Comment by danso

Been a long time casual — i.e. happy to fix my code by asking questions and copy/pasting individual snippets via the chat interface. Decided to give the `claude` terminal tool a run and have to admit it looks like a fantastic tool.

Haven't tried to build a modern JS web app in years — it took the claude tool just a few minutes of prompting to convert and refactor an old clunky tool into a proper project structure, and using svelte and vite and tailwind (which I haven't built with before). Trying to learn how to even scaffold a modern app has felt daunting and this eliminates 99% of that friction.

One funny quirk: I asked it to build a test suite (I know zilch about JS testing frameworks, so it picked vitest for me) for the newly refactored app. I noticed that 3 of the 20 tests failed and so I asked it to run vitest for itself and fix the failing things. 2 minutes later, and now 7 tests were failing...

Which is very funny to me, but also not a big deal. Again, it's such a chore to research test libs and then set things up to their conventions. That the claude tool built a very usable scaffold that I can then edit and iterate on is such a huge benefit by itself, I don't need (nor desire) the AI to be complete turnkey solution.