Comment by tqwhite
17 hours ago
I've been using Claude Code, ie, a terminal interface to Sonnet 3.7 since the day it came out in mid March. I have done substantial CLI apps, full stack web systems and a ton of utility crap. I am much more ambitious because of it, much as I was in the past when I was running a programming team.
I'm sure it is much the same as this under the hood though Anthropic has added many insanely useful features.
Nothing is perfect. Producing good code requires about the same effort as it did when I was running said team. It is possible to get complicated things working and find oneself in a mess where adding the next feature is really problematic. As I have learned to drive it, I have to do much less remediation and refactoring. That will never go away.
I cannot imagine what happened to poor kgeist. I have had Claude make choices I wouldn't and do some stupid stuff, never enough that I would even think about giving up on it. Almost always, it does a decent job and, for a most stuff, the amount of work it takes off of my brain is IMMENSE.
And, for good measure, it does a wonderful job of refactoring. Periodically, I have a session where I look at the code, decide how it could be better and instruct Claude. Huge amounts of complexity, done. "Change this data structure", done. It's amazingly cool.
And, just for fun, I opened it in a non-code archive directory. It was a junk drawer that I've been filling for thirty years. "What's in this directory?" "Read the old resumes and write a new one." "What are my children's names?" Also amazing.
And this is still early days. I am so happy.
Recently I had to define a remote data structure, specify the API to request it, implement parsing and storage, and show it to the user.
Claude was able to handle all of these tasks simultaneously, so I could see how small changes at either end would impact the intermediate layers. I iterated on many ideas until I settled on the best overall solution for my use case.
Being able to iterate like that through several layers of complexity was eye-opening. It made me more productive while giving me a better understanding of how the different components fit together.
> And, for good measure, it does a wonderful job of refactoring. Periodically, I have a session where I look at the code, decide how it could be better and instruct Claude. Huge amounts of complexity, done. "Change this data structure", done. It's amazingly cool.
Yeah this is literally just so enjoyable. Stuff that would be an up-hill battle to get included in a sprint takes 5 minutes. It makes it feel like a whole team is just sitting there, waiting to eagerly do my bidding with none of the headache waiting for work to be justified, scheduled, scoped, done, and don't even have to justify rejecting it if I don't like the results.