks first. So you can tell it "NO!" and suggest a better approach.

Imagine having a college sophmore CS major who types really quickly and who is up-to-date on lots of new technologies. But they're prone to cutting corners when they get stuck, and they have never worked on anything larger than a group project. Now imagine watching them as they work (really quickly) and correcting them when they mess up.

This is... tolerable for small apps. If you have problems that could be solved by a team of very junior programmers, and if you're willing to provide close supervision, then it might even make sense for some real code. Or if you kind of know how to code, and you just need little 1,000 line throwaway tools (like a lot of other STEM fields), eh, it's probably OK.

But your mentoring effort will never result in the model actually learning anything, so it's more like you get a new very junior programmer for each PR.

I don't want to completely badmouth this. For very early stage startups where you need to throw 50 things at the wall, most of them glorified CRUD apps, and see what sticks with the customers, then a senior engineer could make it work. But if you have a half dozen people who only sort of know how to write code all "mentoring" Claude, then your code base will become complete trash within two weeks. In practice, I see significant degradation above 1,000 lines for "hands off" operation, and around 5,000 lines if I'm watching it intensely and carefully reading all code.