I love this article just for the spirit of fun and experimentation on display. Setting up a VPS where Claude is just asked to go nuts - to the point where you're building a little script to keep Claude humming away - is a really fun idea.
This sort of thing is a great demonstration of why I remain excited about AI in spite of all the hype and anti-hype. It's just fun to mess with these tools, to let them get friction out of your way. It's a revival of the feelings I had when I first started coding: "wow, I really can do anything if I can just figure out how."
> “wow, I really can do _anything_ if I can just figure out how
Except this time it’s “if I can just figure out how and pay for the Claude API usage”.
This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.
Yes, they can still write code the manual way, but if the norm is to use AI I suspect that beginner’s guides, tutorials, etc. will become less common.
LLMs are quickly becoming cheaper. Soon they will be “cheap as free,” to quote Homestar Runner. Then programming will be solved, no need for meatbags. Enjoy the 2-5 years we have left in this profession.
Yep, I used to spend a lot of time learning PHP on a web server which was part of my internet subscription. Without it being free, I would never have learn how to create websites and would have never got in programming, the trigger was that free web hosting with PHP that was part of the internet connection my parents were already paying for
I agree that access is a problem now, but I think it is one that hardware improvements will solve very quickly. We are a few generations of Strix Halo type hardware away from effortlessly running very good LLMs locally. (It's already possible, but the hardware is about $2000 and the LLMs you can run are good but not very good.) AFAIK AMD have not released the roadmap for Medusa Halo, but the rumours [1] are increased CPU and GPU performance, and increased bandwidth. Another iteration or two of this will make Strix Halo hardware more affordable, and the top-of-the-line models will be beasts for local LLMs.
yes indeed, who will pay? I run a lot through open models locally using LM Studio and Ollama, and it is nice to only be spending a tiny amount of extra money for electricity.
I am retired and not wanting to spend a ton of money getting locked long term into using an expensive tool like Claude Code is a real thing. It is also more fun to sample different services. Don’t laugh but I am paying Ollama $20/month just to run gpt-oss-120b very fast on their (probably leased) hardware with good web search tooling. Is it worth $20/month? Perhaps not but I enjoy it.
I also like cheap APIs: Gemini 2.5-flash, pro when needed, Kimi K2, open models on Groq, etc.
The AI, meaning LLM, infrastructure picture is very blurred because of so many companies running at a loss - which I think should be illegal because long term I think it is misleading consumers.
They're not that expensive for anyone that has the tech skills to actually make good use out of them. I've been paying around with Claude Code, using API credits rather than the monthly fee. It costs about $5 per one-hour session. If you're going to be doing this professionally it's worth springing for the $100/month membership to avoid hitting credit limits, but if you just want to try it out, you can do so without breaking the bank.
A bigger question for me is "Does this actually increase my productivity?" The jury is still out on that - I've found that you really need to babysit the algorithm and apply your CS knowledge, and you also have to be very clear about what you're going to tell it later, don't let it make bad assumptions, and in many cases spell out the algorithm in detail. But it seems to be very good at looking up API details, writing the actual code, and debugging (if you guide it properly), all things that take a non-trivial amount of tedium in everyday programming.
Maybe local models can address this, but for me the issue is that relying on LLMs for coding introduces gatekeepers.
> Uh oh. We're getting blocked again and I've heard Anthropic has a reputation for shutting down even paid accounts with very few or no warnings.
I'm in the slack community where the author shared their experiment with the autonomous startup and what stuck out to me is that they stopped the experiment out of fear of being suspended.
Something that is fun should not go hand-in-hand with fear of being cut off!
You made me realize exactly why I love skill-based video games, and shun the gacha games (especially those with PvP). You swiped to gain power over players who don't. Yay?
The knowledge check will also slowly transfer towards the borders of fast iteration and not necessarily knowledge depth. The end goal is to make a commodity out of the myth of the 10x dev, and take more leverage away from the devs.
Eh back in the day computers were expensive and not everyone could afford one (and I don't mean a library computer that you can work on, one you can code and hack on). The ubiquity of computing is not something that's been around forever.
There have always been costs and barriers for the cutting edge.
For me, I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control. I enjoy the actual process of crafting code myself. For similar reasons, I could never be a manager.
Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I’ll probably just find a new career
I do agree it’s definetly a tool category with a unique set of features and am not surprised it’s offputting to some. But it’s appeal is definetly clear to me as an introvert.
For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language.
I think I’m slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort.
Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff!
I bet your code sucks in quality and quantity compared to the senior+ engineer who uses the modern tools. My code certainly did even after 20 years of experience, much of that as senior/staff level at well paying companies.
> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
This sounds like a wild generalization.
I am in neither of those two groups, and I’ve been finding tools like Claude Code becoming increasingly more useful over time.
Made me much more optimistic about the direction of AI development in general too. Because with each iteration and new version it isn’t getting anywhere closer to replacing me or my colleagues, but it is becoming more and more useful and helpful to my workflow.
And I am not one of those people who are into “prompt engineering” or typing novels into the AI chatbox. My entire interaction is typically short 2-3 sentences “do this and that, make sure that XYZ is ABC”, attach the files that are relevant, let it do its thing, and then manual checks/adjustments. Saves me a boatload of work tbh, as I enjoy the debugging/fixing/“getting the nuanced details right” aspect of writing code (and am pretty decent at it, I think), but absolutely dread starting from a brand new empty file.
> I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control.
Try aider.chat (it's in the name), but specifically start with "ask" mode then dip a toe into "architect" mode, not "code" which is where Claude Code and the "vibe" nonsense is.
Let aider.chat use Opus 4.1 or GPT-5 for thinking, with no limit on reasoning tokens and --reasoning-effort high.
> agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
On the contrary, I think the non-vibe tools are force multipliers for those with an ability to communicate so precisely they find “extraverts and neurotypical people” confounding when attempting to specify engineering work.
I'd put both aider.chat and Claude Code in the non-vibe class if you use them Socratically.
For me (an introvert), I have found great value in these tools. Normally, I kind of talk to myself about a problem / algorithm / code segment as I'm fleshing it out. I'm not telling myself complete sentences, but there's some sort of logical dialog I am having with myself.
So I just have to convert that conversation into an AI prompt, basically. It just kind of does the typing for the construct already in my head. The trick is to just get the words out of my head as prompt input.
That's honestly not much different than an author writing a book, for example. The story line is in their head, they just have to get it on paper. And that's really the tricky part of writing a novel as much as writing code.
I therefore don't believe this is an introvert/extrovert thing. There are plenty of book authors which are both. The tools available as AI code agents are really just an advanced form of dictation.
> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
As an extrovert the chances I'll use an AI agent in the next year is zero. Not even a billion to one but a straight zero. I understand very well how AI works, and as such I have absolutely no trust in it for anything that isn't easy/simple/solved, which means I have virtually no use for generative AI. Search, reference, data transformation, sure. Coding? Not without verification or being able to understand the code.
I can't even trust Google Maps to give me a reliable route anymore, why would I actually believe some AI model can code? AI tools are helpers, not workers.
For what it’s worth I’m neurodivergent, introverted and have avoided management up to the staff+level. Claude Code is great I use it all day every day now.
I kind of think we will see some industry attrition as a result of LLM coding and agent usage, simply because the ~vIbEs~ I'm witnessing boil down to quite a lot of resistance (for multiple reasons: stubbornness, ethics, exhaustion from the hype cycle, sticking with what you know, etc)
The thing is, they're just tools. You can choose to learn them, or not. They aren't going to make or break your career. People will do fine with and without them.
I do think it's worth learning new tools though, even if you're just a casual observer / conscientious objector -- the world is changing fast, for better or worse, and you'll be better prepared to do anything with a wider breadth of tech skill and experience than with less. And I'm not just talking about writing software for a living, you could go full Uncle Ted and be a farmer or a carpenter or a barista in the middle of nowhere, and you're going to be way better equipped to deal with logistical issues that WILL arise from the very nature of the planet hurtling towards 100% computerization. Inventory management, crop planning, point of sale, marketing, monitoring sensors on your brewery vats, whatever.
Another thought I had was that introverts often blame their deficits in sales, marketing and customer service on their introversion, but what if you could deploy an agent to either guide, perform, or prompt (the human) with some of those activities? I'd argue that it would be worth the time to kick the tires and see what's possible there.
It feels like early times still with some of these pie in the sky ideas, but just because it's not turn-key YET doesn't mean it won't be in the near future. Just food for thought!
I think they're fantastic at generating the sort of thing I don't like writing out. For example, a dictionary mapping state names to their abbreviations, or extracting a data dictionary from a pdf so that I can include it with my documentation.
At one point in my life I liked crafting code. I took a break, came back, and I no longer liked it--my thoughts ranged further, and the fine-grained details of implementations were a nuisance rather than ~pleasurable to deal with.
Whatever you like is probably what you should be doing right now. Nothing wrong with that.
>Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
I completely disagree. Juggling several agents (and hopping from feature-to-feature) at once, is perfect for somebody with ADHD. Being an agent wrangler is great for introverts instead of having to talk to actual people.
It is effin nutzo that you would try to relate chatting with AI and agentic LLM codegen workflows to the intra/extra vert dichotomy or to neuro a/typicality - you so casually lean way into this absolute spectrum that I don’t even think associates the way you think it does, and it’s honestly kind of unsettling, like - what do you think you know about me, and about My People, that apparently I don’t know??
If it doesn’t work for you that’s fine, but turning it into some tribalised over-generalization is just… why, why would you do that, who is that kind of thing useful for??
Agents are boon for introverts who fucking hate dealing with other people (read: me). I can iterate rapidly with another 'entity' in a technical fashion and not have to spend hours explaining in relatable language what to do next.
