[imperialdrive]

Finally gave Claude a go after trying OpenAI a while and feeling pretty _meh_ about the coding ability... Wow, it's a whole other level or two ahead, at least for my daily flavor which is PowerShell. No way a double-digit amount of jobs aren't at stake. This stuff feels like it is really starting to take off. Incredible time to be in tech, but you gotta be clever and work hard every day to stay on the ride. Many folks got comfortable and/or lazy. AI may be a kick in the pants. It is for me anyway.

[WXLCKNO]

I've been trying every flavor of AI powered development and after trying Claude Code for two days with an API key, I upgraded to the full Max 20x plan.

Cursor, Windsurf, Roo Code / Cline, they're fine but nothing feels as thorough and useful to me as Claude Code.

The Codex CLI from OpenAI is not bad either, there's just something satisfying about the LLM straight up using the CLI

[solumunus]

It really is night and day. Most of them feel like cool toys, Claude Code is a genuine work horse. It immediately became completely integral to my workflow. I own a small business and I can say with absolute confidence this will reduce the amount of devs I need to hire going forward.

[wellthisisgreat]

hey can you explain the appeal of Claude Code vs Cursor?

I know the context window part and Cursor RAG-ing it, but isn't IDE integration a a true force multiplier?

Or does Claude Code do something similar with "send to chat" / smart (Cursor's TAB feature) autocomplete etc.?

I fired it up but it seemed like just Claude in terminal with a lot more manual copy-pasting expected?

I tried all the usual suspects in AI-assisted programming, and Cursor's TAB is too good to give up vs Roo / Cline.

I do agree Claude's the best for programming so would love to use it full-featured version.

[dandaka]

Claude Code works surprisingly well and is also cheaper, compared to Windsurf and Cline + Sonnet 4. The rate of errors dropped dramatically for my side projects, from "I have to check most changes" to "I have not written a line".

[GardenLetter27]

I find it's good if you can get a really clean context, but on IRL problems with 100k+ lines of code that's extremely hard to manage.

It absolutely aced an old take-home test I had though - https://jamesmcm.github.io/blog/claude-data-engineer/

But note the problems it got wrong are troubling, especially the off-by-one error the first time as that's the sort of thing a human might not be able to validate easily.

[neilfrndes]

Yup, Claude Code is the real deal. It's a massive force multiplier for me. I run a small SaaS startup. I've gotten more done in the last month than the previous 3 months or more combined. Not just code, but also emails, proposals, planning, legal etc. I feel like working in slo-mo when Claude is down (which unfortunately happens every couple of days). I believe that tools like Claude code will help smaller companies disproportionately.

[finlayson_point]

how are you using claude code for emails? with a MCP connection or just taking the output from the terminal

[Aurornis]

> Finally gave Claude a go after trying OpenAI a while and feeling pretty _meh_ about the coding ability... Wow, it's a whole other level or two ahead,

I’ve been avoiding LLM-coding conversations on popular websites because so many people tried it a little bit 3-6 months ago, spot something that doesn’t work right, and then write it off completely.

Everyone who uses LLM tools knows they’re not perfect, they hallucinate some times, their solutions will be laughably bad to some problems, and all the other things that come with LLMs.

The difference is some people learn the limits and how to apply them effectively in their development loop. Other people go in looking for the first couple failures and then declare victory over the LLM.

There are also a lot of people frustrated with coworkers using LLMs to produce and submit junk, or angry about the vibe coding glorification they see on LinkedIn, or just feel that their careers are threatened. Taking the contrarian position that LLMs are entirely useless provides some comfort.

Then in the middle, there are those of us who realize their limits and use them to help here and there, but are neither vibe coding nor going full anti-LLM. I suspect that’s where most people will end up, but until then the public conversations on LLMs are rife with people either projecting doomsday scenarios or claiming LLMs are useless hype.

[unshavedyak]

I purchased Max a week ago and have been using it a lot. Few experiences so far:

- It generates slop in high volume if not carefully managed. It's still working, tested code, but easily illogical. This tool scares me if put in the hands of someone who "just wants it to work".

- It has proven to be a great mental block remover for me. A tactic i've often had in my career is just to build the most obvious, worst implementation i can if i'm stuck, because i find it easier to find flaw in something and iterate than it is to build a perfect impl right away. Claude makes it easy to straw man a build and iterate it.

- All the low stakes projects i want to work on but i'm too tired to after real work have gotten new life. It's updated library usage (Bevy updates were always a slog for me), cleaned up tooling and system configs, etc.

- It seems incapable of seeing the larger picture on why classes of bugs happen. Eg on a project i'm Claude Code "vibing" on, it's made a handful of design issues that started to cause bugs. It will happily try and fix individual issues all day rather than re-architect to make a less error prone API. Despite being capable to actually fix the API woes if prompted to. I'm still toying with the memory though, so perhaps i can get it to reconsider this behavior.

- Robust linting, formatting and testing tools for the language seem necessary. My pet peeve is how many spaces the LLM will add in. Thankfully cargo-fmt clears up most LLM gunk there.