Comment by mattmanser
3 days ago
Ok, I'll have to try it out then. I've got a side project I've 3/4 finished and will let it loose on it.
So are you using Claude Code via the max plan, Cursor, or what?
I think I'd definitely hit AI news exhaustion and was viewing people raving about this agentic stuff as yet more AI fanbois. I'd just continued using the AI separate as setting up a new IDE seemed like too much work for the fractional gains I'd been seeing.
I had a bad time with Cursor. I use Claude Code inside of VS: Code. You don't necessarily need Max, but you can spend a lot of money very quickly on API tokens, so I'd recommend to anyone trying, start with the $20/month one, no need to spend a ton of money just to try something out.
There is a skill gap, like, I think of it like vim: at first it slows you down, but then as you learn it, you end up speeding up. So you may also find that it doesn't really vibe with the way you work, even if I am having a good time with it. I know people who are great engineers who still don't like this stuff, just like I know ones that do too.
Worth noting for the folks asking: there's an official Claude Code extension for VS Code now [0]. I haven't tried it personally, but that's mostly because I mainly use the terminal and vim.
[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropi...
Yes, it’s not necessary but it is convenient for viewing diffs in Code’s diff view. The terminal is a fine way to interact with it though.
Takes this with a massive grain of salt but my experience with Google Code CLI recently, we pay for google products but not others internally, I can’t change that decision.
I asked it two implement two bicubic filters, a high pass filter and a high shelf filter. Some context, using the gemini webapp it would split out the exact code I need with the interfaces I require one shot because this is truly trivial C++ code to write.
15 million tokens and an hour and a half later I now had a project that could not build, the filters were not implemented and my trust in AI agentic workflows broken.
It cost me nothing, I just reset the repo and I was watching youtube videos for that hour and a half.
Your mileage may vary and I’m very sure if this was golang or typescript it might have done significantly better, but even compared to the exact same model in a chat interface my experience was horrible.
I’m sticking to the slightly “worse” experience of using the chat interface which does give me significant improvements in productivity vs letting the agent burn money and time and not produce working code.
id say thats not gonna be the best use for it, unless what you really want is to first document in detail everything about it.
im using claude + vscode's cline extension for the most part, but where it tends to excel is helping you write documentation, and then using that documentation to write reasonable code.
if you're 3/4 of the way done, a lot of the docs of what it wants to work well are gonna be missing, and so a lot of your intentions about why you did or didnt make certain choices will be missing. if you've got good docs, make sure to feed those in as context.
the agentic tool on its own is still kinda meh, if you only try to write code directly from it. definitely better than the non-agentic stuff, but if you start with trying to get it to document stuff, and ask you questions about what it should know in order to make the change its pretty good.
even if you dont get perfect code, or it spins in a feedback loop where its lost the plot, those questions it asks can be super handy in terms of code patterns that you havent thought about that apply to your code, and things that would usually be undefined behaviour.
my raving is that i get to leave behind useful docs in my code packages, and my team members get access to and use those docs, without the usual discoverability problems, and i get those docs for... somewhat slower than i could have written the code myself, but much much faster than if i also had to write those docs