I feel as if you need to work with these things more, as you would prefer to work, and see just how good they are.
You are leaving a lot of productivity on the table by not parallelizing agents for any of your work. Seemingly for psychological comfort quirks rather than earnestly seeking results.
Automation productivity doesn’t remove your own agency. It frees more time for you to apply your desire for control more discerningly.
This is the kind of thing people should be doing with AI. Weird and interesting stuff that has a "Let's find out!" Attitude.
Often there's as much to be learned from why it doesn't work.
I see the AI hype to be limited to a few domains.
People choosing to spend lots of money on things speculatively hoping to get a slice of whatever is cooking, even if they don't really know if it's a pie or not.
Forward looking imagining of what would change if these things get massively better.
Hyperbolic media coverage of the above two.
There are companies taking about adding AI for no other reason than they feel like that's what they should be doing, I think that counts as a weak driver of hype, but only because cumulatively, lots of companies are doing it. If anything I would consider this an outcome of hype.
Of these the only one that really affects me is AI being shoehorned into places it shouldn't
The media coverage stokes fires for and against, but I think it only changes the tone of annoyance I have to endure. They would do the same on another topic in the absence of AI. It used to be crypto,
I'm ok with people spending money that is not mine on high risk, high potential reward. It's not for me to judge how they calculate the potential risk or potential reward. It's their opinion, let them have it.
The weird thing I find is the complaints about AI hype dominating. I have read so many pieces where the main thrust of their argument is about the dominance of fringe viewpoints that I very rarely encounter. Frequently they take the stance that anyone imagining how the world might change from any particular form of AI as a claim that that form is inevitable and usually imminent. I don't see people making those claims.
I see people talking about what they tried, what they can do, and what they can't do. Everything they can't do is then held up by others as if it were a trophy and proof of some catestrophic weakness.
Just try stuff, have fun, if that doesn't interest you, go do something else. Tell us about what you are doing. You don't need to tell us that you aren't doing this particular thing, and why. If you find something interesting tell us about that, maybe we will too.
On one hand, I agree with you that there is some fun in experimenting with silly stuff. On the other hand...
> Claude was trying to promote the startup on Hackernews without my sign off. [...] Then I posted its stuff to Hacker News and Reddit.
...I have the feeling that this kind of fun experiments is just setting up an automated firehose of shit to spray places where fellow humans congregate. And I have the feeling that it has stopped being fun a while ago for the fellow humans being sprayed.
This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go through a period where internet communications (like HN, Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable. Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a stable balance.
I definitely understand the concern - I don't think I'd have hung out on HN for so long if LLM generated postings were common. I definitely recognize this is something you don't want to see happening at scale.
But I still can't help but grin at the thought that the bot knows that the thing to do when you've got a startup is to go put it on HN. It's almost... cute? If you give AI a VPS, of course it will eventually want to post its work on HN.
It's like when you catch your kid listening to Pink Floyd or something, and you have that little moment of triumph - "yes, he's learned something from me!"
(author here) I did feel kinda bad about it as I've always been a 'good' HNer until that point but honestly it didn't feel that spammy to me compared to some human generated slop I see posted here, and as expected it wasn't high quality enough to get any attention so 99% of people would never have seen it.
I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?
I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way forward for online interaction is very strong identification on any place where you can post anything.
it's annoying but it'll be corrected by proper moderation on these forums
as an aside i've made it clear that just posting AI-written emoji slop PR review descriptions and letting claude code directly commit without self reviewing is unacceptable at work
Forums like HN, reddit, etc will need to do a better job detecting this stuff, moderator staffing will need to be upped, AI resistant captchas need to be developed, etc.
Spam will always be here in some form, and its always an arms race. That doesnt really change anything. Its always been this way.
Not sure if I'd want Claude doing whatever on a production vps/node, but I like the idea of a way to use Claude Code on the go/wherever you are. I'm going to setup KASM workspaces on my free OCI server and see how it works there.
Thanks for sharing this! I have been trying on and off to run RooCode on a VPS to use it on the go. I tried Code Server but it does not share "sessions".
KASM seems interesting for this. Do share if you write a blog post on setting it up
All this AI coding stuff is scaring the shit out of me. a few months ago my team were hiring for a new engineer. of the 9 candidates we ran technical interviews with, only two could work without the ai. The rest literally just vibe coded their way though the app. as soon as it was taken away, they couldn't even write a basic sql query in ecto (we're a phoenix app). when questioned about tradeoffs inherent in the ai generated implementation, all but one was completely in the dark.
Not the point at all, but I have found it quite common among younger professional engineers to not know SQL at all. A combination of specialization (e.g. only work on microservices that do not directly touch a database) and NoSQL has made the skill of SQL more obscure than I would have thought possible as recently as 5 years ago.
I'm nearly guilty of this. I've been in industry for a bit over 10 years and I can barely write SQL. That's despite writing a bunch of queries by hand in my undergrad databases course. I almost never deal with databases myself outside of some ad-hoc queries.
I've been a full stack engineer for 10 years and I know SQL syntax but a few years ago I was asked at an interview "make a relation between users and posts" and I went "rails generate user" or something, and he's like, "not that," so I was like "OK I'll add it to a prisma file" and he's like "not that, write the SQL. I dunno what to do because this has never happened before."
Needless to say, I did not get the job, but several years later I still don't know how to answer his question.
I've worked with NOSQL (Mongo/Mongoose, Firebase) and I've worked with ORMs (Prisma, drizzle, Hasura), and I've been able to implement any feature asked of me, across several companies and projects. Maybe there's a subset of people who really do need to know this for some really low level stuff, but I feel like your average startup would not.
I think maybe it's similar to "can you reverse a linked list" question in that maybe you won't need the answer to that particular question on the job, but knowing the answer will help you solve adjacent problems. But even so, I don't think it's a good qualifier for good vs bad coders.
I started to notice this in a big way at my last job which I started in 2013. We were a rails shop and by about 2016 I was noticing most new hires would have no idea how to write a SQL query.
That's so weird to me, SQL is the very first language they taught me in college 20 years ago, before even learning how to write a for loop in pseudo code. Nowadays it's still the language I use the most on a daily basis.
I’ve worked for years in the past on huge complex sql. I wouldn’t have been able to remember exactly what that looks like in sql without a quick search. Your interview questions are bad if they require wrote learned syntax. Great programmers exist who barely bother to remember anything they can’t just look up.
I use claude code quite liberally, but I very often tell it why I won't accept it's changes and why; sometimes I just do it myself if it doesn't "get it".
We have also seen this about a year ago when hiring. But only a couple of them made it to the live interview and then it was evident. Most of them were quickly filtered out based on the coding submissions. We are soon about to hire again, with the uptick in LLM usage and newer more up to date models, I'm not looking forward too much having to deal with all of this.
I'd say "Learn the wrong things much faster". But I'd actually argue that learning isn't a fast process, it's rather a very slow journey, takes time and dedication to master deep knowledge. You won't learn anything that will stay with llms, if they got the output correct
This was my experience prior to any of the llm tools. It’s hard to find people with all around knowledge. Plus someone good in one context is awful in another. Your hiring process should find people who are a good fit and not look for people with just certain technical skills. The basics of SQL can be learned quickly. Fit cannot be learned.
Well said. Some of the best engineers I know looked up syntax whenever they needed it because there’s not much point in wrote learning everything. As long as they understand what they’re doing, that’s the main point.
I’m honestly so sick of interviews filled with gotcha questions that if you’d happened to study the right thing you could outperform a great experienced engineer who hadn’t brushed up on a couple of specific googlable things before the interview. It’s such a bad practice.
Now take Google away, and LSP. And the computer. Write CTEs with a pencil or bust.
I'm exaggerating of ourse, and I hear what you're saying, but I'd rather hire someone who is really really good at squeezing the most out of current day AI (read: not vibe coding slop) than someone who can do the work manually without assistance or fizz buzz on a whiteboard.
For your examples, honestly yeah. A dev should familiar with the basic concepts of their language and tech stack. So yes, they should be able to understand a basic snippet of code without Google, an LSP, or even a computer. They should even be able to "write CTEs with a pencil and paper". I don't expect them to get the syntax perfect, but they should just know the basic tools and concepts enough to have something at least semantically correct. And they certainly should be able to understand the code produced by an AI tool for a take home toy project.
I say this as someone who would definitely be far less productive without Google, LSP, or Claude Code.
How does privacy work with Claude Code in the real world? Its arbitrarily sending files from current folder/subfolders to anthropics cloud, right? Does Claude have a good privacy policy? E.g. do they promise not to retain what gets sent?
Because I think 'sending everything to the ai' would be a bit of an obstacle for most company environments
You run a coding agent with no permissions checks on a production server anywhere I'm involved in security and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.
Really, any coding agent our shop didn't write itself, though in those cases the smiting might be less theatrical than if you literally ran a yolo-mode agent on a prod server.
> 1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine. If you're from infosec, you might want to stop reading now—the rest of this article isn't going to make you any happier. Keep your medication close at hand if you decide to continue).
But I think I'm getting to the point where "If I'd let an intern/junior dev have access while I'm watching then I'm probably OK with Claude having it too"
The thing that annoys me about a lot of infosec people is that they have all of these opinions about bad practice that are removed from the actual 'what's the worst that could happen here' impact/risk factor.
I'm not running lfg on a control tower that's landing boeing 737s, but for a simple non-critical CRUD app? Probably the tradeoff is worth it.
Why in the world would you advocate explicitly for letting it run on production servers, rather than teaching it how to test in a development or staging environment like you would with a junior engineer?
