Comment by ramchip
3 days ago
Personally, I spend _more_ time thinking with Claude. I can focus on the design decisions while it does the mechanical work of turning that into code.
Sometimes I give the agent a vague design ("make XYZ configurable") and it implements it the wrong way, so I'll tell it to do it again with more precise instructions ("use a config file instead of a CLI argument"). The best thing is you can tell it after it wrote 500 lines of code and updated all the tests, and its feelings won't be hurt one bit :)
It can be useful as a research tool too, for instance I was porting a library to a new language, and I told the agent to 1) find all the core types and 2) for each type, run a subtask to compare the implementation in each language and write a markdown file that summarizes the differences with some code samples. 20 min later I had a neat collection of reports that I could refer to while designing the API in the new language.
I was recently considering a refactoring in a work codebase. I had an interesting discussion with Claude about the tradeoffs, then had it show me what the code would look like after the refactor, both in a very simple case, and in one of the most complex cases. All of this informed what path I ended up taking, but especially the real-world examples meant this was a much better informed decision than just "hmm, yeah seems like it would be a lot of work but also probably worth it."