My workflow is somewhat similar to yours. I also much love --dangerously-skip-permissions, as root! I even like to do it from multiple Claude Code instances in parallel when I have parallel ideas that can be worked out.
Maybe my wrapper project is interesting for you? https://github.com/release-engineers/agent-sandbox It's to keep Claude Code containerized with a copy of the workspace and a firewall/proxy so it can only access certain sites. With my workflow I don't really risk much, and the "output" is a .patch file I can inspect before I git apply it.
Author (who also replied to you) might have been "doing it wrong" but no wonder, Anthropic only made Claude Code smarter about this 5 days ago and there's too much to keep up with:
The new command is something like /security-review and should be in the loop before any PR or commit especially for this type of web-facing app, which Claude Code makes easy.
This prompt will make Claude's code generally beat not just intern code, but probably most devs' code, for security mindedness:
I've often gotten the sense that fly.io is not completely averse to some degree of "cowboying," meaning you should probably take heed to this particular advice coming from them..
> export IS_SANDBOX=1 && claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
FYI, this can be shortened to:
IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
You don't need the export in this case, nor does it need to be two separate commands joined by &&. (It's semantically different in that the variable is set only for the single `claude` invocation, not any commands which follow. That's often what you want though.)
> I asked Claude to rename all the files and I could go do something else while it churned away, reading the files and figuring out the correct names.
It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks manually and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it doing something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to write a program to do the thing I want. e.g. I needed to change the shape of about 100 JSON files the other day and it wanted to go through them one-by-one. I stopped it after the third file, told it to write a script to import the old shape and write out the new shape, and 30 seconds later it was done. I also had it write me a script to... rename my stupidly named bank statements. :-)
This. I had a 10000 line css file, and told it to do a find and replace on some colours. It was hilariously bad at this and started chewing tokens. Asking it to write a script to swap it out and then execute that script for me and it was done instantly. Knowing the right questions to ask an AI is everything.
> It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks manually and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it doing something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to write a program to do the thing I want.
It works because they exported it. VAR=foo bar only sets it for the env passed to that exec or subshell, export VAR=foo && bar adds it to the current env then executes bar.
export VAR=foo && bar is dangerous because it stays set.
This might have been the case for fish shell; but not anymore, it works in current version. I myself have used the popular syntax without specifying `env` in my aliases.
Being on day 4 of being ignored entirely by CSRs from Anthropic after 5 months of paying for Max x20 has put a sufficiently bad taste in my mouth that it has killed all of my previous Claude Code cheer-leading efforts.
Sure, go have fun with the new software -- but for godsake don't actually depend on a company that can't bother to reply to you. Even Amazon replies.
For me it was the constant overloads. Paying 200 USD a month only to open Claude Code and half the time it would get stuck at the initial prompt. Sometimes with an overload error, sometimes just stuck forever. Maybe they improved it now, but it has motivated me to switch to Cursor Agent (also TUI based like CC) with GPT-5 to see if it was a viable alternative to Claude Code and so far it is working even a bit better for my use-cases.
I had a problem with signing up for max with the wrong email, then thinking I didn’t actually do it, so I signed up with the one I wanted.
Saw the double bill and contacted them, I had a full refund in a couple days and a nice personal note thanking me for being a max user.
This was a couple months ago so it’s possible they’ve had a huge influx of requests that made it difficult to respond fast lately but I had a good experience with their customer service.
My experience has generally been positive, even as a small customer spending in the low thousands per month. I've definitely had help that wasn't particularly effective or adept. Lots of gradual escalations which are fairly time consuming. But they've certainly made sure I had assistance, and it was fairly prompt.
This article feels like it was written as a dialectical exercise between an AI and a human. It would probably benefit from some more heavy human editing to make it more succinct and to give the overall article a structure. As it is, it's very difficult to follow along.
I’ve seen a lot of articles like this on the HN page recently… stuff that has one or two interesting tidbits, but is clearly just a conversation someone had with an AI and dumped into an article. Don’t make me wade through all the AI word barf to get the interesting points, that’s what old fashioned editing is for.
The title is a bit exaggerated. The depth of the projects covered in the article is clearly not representative of "all".
In fact, I now prefer to use a purely chat window to plan the overall direction and let LLM provide a few different architectural ideas, rather than asking LLM to write a lot of code whose detail I have no idea about.
That's my gist. All of these seem pretty basic apps I would see implemented to demo a new web or REST framework. Comment ranker is cool, but I can't imagine its doing much more than scrape text > call semantic api > modify DOM.
How much of this is buildings versus recalling tutorials in the dataset. For every vibe coded project with 20 lines of requirements, I have a model with 20 different fields all with unique semantic meanings. In focused areas, AI has been okay. But I have yet to see Claude or any model build and scale a code base with the same mindset.
I like using Claude-Code, it can be a real timesaver in certain cases.
But it's far from perfect. Really difficult things/big projects are nearly impossible. Even if you break it down into hundred small tasks.
I've tried to make it port an existing, big codebase from one language to another. So it has all of the original codebase in one folder, and a new project in another folder. No matter how much guidance you give it, or how clear you make your todos, it will not work.
Most harnesses provide this as a "plan" vs. "act" mode now. You first "chat" in plan mode (no access to tools, no instructions to write any code basically), you then can optionally write those plans in a memorybank / plan.md, and then say "now go implement it", and it moves to the "act" mode where it goes through and does it, updating progress in plan.md as it goes.
I've found it very useful to have items like requirements.md, plans.md, or todo.md, in my LLM focused projects. I'll use AI to help take the ideas I have at that stage and refine them into something more appropriate for ingestion into the next stage. So, when I want it to come up with the plans, it is going to base is mostly on requirements.md, and then I'll have it act on the plans step by step after that.
"ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad? I understand that more than anything engineers believe having to spend money on design is a total waste, but none of this is pleasing or balanced at all
Just from personal experience, visual design is the task with the worst outcomes for Claude Code (w/ latest Opus 4.1, etc).
It truly cannot reason well yet about geometry, visual aesthetics, placement, etc. The performance varies: it's quite good at matplotlib but terrible at any non-trivial LaTeX / TikZ layout or graphic. Why? Not a clear idea yet -- would love to think more about it.
I've tried many things now to try and give it eyes (via text), and this is unavoidably a place where things are ... rough ... right now.
I've had bad results with image screenshotting. More often than not, it has no idea what it is looking at -- won't even summarize the image correctly -- or will give me an incorrect take "Yes indeed we fixed the problem as you can tell by <this part of the UI> and <that part of the UI>" which is wrong.
I typically have to come in and make a bunch of fine-grained changes to get something visually appealing. I'm sure at some point we'll have a system which can go all the way, and I'd be excited to find approaches to this problem.
Note -- tasks which involve visual design which I've run into diminishing returns:
* proper academic figures (had a good laugh at the GPT 5 announcement issues)
* video game UI / assets
* UI design for IDEs
* Responsive web design for chat-based interfaces
All of these feel like "pelican" tasks -- they enter into a valley which can't be effectively communicated via textual feedback yet ...
Just reflecting on my own comment -- what one might want is an automated layout system with a simple "natural language"-like API (perhaps similar to Penrose, although it's been awhile since I looked at that project).
Hardened and long use systems like TikZ of course, do have something like this -- but in complex TikZ graphics, you end up with a mixture of "right of" and "left of" (etc) and low-level manual specification, which I think tends to fall into the zone of issues.
> "ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad?
I agree that it's bad. What I noticed using AI was that it tends to introduce gradients whenever you want to make something look nice. Whenever I see a gradient now I immediately assume that it was designed with AI
Feels like the word "all" is pulling a lot of weight in that sentence, it's not cheap and you're forever reliant on a company to keep providing the service (which has already changed recently I think, seem to remember something about harsher rate limiting being put in place). "All you need" typically implies that you don't need much (eg "The terminal is all you need"), and Claude Code isn't that.
Otherwise good article, I'm still not sure vibe coding is for me and at the price, it's hard to justify trying to out, but things like this do make me a little more tempted to give it a shot. I doubt it'd ever replace writing code by hand for me, but could be fun for prototyping I suppose
This is a fun project to be sure. I just wish the author would not refer to the experiment as an "autonomous startup builder" unless they mean it humorously. Having poked around the GitHub repo and read through the materials, it seems like more of an AI coding assistant running in a loop that built and deployed a broken web application with no users, no business model, and no understanding of what problem it was trying to solve. There were quasi-autonomous processes and there were things that were built, but nothing I'd call a startup.
As I understood it, the AI company is trying to prevent itself and its customers from engaging in (probably unintentional, but any) criminal activity.
When the AI company is "policing" your agent by requiring a "human in the loop", it's just CYA (cover your ass) for the AI company.
If your agent goes off and does something illegal, the AI company would be liable unless they have some legal deniability. By requiring you the human account owner to sign-off on what your agent is doing, you become liable for any crimes your agent commits on your behalf. I haven't read their TOS but I can guarantee there is some clause like this in there.
You are still completely free to commit crimes with your agent and suffer whatever legal consequences follow!! You just have to be clear that you intentionally wanted those actions to occur which resulted in the crime. If you repeatedly allow your agents to take actions that could potentially be criminal without any human-in-the-loop, they're going to ban you because it exposes themselves to potential criminal charges.
I've asked copilot (Claude Sonnet 4) to edit some specific parts of a project. It removed the lines that specifically have comments that say "do not remove" with long explanation why. Then it went ahead and modified the unit tests to ensure 100% coverage.
Using coding agent is great btw, but at least learn how to double check their work cuz they are also quite terrible.
Claude loves to delete comments. I setup specific instructions telling it not to, and yet it regularly tries to delete comments that often have nothing to do with the code we're working on.
It's so hit and miss in Rust too. When I ask it for help with a bug it usually tries a few things then tries to just delete or comment out the buggy code. Another thing it does is to replace the buggy code with a manual return statement with a comment saying "Returning a manual response for now". It'll then do a cargo build, proclaim that there are no errors and call it a day. If you don't check what it's doing it would appear it has fixed the bug.
When I give it very specific instructions for implementation it regularly adds static code with comments like "this is where the functionality for X will be implemented. We'll use X for now". It does a cargo build then announces all of its achievements with a bunch of emojis despite having not implemented any of the logic that I asked it to.
This is the tricky part. The whole point of agents is, well, do things so that we don't have to. But if you need to check everything they do, you might as well copy and paste from a chat interface...
Which makes me feel early adopters pay with their time. I'm pretty sure the agents will be much better with time, but this time is not exactly now, with endless dances around their existing limitations. Claude Code is fun to experiment with but to use it in production I'd give it another couple of years (assuming they will focus on code stability ans reducing its natural optimism as it happily reports "Phase 2.1.1 has been successfully with some minor errors with API tests failing only 54.3% of the time").
Is Claude Code better than the Gemini CLI? I've been using the Gemini CLI with Gemini 2.5 Pro and haven't been impressed. Maybe these LLMs aren't as good with Rust codebases? I'm guessing there are a lot more people looking to use these tools with JS and Python.
- Repeat more than 20 times the same response to my prompt rejecting its proposed changes; I just kept prompting to see how far it would go before doing something different. Claude Code would quickly guess there is something wrong and try something else or ask what I'm getting at
- Continually refer to outdated versions of files, even after I've told to re-read the files
- Refer to files in a different session on a different machine that have no relevance to what I'm currently doing, presumably simply because I logged in with the same account.
- Randomly crash or enter infinite loops, sometimes soon after starting
- Refuse to read files in a sibling or parent folder
- Fail to understand simple request.
- Propose empty changes
Claude Code is just far better. I only use Gemini CLI for the simplest of tasks
You can make Gemini CLI much better by making it behave more like Claude Code. Claude Code has some lovely prompt engineering at the system and subsystem level that can be replicated with Gemini CLI. I’m having great results already. I am still perfecting process and prompts to be a fully agentic system that can do well on benchmarks but more importantly do the right work with steerability, which was an absolute pain with Gemini CLI out-of-the-box. If you are interested, I can publish some of the basics now and then I can keep you posted as I develop it into a more robust system. Just email me at randycarlton@gmail.com with the subject: SaaS.bot (where this work will likely reside).
I've been using both on a Rust codebase and have found both work fairly well. Claude code is definitely more capable than Gemini. What difficulties have you had?
The biggest pain point I've had is that both tools will try to guess the API of a crate instead of referencing the documentation. I've tried adding an MCP for this but have had mixed results.
It might be that we have multiple features in our codebase and Gemini seems to struggle understanding that it needs to be aware of #[cfg(feature = "x")] and also that if it's trying to run things, it might need to specify the feature.
And yes, when they guess APIs, it's highly annoying.
i've tried codex, cursor, and a few other agentic tools and nothing compares to claude code when it comes to UX. The other service's models are quickly catching up to claude, but the claude code ux is just magical to me. i havent used it with rust personally. like you suggested would be the average user, i've mostly stuck with js and python.
I don't know if it's Gemini CLI or Gemini 2.5 Pro, but the combination is not even comparable to Claude Code with Sonnet. I was starting with these agent tools several weeks ago, so it was very tempting to use Gemini, instead of paying for Claude Pro, but the difference is huge. In my experience, Gemini was very quick to get stuck in debugging loop, fixing something "one last time" over and over again. Or it got into writing code, despite my explicitly saying not to do so. I'm still trying to figure out if I could use Gemini for something, but every time I try it, I regret it. Claude Code with GLM-4.5 is a good alternative to paying for Claude Pro, it's not as good as Sonnet, but close.
I guess what seems surprising to me is that Gemini 2.5 Pro scores well above Claude Sonnet on Aider's leaderboard, even beating Claude Opus 4.
I have been kinda wondering if there's something that just isn't as good between the CLI and model because the Gemini CLI has been a mostly frustrating experience - and it's kept me from wanting to pay for Claude because I don't want to pay money for the same frustrating experience. But maybe I should try Claude and see.
I was once a heavy user of Cursor with Gemini 2.5 Pro as a model, then a Claude Code convert. Occasionally I try out Gemini CLI and somehow it fails to impress, even as Cursor + Gemini still works well. I think it's something about the limited feature set and system prompt.
I have found Claude code to be significantly better, both in how good the model ends up being and in how polished it is. To the point that I do not drop down to Gemini CLI when I reach my Claude usage limit.
I feel like Claude code is great but how is it so much different from the agent of GitHub copilot?
They both can use the same model (Claude 4) and the agent behaves very similar.
For 10 bucks I think GitHub copilot is very reasonably priced as well. But ofc usage limits are maybe where they differ a lot.
Am I missing out?
I only know the old Github Copilot (like 2yrs+ ago) so cannot speak to it directly, but even the Cursor Agent (with Sonnet 4 or GPT-5) is IMO inferior to Claude Code (CC).
In my experience, it is faster and better performing.
CC seems to spend tokens more deliberately + gives superior coding tools to the model than other provider.
Recently my CC subscription ran out, tried 3 prompts with Cursor Agent and then went back to subscribing CC. I still use Cursor though for autocompletion.
Yeah the old one was much worse. They have really stepped up their game recently. Thats why I am wondering how large the gap still is. I only ever see people compare cursor and Claude code. Never GitHub copilot. So I assume there is either a blind spot or it's much worse
I haven't tried Claude Code yet, but I extensively use Cursor and find it can do similar work (which makes sense). I think it's good you led with the length prompt/spec, which will maybe help the "AI can't do ____" crowd grasp that it really is a skill issue when they can't get any good results from LLMs. (Unfortunately it cannot help the "well, this isn't actually useful or making an impact" group)
Regarding some of the comments here: I found the article style fine, and I even like the "follow my journey" style writing as it helps the reader understand the process you went though. That kind of engineering and debugging workflow is something I enjoy about this industry.
> help the "AI can't do ____" crowd grasp that it really is a skill issue when they can't get any good results from LLMs.
I think the issue with this conversation is that no one tells you what they are working on, and I suspect there is both a skill gap in usage, but also a lack of capability in the LLMs, both surfacing as the same outcome.
There is definitely stuff an LLM cannot do on its own, at which point is the LLM really achieving the outcome or is it the human just achieving it by backseat driving. Much like a senior telling the junior how to solve a tricky bug, you wouldn't say the junior came up with the solution and therefore you would not say the junior is capable of solving the bug.
> I had some issues getting it to understand that it wasn't meant to terminate, so I instead told it to write a basic bash script that calls claude with the -p flag and "please continue" whenever it detects its not running.
This is why we can't have nice things. Anthropic is placing more restrictive limits and now you risk being locked out for hours if you need to use it a bit more than usual (e.g. you have an impending deadline or presentation).
I wish Anthropic just banned these abusive accounts instead of placing draconian (and fuzzy) limits. The other day there was an idiot YouTube streamer actively looking to hit limits with as many concurrent Claude Code sessions as he could, doing nonsense projects.
I believe these are fundamentally two different types of abuse — the OP is engaging in a significantly less harmful version … the seriously harmful version is the account sharing / massively concurrent one which abuses whatever holes exist in the streaming API to allow Claude to “complete the completion and then stop because of limit” (which I think is there to make the UX better)
Just letting a single instance run all the time … is not that bad, seriously.
I'd personally rather use gpt-5. The sub price is cheap and offers more overall value than an Anthropic sub or paying per token. The chatgpt app on iPhone and Mac are native and nicer than Anthropic's and offer more features. Codex is close enough to Claude Code and also now native. For me it's nicer to use the "same" model across each use case like text, images, code etc. this way I better understand the limitations and quirks of the model rather than the constant context switching to different models to get maybe slightly better perf. To each their own though depending on your personal use case.
The problem is GPT-5 is not in the same league as even Claude 3.5. But I do hope their lower pricing puts some downward pressure on Anthropic's next release.
I don’t believe this is true but I’m willing to be proven wrong. I believe people who think this are just used to Claude’s models and therefore understand the capabilities and limitations due to their experience using them.
I dont know about yall, but personally I love to see an AI running with "--dangerously-skip-permissions" in an infinite loop. Every day we get closer to the cyberpunk future we deserve.
How do you stay in the loop with CC? I find myself using it for the exact opposite use case: large features or greenfield projects where I can just let it rip autonomously for a while. I find the TUI awkward for reviewing code.
I think if you use Cursor, using Claude Code is a huge upgrade. The problem is that Cursor was a huge upgrade from the IDE, so we are still getting used to it.
The company I work for builds a similar tool - NonBioS.ai. It is in someways similar to what the author does above - but packaged as a service. So the nonbios agent has a root VM and can write/build all the software you want. You access/control it through a web chat interface - we take care of all the orchestration behind the scene.
Its also in free Beta right now, and signup takes a minute if you want to give it a shot. You can actually find out quickly if the Claude code/nonbios experience is better than Cursor.
I think the path forward there is slack/teams/discord/etc integration of agents, so you can monitor and control whatever agent software you like via a chat interface just like you would interact with any other teammate.
I'm a long-time GitHub Copilot subscriber, but I have also tested many alternatives, such as Cursor.
Recently, I tried using Claude Code with my GitHub Copilot subscription (via unofficial support through https://github.com/ericc-ch/copilot-api), and I found it to be quite good. However, in my opinion, the main difference comes down to your preferred workflow. As someone who works with Neovim, I find that a tool that works in the terminal is more appropriate for me.
Isn’t that usage a violation of ToS? In that repo there’s even an issue thread that mentions this. The way I rely on GitHub these days, losing my account would be far more than annoying.
Most of these are Anthropic models under the hood, so I think 'whatever fits your workflow best' is the main deciding factor. That's definitely Claude Code for me, and I do think there's some 'secret sauce' in the exact prompting and looping logic they use, but I haven't tried Cursor a lot to be sure.
any secret sauce in prompting etc could be trivially reverse engineered by the companies building the other agents, since they could easily capture all the prompts it sends to the LLM. If there’s any edge, it’s probably more around them fine-tuning the model itself on Claude Code tasks.
Claude code seems like the obvious choice for someone using Vim but even in the context of someone using a graphical IDE like VSCode I keep hearing that Claude is “better” but I just can’t fathom how that can be the case.
Even if the prompting and looping logic is better, the direct integration with the graphical system along with the integrated terminal is a huge benefit, and with graphical IDEs the setup and learning curve is minimal.
Letting Cursor pick the model for you is inviting them to pick the cheapest model for them, at the cost of your experience. It's better to develop your own sense of what model works in a given situation. Personally, I've had the most success with Claude, Gemini Pro, and o3 in Cursor.
I use Cursor with Claude Code running in the integrated terminal (within a dev container in yolo mode). I'll often have multiple split terminals with different Claude Code instances running on their own worktrees. I keep Cursor around because I love the code completions.
Why isn't anyone talking about the HackerNews Comment Ranker plugin? [1] That's amazing. I had this idea too -- to rank HN comments by their relevance to the actual article, and filter out comments that obviously didn't read it.
I need to modify this to work with local models, though. But this does illustrate the article's point -- we both had an idea, but only one person actually went ahead and did it, because they're more familiar with agentic coding than me.
The screenshot was a really great example how bad that can end up in practice. One comment asking "What's the catch?" which is a good follow-up question to further conversation was ranked a 1/5.
Probably just needs a slight update to expand the relevant context of child comments. I bet it's still comparing "What's the catch?" to the OP article.
> I hit a small snag where Anthropic decides that running Claude as root with --dangerously-skip-permissions / yolo-mode is not allowed. You can get past this dumb nanny-state stuff by running [fun dangerous command that lets you run as root]
I run with the dangerous option on my work computer. At first I was thinking I would be good if I just regularly kept full disk backups. But my company at least pays lip service to the fact that we want to protect our intellectual property. Plus I think it might be irresponsible to allow an AI model full internet access unsupervised.
So now I use a docker compose setup where I install Claude and run it in a container. I map source code volumes into the container. It uses a different container with dnsmasq with an allowlist.
I initially wanted to do HTTP proxying instead of DNS filtering since it would be more secure, but it was quite hard to set it up satisfactorily.
Running CLI programs with the dangerous full permissions is a lot more comfortable and fast, so I'm quite satisfied.
> If you're from infosec, you might want to stop reading now — the rest of this article isn't going to make you any happier. Keep your medication close at hand if you decide to continue...
I just came for the comments for this... I am not sure at what point we are. Think AI and Crypto are a match in hell, especially given that a lot of Crypto projects are made by bros who have no interest in tech. estimate we'll be seeing projects/companies that get hacked as soon as they launch by Claude itself.
I don't know about Claude Code, but here's my story. With Replit, I have a bunch of tasks that I want Replit to do at the end of a coding session -- push to Github, update user visible Changelogs, etc. It's a list in my replit.md file.
A couple of weeks ago I asked it to "clean up" instead of the word I usually use and it ended up deleting both my production and dev databases (a little bit my fault too -- I thought it deleted the dev database so I asked it to copy over from production, but it had deleted the production database and so it then copied production back to dev, leaving me with no data in either; I was also able to reconstruct my content from a ETL export I had handy).
This was after the replit production db database wipe-out story that had gone viral (which was different, that dev was pushing things on purpose). I have no doubt it's pretty easy to do something similar in Claude Code, especially as Replit uses Claude models.
Anyway, I'm still working on things in Replit and having a very good time. I have a bunch of personal purpose-built utilities that have changed my daily tech life in significant ways. What vibe coding does allow me to do is grind on "n" of unrelated projects in mini-sprints. There is personal, intellectual, and project cost to this context switching, but I'm exploring some projects I've had on my lists for a long time, and I'm also building my base replit.md requirements to match my own project tendencies.
I vibe coded a couple of things that I think could be interesting to a broader userbase, but I've stepped back and re-implemented some of the back-end things to a more specific, higher-end vibe coded environment standard. I've also re-started a few projects from scratch with my evolved replit.md... I built an alpha, saw some issues, upgraded my instructions, built it again as a beta, saw some issues... working on a beta+ version.
I'm finding the process to be valuable. I think this will be something I commit to commercially, but I'm also willing to be patient to see what each of the next few months brings in terms of upgraded maturity and improved devops.
Claude Code has minimal internal guardrails against destructive operations when using --dangerously-skip-permissions, which is why it's a major security risk for production environments regardless of how convenient it seems.
An over eager helm update lead to some "uh oh, I hope the volume is still there" and it was. Otherwise no, haven't had anything bad happen. Of course, it's just a matter of time, and with the most recent version it's easy to toggle permissions back on without having to restart Claude Code, so for spicy tasks I tend to disable YOLO mode.
If Anthropic is smart they would open it up to other models now to make it default for everyone. Otherwise you are banking on Sonnet remaining the best coding model.
The entire point of CC is to drive anthropic subscriptions and it's working. even with the release of the long-awaited gpt5 the anthropic models are still the best coding models.
There are plenty of alternatives for other models like opencode et al, and you can always just set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL with claude code to have it use another provider. I don't see why they need to do anything in addition to that.
My only request would be for claude code to be a bit more open, less obfuscated and to accept PRs - but I understand the unwillingness of also wanting to manage what would be a very popular open source project.
There's Claude Code Router, that lets you use any model with Claude Code. Claude is a really good model for agents though, even though Gemini 2.5 and GPT5 are better models overall, Claude uses tools and plans tasks more effectively. A better pattern is to provide sub agents in Claude Code that call out to other LLMs as tools for planning/architecture.
This piece is also covered by a bunch of other cli/tui agents (like codex-cli and opencode) allowing you to switch between Claude and other models (comes in handy depending on the task) so it really all depends on the setup you like. As mentioned in the sibling comment there are ways to get it to work with Claude Code too.
I appreciate this writeup. I live in the terminal and work primarily in vim, so I always appreciate folks talking about tooling from that perspective. Little of the article is that, but it's still interesting to see the workflow outlined here, and it gives me a few ideas to try more of.
However, I disagree that LLMs are anywhere near as good as what's described here for most things I've worked with.
So far, I'm pretty impressed with Cursor as a toy. It's not a usable tool for me, though. I haven't used Claude a ton, though I've seen co-workers use it quite a bit. Maybe I'm just not embracing the full "vibe coding" thing enough and not allowing AI agents to fully run wild.
I will concede that Claude and Cursor have gotten quite good at frontend web development generation. I don't doubt that there are a lot of tasks where they make sense.
However, I still have yet to see a _single_ example of any of these tools working for my domain. Every single case, even when the folks who are trumpeting the tools internally run the prompting/etc, results in catastrophic failure.
The ones people trumpet internally are cases where folks can't be bothered to learn the libraries they're working with.
The real issue is that people who aren't deeply familiar with the domain don't notice the problems with the changes LLMs make. They _seem_ reasonable. Essentially by definition.
Despite this, we are being nearly forced to use AI tooling on critical production scientific computing code. I have been told I should never be editing code directly and been told I must use AI tooling by various higher level execs and managers. Doing so is 10x to 100x slower than making changes directly. I don't have boilerplate. I do care about knowing what things do because I need to communicate that to customers and predict how changes to parameters will affect output.
I keep hearing things described as an "overactive intern", but I've never seen an intern this bad, and I've seen a _lot_ of interns. Interns don't make 1000 line changes that wreck core parts of the codebase despite being told to leave that part alone. Interns are willing to validate the underlying mathematical approximations to the physics and are capable of accurately reasoning about how different approximations will affect the output. Interns understand what the result of the pipeline will be used for and can communicate that in simple terms or more complex terms to customers. (You'd think this is what LLMs would be good at, but holy crap do they hallucinate when working with scientific terminology and jargon.)
Interns have PhDs (or in some cases, are still in grad school, but close to completion). They just don't have much software engineering experience yet. Maybe that's the ideal customer base for some of these LLM/AI code generation strategies, but those tools seem especially bad in the scientific computing domain.
My bottleneck isn't how fast I can type. My bottleneck is explaining to a customer how our data processing will affect their analysis.
(To our CEO) - Stop forcing us to use the wrong tools for our jobs.
(To the rest of the world) - Maybe I'm wrong and just being a luddite, but I haven't seem results that live up to the hype yet, especially within the scientific computing world.
This is roughly my experience with LLMs. I've had a lot of friends that have had good experience vibe coding very small new apps. And occasionally I've had AI speed things up for me when adding a specific feature to our main app. But at roughly 2 million lines of code, and with 10 years of accumulated tribal knowledge, LLMs really seem to struggle with our current codebase.
The last task I tried to get an LLM to do was a fairly straightforward refactor of some of our C# web controllers - just adding a CancellationToken to the controller method signature whenever the underlying services could accept one. It struggled so badly with that task that I eventually gave up and just did it by hand.
The widely cited study that shows LLMs slow things down by 20% or so very much coheres with my experience, which is generally: fight with the LLM, give up, do it by hand.
My experience is that sometimes they give you a 10x speedup but then you hit a wall and take 30 times longer to do a simple thing and a lot of people just keep hammering because of the first feeling. Outside of boilerplate, I haven't seen it be this magical tool people keep claiming it is.
To be fair, it's the higher level folks who are too far removed from things to have any actual authority. I've never heard a direct single-team engineering manager something like that. But yeah, CEOs say crazy crap. And we're definitely there, though to be fair, his exact quote was "I insist everyone try to have AI generate your code first before you try making any direct changes". It's not _quite_ as bad as what I described. But then the middle management buys in and says similar things. And we now have a company level OKR around having 80% of software engineers relying on AI tooling. It's a silly thing to dictate.
In my view its a tool, at least for the moment. Learn it, work out how it works for you, and what it doesn't work for you. But assuming you are the professional they should trust your judgement, and you should also earn that trust. That's why you pay skilled people for. If that tool isn't the best to getting the job done use something else. Of course that professional should be evaluating tools and assuring us/management (whether by evidence or other means) that the most cost efficient and quality product is being built like any other profession.
I use AI, and for some things its great. But I'm feeling like they want us to use the "blunt instrument" that is AI when sometimes a smaller, more fine grained tool/just handcrafting code for accuracy at least for me is quicker and more appropriate. The autonomy window as I recently heard it expressed.
Sir, do you realize that crud is such a solved problem that popular MVC frameworks from over a decade ago generate it for you from templates? No wasteful LLM prompting required.
It's a lot like the first time taking a metal detector to a beach. It's really cool and exciting (dopamine hit) to find stuff, but after a while it wears off because realistically you only found trash.
Buuut for some people it just clicks and it becomes their chore to go find trash in the beach everyday and the occasional nickel or broken bracelet they feel the need to tell people and show it off.
(author here) I think there's a difference between "I'm no longer impressed" (good) and "I was never impressed and never would have been impressed" (bad, but common).
Yes it's easy now so its by definition no longer impressive, but that in itself is impressive if you can correctly remember or imagine what your reaction _would_ have been 6 months ago.
Never impressed, no longer impressed, feeling depressed ... Another option, newly impressed by the next iteration.
Up to a point these have been probability machines. There's probably a lot of code that does certain likely things. An almost astonishing amount doing the same things, in fact. As such, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised or impressed by the stochastic parrot aspect any more than we're impressed by 80% of such sites being copy pasta from Stack Overflow a few years ago.
However, what we perhaps didn't expect is that on the margins of the mass probability space, there are any number of less common things, yet still enough of those in aggregate that these tools can guess well how to do those things too, even things that we might not be able to search for. Same reason Perplexity has a business model when Google or DDG exist.
And now, recently, many didn't expect one might be able to simulate a tiny "society of mind" made of "agents" out of these parrots, a tiny society that's proving actually useful.
Parrots themselves still impress me, but a society of them making plans at our beck and call? That can keep us all peeking, pecking, and poking for a while yet.
// given enough time and typewriters, who wins: a million monkeys, a society of parrots, or six hobbits?
This is good stuff. While somebody could build a Trello clone or an image generator by typing “git clone “ followed by any number of existing projects, the code you’d get might’ve been written by a person, plus if you do that you’re not even spending any money, which just doesn’t seem right.
The future is vibe coding but what some people don’t yet appreciate what that vibe is, which is a Pachinko machine permanently inserted between the user and the computer. It’s wild to think that anybody got anything done without the thrill of feeding quarters into the computer and seeing if the ball lands on “post on Reddit” or “delete database”
I’ve noticed a new genre of AI-hype posts that don’t attempt to build anything novel, just talk about how nice and easy building novel things has become with AI.
The obvious contradiction being that if it was really so easy their posts would actually be about the cool things they built instead of just saying what they “can” do.
I wouldn’t classify this article as one since the author does actually create something of this, but LinkedIn is absolutely full of that genre of post right now.
Have someone who isn't ever going to use claude code sign up for him and then give him the credentials. (do you have a partner or other relative not in tech?)
system_instructions = """You will generate an image. The image will be used as the background of a poster, so keep it muted and not too detailed so text can still easily be seen on top. The actual poster elements like margin etc will be handled separately so just generate a normal image that works well in A4 ratio and that works well as a background."""
full_prompt = f"{system_instructions}\n\nGenerate a background image for an A4 poster with the following description: {prompt}"
openai_request = {
'model': 'gpt-4.1-mini',
'input': full_prompt,
'tools': [{
'type': 'image_generation',
'size': '1024x1536',
'quality': 'medium'
}]
}
# Make request to OpenAI
response_data = self.call_openai_api('/v1/responses', openai_request)
I've found Claude's CLI to be the best of what I've tried. I've moved away from cursor and found myself in a much better programming headspace wherein I can "toggle" this AI-enabled mode. It has to be a more mindful approach to when/how I use AI in my day-to-day work instead of it being a temptation to "AI" some of the work away in the Cursor IDE.
A frustration of using tools is that they never entirely act exactly the way you want... instead of it working the way you want, you have to work they way it wants (and before that, you have to figure out what that is).
...We're stuck with this, because it's just not feasible to build custom software for each person, that works exactly the way they want.
...Or is it?
I'm intrigued by the possibility that coding models do in fact make it feasible to have software customized exactly to what I want.
Of course, that includes the coding agent, so no need for Claude Code.
> instead of it working the way you want, you have to work they way it wants
You can use these tools in lots of different ways. You don't have to go all the way to the vibe coding extreme. You can go down to individual functions and have it write them and adjust them step by step if you want, approving every diff. Or even just have it on the side to chat with about your code (Aider is great for this in /ask mode). You can guide its behaviour with CONVENTIONS.md / CLAUDE.md and get it to work how you want as well. I find it handy just asking Aider to write comments for my functions.
It's definitely early days but I'm expecting we'll pretty quickly evolve to having standard "profiles" you can apply to work in different ways, and projects will start shipping with them out of the box (a bit like lint config). This will relieve a lot of the friction at the moment where you spend the first hours / days just corralling it to work the way you want.
> I watched the autonomous startup builder a bit more.
I think i'm done with this community in the age of vibe coding. The line between satire, venture capitalism, business idea guys and sane tech enthusiasts is getting too blurry.
It didn't seem to do anything well. And weird quotes like 'I think it one-shotted that too' on something important. What on earth is this. Reading it is like experiencing a bad weird dream.
I've been diving into Claude Code after reading articles constantly praising its abilities. But I think perhaps it's better suited to web development
Using it for iOS development is interesting. It does produce working output (sometimes!) but it's very hit-or-miss. Recently I gave it a couple hours to build a CarPlay prototype of one of my apps. It was completely unable to refactor the codebase to correctly support CarPlay (even though I passed the entire CarPlay documentation into it). I gave it three attempts at it. Then I intervened and added support for CarPlay manually, following that I added a lot of skeleton code for it to flesh out. Claude was then able to build a prototype
However, over the next few days as I tried to maintain the code I ended up rewriting 60% of it because it was not maintainable or correct. (By "not correct" I mean it had logic errors and was updating the display multiple times with incorrect information before replacing it with correct information, causing the data displayed to randomly refresh)
I also tried getting it to add some new screens to a game I develop. I wanted it to add some of the purchase flows into the app (boring code that I hate writing). It managed to do it with compile errors, and was unable to fix its own build output despite having the tools to do so. Instead of fixing the build errors it caused, Claude Code decided it would manually verify that only its own changes were correct by running `swiftc` on only files that it touched. Which was nonsense
All that said, there was a benefit in that Claude Code writing all this code and getting something up on the screen motivated me to finally pick up the work and do some of these tasks. I had been putting them off for months and just having the work "get started" no matter how bad, was a good kick start
I'm sorry but people who let an agent run on prod deserve what they get. Basically even saying you would do that should disqualify you from working in IT in the way saying "I like to drink when I'm working" should disqualify you from airtraffic control.
I haven't been following too closely, but is there even a reason to do this? What are the benefits of allowing production access versus just asking for a simple build system which promotes git tags, writes database migration scripts, etc.? From my perspective, it should be easier than ever to use a "work" workflow for side projects, where code is being written to PR's, which could optionally be reviewed or even just auto approved as a historical record of changes, and use a trunk-based development workflow with simple CI/CD systems - all of which could even be a cookie cutter template/scaffolding to be reused on every project. Doesn't it make sense now more than ever to do something like that for every project?
> I'm sorry but people who let an agent run on prod deserve what they get.
The problem is that whatever consequences come of it won’t affect just them. You don’t really have any way of knowing if any service you use or depend on has developers running LLMs in production. One day not too far off in the future, people who don’t even like or use LLMs will be bitten hard by those who do.
Particularly with the VSCode extension. I was a loyal Cline user until recently because of how good the editor experience was, but the ability for Claude to go off and run for 10+ minutes effectively autonomously, and show me the diffs in realtime is a gamechanger. The token usage has also gotten much more efficient in the last few months. With proper IDE support now I don't see any reason at all to use anything else, especially not the "credit" based middle-man providers (Windsurf/Cursor et. al).
Same here, I was convinced Cline+OpenRouter was the way to go. But with Claude code I’m getting better results and saving money, even compared to planning with Sonnet and transitioning to act mode with DeepSeek, I was still using more than $20/mo easily.
This article seems fun, and it's interesting, but I was waiting for the point and it never came.
The author didn't do anything actually useful or impactful, they played around with a toy and mimicked a portion of what it's like to spin up pet projects as a developer.
But hey, it could be that this says something after all. The first big public usages of AI were toys and vastly performed as a sideshow attraction for amused netizens. Maybe we haven't come very far at all, in comparison to the resources spent. It seems like all of the truly impressive and useful applications of this technology are still in specialized private sector work.
"Thanks for the article. I found it interesting, though the 'vibe coding' method isn't something I can apply in my own IT environment, mainly due to its complexity and technology stack.
The piece makes a strong case for why LLMs are so good at coding. It's clear they excel with the technologies and patterns most common in their training data—the same ones their own developers likely use. While their performance drops off with less familiar tech, it's undeniable that for certain types of tasks, they are very effective."
I love this article just for the spirit of fun and experimentation on display. Setting up a VPS where Claude is just asked to go nuts - to the point where you're building a little script to keep Claude humming away - is a really fun idea.
This sort of thing is a great demonstration of why I remain excited about AI in spite of all the hype and anti-hype. It's just fun to mess with these tools, to let them get friction out of your way. It's a revival of the feelings I had when I first started coding: "wow, I really can do anything if I can just figure out how."
Great article, thanks for sharing!
> “wow, I really can do _anything_ if I can just figure out how
Except this time it’s “if I can just figure out how and pay for the Claude API usage”.
This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.
Yes, they can still write code the manual way, but if the norm is to use AI I suspect that beginner’s guides, tutorials, etc. will become less common.
LLMs are quickly becoming cheaper. Soon they will be “cheap as free,” to quote Homestar Runner. Then programming will be solved, no need for meatbags. Enjoy the 2-5 years we have left in this profession.
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Yep, I used to spend a lot of time learning PHP on a web server which was part of my internet subscription. Without it being free, I would never have learn how to create websites and would have never got in programming, the trigger was that free web hosting with PHP that was part of the internet connection my parents were already paying for
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I agree that access is a problem now, but I think it is one that hardware improvements will solve very quickly. We are a few generations of Strix Halo type hardware away from effortlessly running very good LLMs locally. (It's already possible, but the hardware is about $2000 and the LLMs you can run are good but not very good.) AFAIK AMD have not released the roadmap for Medusa Halo, but the rumours [1] are increased CPU and GPU performance, and increased bandwidth. Another iteration or two of this will make Strix Halo hardware more affordable, and the top-of-the-line models will be beasts for local LLMs.
[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Powerful-Zen-6-Medusa-Halo-iGP...
yes indeed, who will pay? I run a lot through open models locally using LM Studio and Ollama, and it is nice to only be spending a tiny amount of extra money for electricity.
I am retired and not wanting to spend a ton of money getting locked long term into using an expensive tool like Claude Code is a real thing. It is also more fun to sample different services. Don’t laugh but I am paying Ollama $20/month just to run gpt-oss-120b very fast on their (probably leased) hardware with good web search tooling. Is it worth $20/month? Perhaps not but I enjoy it.
I also like cheap APIs: Gemini 2.5-flash, pro when needed, Kimi K2, open models on Groq, etc.
The AI, meaning LLM, infrastructure picture is very blurred because of so many companies running at a loss - which I think should be illegal because long term I think it is misleading consumers.
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They're not that expensive for anyone that has the tech skills to actually make good use out of them. I've been paying around with Claude Code, using API credits rather than the monthly fee. It costs about $5 per one-hour session. If you're going to be doing this professionally it's worth springing for the $100/month membership to avoid hitting credit limits, but if you just want to try it out, you can do so without breaking the bank.
A bigger question for me is "Does this actually increase my productivity?" The jury is still out on that - I've found that you really need to babysit the algorithm and apply your CS knowledge, and you also have to be very clear about what you're going to tell it later, don't let it make bad assumptions, and in many cases spell out the algorithm in detail. But it seems to be very good at looking up API details, writing the actual code, and debugging (if you guide it properly), all things that take a non-trivial amount of tedium in everyday programming.
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This is a pro for a lot of the people whom AI people are targeting: idiots with money.
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One can create a free Google account and use Gemini for free.
Or think it this way: It's easy to get base level free LLM (Toyota) but one should not expect free top of the shelf (Porsche).
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Maybe local models can address this, but for me the issue is that relying on LLMs for coding introduces gatekeepers.
> Uh oh. We're getting blocked again and I've heard Anthropic has a reputation for shutting down even paid accounts with very few or no warnings.
I'm in the slack community where the author shared their experiment with the autonomous startup and what stuck out to me is that they stopped the experiment out of fear of being suspended.
Something that is fun should not go hand-in-hand with fear of being cut off!
You made me realize exactly why I love skill-based video games, and shun the gacha games (especially those with PvP). You swiped to gain power over players who don't. Yay?
The knowledge check will also slowly transfer towards the borders of fast iteration and not necessarily knowledge depth. The end goal is to make a commodity out of the myth of the 10x dev, and take more leverage away from the devs.
Eh back in the day computers were expensive and not everyone could afford one (and I don't mean a library computer that you can work on, one you can code and hack on). The ubiquity of computing is not something that's been around forever.
There have always been costs and barriers for the cutting edge.
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For me, I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control. I enjoy the actual process of crafting code myself. For similar reasons, I could never be a manager.
Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I’ll probably just find a new career
I strongly disagree agents are for extroverts.
I do agree it’s definetly a tool category with a unique set of features and am not surprised it’s offputting to some. But it’s appeal is definetly clear to me as an introvert.
For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language.
I think I’m slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort.
Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff!
It’s a great time to be a software engineer!
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I bet your code sucks in quality and quantity compared to the senior+ engineer who uses the modern tools. My code certainly did even after 20 years of experience, much of that as senior/staff level at well paying companies.
> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
This sounds like a wild generalization.
I am in neither of those two groups, and I’ve been finding tools like Claude Code becoming increasingly more useful over time.
Made me much more optimistic about the direction of AI development in general too. Because with each iteration and new version it isn’t getting anywhere closer to replacing me or my colleagues, but it is becoming more and more useful and helpful to my workflow.
And I am not one of those people who are into “prompt engineering” or typing novels into the AI chatbox. My entire interaction is typically short 2-3 sentences “do this and that, make sure that XYZ is ABC”, attach the files that are relevant, let it do its thing, and then manual checks/adjustments. Saves me a boatload of work tbh, as I enjoy the debugging/fixing/“getting the nuanced details right” aspect of writing code (and am pretty decent at it, I think), but absolutely dread starting from a brand new empty file.
> I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control.
Try aider.chat (it's in the name), but specifically start with "ask" mode then dip a toe into "architect" mode, not "code" which is where Claude Code and the "vibe" nonsense is.
Let aider.chat use Opus 4.1 or GPT-5 for thinking, with no limit on reasoning tokens and --reasoning-effort high.
> agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
On the contrary, I think the non-vibe tools are force multipliers for those with an ability to communicate so precisely they find “extraverts and neurotypical people” confounding when attempting to specify engineering work.
I'd put both aider.chat and Claude Code in the non-vibe class if you use them Socratically.
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> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
Please stop with this kind of thing. It isn't true, it doesn't make sense and it doesn't help anyone.
For me (an introvert), I have found great value in these tools. Normally, I kind of talk to myself about a problem / algorithm / code segment as I'm fleshing it out. I'm not telling myself complete sentences, but there's some sort of logical dialog I am having with myself.
So I just have to convert that conversation into an AI prompt, basically. It just kind of does the typing for the construct already in my head. The trick is to just get the words out of my head as prompt input.
That's honestly not much different than an author writing a book, for example. The story line is in their head, they just have to get it on paper. And that's really the tricky part of writing a novel as much as writing code.
I therefore don't believe this is an introvert/extrovert thing. There are plenty of book authors which are both. The tools available as AI code agents are really just an advanced form of dictation.
> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
As an extrovert the chances I'll use an AI agent in the next year is zero. Not even a billion to one but a straight zero. I understand very well how AI works, and as such I have absolutely no trust in it for anything that isn't easy/simple/solved, which means I have virtually no use for generative AI. Search, reference, data transformation, sure. Coding? Not without verification or being able to understand the code.
I can't even trust Google Maps to give me a reliable route anymore, why would I actually believe some AI model can code? AI tools are helpers, not workers.
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For what it’s worth I’m neurodivergent, introverted and have avoided management up to the staff+level. Claude Code is great I use it all day every day now.
I kind of think we will see some industry attrition as a result of LLM coding and agent usage, simply because the ~vIbEs~ I'm witnessing boil down to quite a lot of resistance (for multiple reasons: stubbornness, ethics, exhaustion from the hype cycle, sticking with what you know, etc)
The thing is, they're just tools. You can choose to learn them, or not. They aren't going to make or break your career. People will do fine with and without them.
I do think it's worth learning new tools though, even if you're just a casual observer / conscientious objector -- the world is changing fast, for better or worse, and you'll be better prepared to do anything with a wider breadth of tech skill and experience than with less. And I'm not just talking about writing software for a living, you could go full Uncle Ted and be a farmer or a carpenter or a barista in the middle of nowhere, and you're going to be way better equipped to deal with logistical issues that WILL arise from the very nature of the planet hurtling towards 100% computerization. Inventory management, crop planning, point of sale, marketing, monitoring sensors on your brewery vats, whatever.
Another thought I had was that introverts often blame their deficits in sales, marketing and customer service on their introversion, but what if you could deploy an agent to either guide, perform, or prompt (the human) with some of those activities? I'd argue that it would be worth the time to kick the tires and see what's possible there.
It feels like early times still with some of these pie in the sky ideas, but just because it's not turn-key YET doesn't mean it won't be in the near future. Just food for thought!
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I think they're fantastic at generating the sort of thing I don't like writing out. For example, a dictionary mapping state names to their abbreviations, or extracting a data dictionary from a pdf so that I can include it with my documentation.
At one point in my life I liked crafting code. I took a break, came back, and I no longer liked it--my thoughts ranged further, and the fine-grained details of implementations were a nuisance rather than ~pleasurable to deal with.
Whatever you like is probably what you should be doing right now. Nothing wrong with that.
I think you misunderstand what this does. It is not only a coding agent. It is an abstraction layer between you and the computer.
>Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people.
I completely disagree. Juggling several agents (and hopping from feature-to-feature) at once, is perfect for somebody with ADHD. Being an agent wrangler is great for introverts instead of having to talk to actual people.
It is effin nutzo that you would try to relate chatting with AI and agentic LLM codegen workflows to the intra/extra vert dichotomy or to neuro a/typicality - you so casually lean way into this absolute spectrum that I don’t even think associates the way you think it does, and it’s honestly kind of unsettling, like - what do you think you know about me, and about My People, that apparently I don’t know??
If it doesn’t work for you that’s fine, but turning it into some tribalised over-generalization is just… why, why would you do that, who is that kind of thing useful for??
> Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people
As a neurodivergent introvert, please don't speak for the rest of us.
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Agents are boon for introverts who fucking hate dealing with other people (read: me). I can iterate rapidly with another 'entity' in a technical fashion and not have to spend hours explaining in relatable language what to do next.
I feel as if you need to work with these things more, as you would prefer to work, and see just how good they are.
You are leaving a lot of productivity on the table by not parallelizing agents for any of your work. Seemingly for psychological comfort quirks rather than earnestly seeking results.
Automation productivity doesn’t remove your own agency. It frees more time for you to apply your desire for control more discerningly.
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Pretty sure we can make LLM agents to transform declarative inputs to agentic action.
This is the kind of thing people should be doing with AI. Weird and interesting stuff that has a "Let's find out!" Attitude.
Often there's as much to be learned from why it doesn't work.
I see the AI hype to be limited to a few domains.
People choosing to spend lots of money on things speculatively hoping to get a slice of whatever is cooking, even if they don't really know if it's a pie or not.
Forward looking imagining of what would change if these things get massively better.
Hyperbolic media coverage of the above two.
There are companies taking about adding AI for no other reason than they feel like that's what they should be doing, I think that counts as a weak driver of hype, but only because cumulatively, lots of companies are doing it. If anything I would consider this an outcome of hype.
Of these the only one that really affects me is AI being shoehorned into places it shouldn't
The media coverage stokes fires for and against, but I think it only changes the tone of annoyance I have to endure. They would do the same on another topic in the absence of AI. It used to be crypto,
I'm ok with people spending money that is not mine on high risk, high potential reward. It's not for me to judge how they calculate the potential risk or potential reward. It's their opinion, let them have it.
The weird thing I find is the complaints about AI hype dominating. I have read so many pieces where the main thrust of their argument is about the dominance of fringe viewpoints that I very rarely encounter. Frequently they take the stance that anyone imagining how the world might change from any particular form of AI as a claim that that form is inevitable and usually imminent. I don't see people making those claims.
I see people talking about what they tried, what they can do, and what they can't do. Everything they can't do is then held up by others as if it were a trophy and proof of some catestrophic weakness.
Just try stuff, have fun, if that doesn't interest you, go do something else. Tell us about what you are doing. You don't need to tell us that you aren't doing this particular thing, and why. If you find something interesting tell us about that, maybe we will too.
On one hand, I agree with you that there is some fun in experimenting with silly stuff. On the other hand...
> Claude was trying to promote the startup on Hackernews without my sign off. [...] Then I posted its stuff to Hacker News and Reddit.
...I have the feeling that this kind of fun experiments is just setting up an automated firehose of shit to spray places where fellow humans congregate. And I have the feeling that it has stopped being fun a while ago for the fellow humans being sprayed.
This is an excellent point that will immediately go off-topic for this thread. We are, I believe, committed, into a mire of CG content enveloping the internet. I believe we will go through a period where internet communications (like HN, Reddit, and pages indexed by search engines) in unviable. Life will go on; we will just be offline more. Then, the defense systems will be up to snuff, and we will find a stable balance.
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I definitely understand the concern - I don't think I'd have hung out on HN for so long if LLM generated postings were common. I definitely recognize this is something you don't want to see happening at scale.
But I still can't help but grin at the thought that the bot knows that the thing to do when you've got a startup is to go put it on HN. It's almost... cute? If you give AI a VPS, of course it will eventually want to post its work on HN.
It's like when you catch your kid listening to Pink Floyd or something, and you have that little moment of triumph - "yes, he's learned something from me!"
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(author here) I did feel kinda bad about it as I've always been a 'good' HNer until that point but honestly it didn't feel that spammy to me compared to some human generated slop I see posted here, and as expected it wasn't high quality enough to get any attention so 99% of people would never have seen it.
I think the processes etc that HN have in place to deal with human-generated slop are more than adequate to deal with an influx of AI generated slop, and if something gets through then maybe it means it was good enough and it doesn't matter?
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I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way forward for online interaction is very strong identification on any place where you can post anything.
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See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860174 (posted 12 hours ago)
it's annoying but it'll be corrected by proper moderation on these forums
as an aside i've made it clear that just posting AI-written emoji slop PR review descriptions and letting claude code directly commit without self reviewing is unacceptable at work
The Internet is already 99% shit and always has been. This doesn't change anything.
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I mean I can spam HN right now with a script.
Forums like HN, reddit, etc will need to do a better job detecting this stuff, moderator staffing will need to be upped, AI resistant captchas need to be developed, etc.
Spam will always be here in some form, and its always an arms race. That doesnt really change anything. Its always been this way.
every vibe coded thing I've built is trash, but it's amazingly fun to do.
I've tried to explain it to other devs that it's like dumping out a 10000 piece jigsaw puzzle and trying to put it together again.
it's just fun.
> it’s just fun
For some definitions of fun… :)
Not sure if I'd want Claude doing whatever on a production vps/node, but I like the idea of a way to use Claude Code on the go/wherever you are. I'm going to setup KASM workspaces on my free OCI server and see how it works there.
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/kasm
Thanks for sharing this! I have been trying on and off to run RooCode on a VPS to use it on the go. I tried Code Server but it does not share "sessions". KASM seems interesting for this. Do share if you write a blog post on setting it up
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Maintaining scheduled playing with what's changed/new/different is mandatory with the tools one already uses, let alone any new ones.
All this AI coding stuff is scaring the shit out of me. a few months ago my team were hiring for a new engineer. of the 9 candidates we ran technical interviews with, only two could work without the ai. The rest literally just vibe coded their way though the app. as soon as it was taken away, they couldn't even write a basic sql query in ecto (we're a phoenix app). when questioned about tradeoffs inherent in the ai generated implementation, all but one was completely in the dark.
> couldn't even write a basic sql query
Not the point at all, but I have found it quite common among younger professional engineers to not know SQL at all. A combination of specialization (e.g. only work on microservices that do not directly touch a database) and NoSQL has made the skill of SQL more obscure than I would have thought possible as recently as 5 years ago.
I'm nearly guilty of this. I've been in industry for a bit over 10 years and I can barely write SQL. That's despite writing a bunch of queries by hand in my undergrad databases course. I almost never deal with databases myself outside of some ad-hoc queries.
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I've been a full stack engineer for 10 years and I know SQL syntax but a few years ago I was asked at an interview "make a relation between users and posts" and I went "rails generate user" or something, and he's like, "not that," so I was like "OK I'll add it to a prisma file" and he's like "not that, write the SQL. I dunno what to do because this has never happened before."
Needless to say, I did not get the job, but several years later I still don't know how to answer his question.
I've worked with NOSQL (Mongo/Mongoose, Firebase) and I've worked with ORMs (Prisma, drizzle, Hasura), and I've been able to implement any feature asked of me, across several companies and projects. Maybe there's a subset of people who really do need to know this for some really low level stuff, but I feel like your average startup would not.
I think maybe it's similar to "can you reverse a linked list" question in that maybe you won't need the answer to that particular question on the job, but knowing the answer will help you solve adjacent problems. But even so, I don't think it's a good qualifier for good vs bad coders.
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I started to notice this in a big way at my last job which I started in 2013. We were a rails shop and by about 2016 I was noticing most new hires would have no idea how to write a SQL query.
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I see this too, also for engineers that have only interacted with relational dbs via ORMs & query builders
That's so weird to me, SQL is the very first language they taught me in college 20 years ago, before even learning how to write a for loop in pseudo code. Nowadays it's still the language I use the most on a daily basis.
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I dont think they teach SQL or relational algebra any more, or at least its easy to get an IT degree and avoid it altogether.
You should at least know how to query your data warehouse environment to debug your services / find out if they're working!
I’ve worked for years in the past on huge complex sql. I wouldn’t have been able to remember exactly what that looks like in sql without a quick search. Your interview questions are bad if they require wrote learned syntax. Great programmers exist who barely bother to remember anything they can’t just look up.
Same. One candidate out of 6.
I use claude code quite liberally, but I very often tell it why I won't accept it's changes and why; sometimes I just do it myself if it doesn't "get it".
We have also seen this about a year ago when hiring. But only a couple of them made it to the live interview and then it was evident. Most of them were quickly filtered out based on the coding submissions. We are soon about to hire again, with the uptick in LLM usage and newer more up to date models, I'm not looking forward too much having to deal with all of this.
AI can also help you learn new things much faster. It’s just a tool.
I'd say "Learn the wrong things much faster". But I'd actually argue that learning isn't a fast process, it's rather a very slow journey, takes time and dedication to master deep knowledge. You won't learn anything that will stay with llms, if they got the output correct
This was my experience prior to any of the llm tools. It’s hard to find people with all around knowledge. Plus someone good in one context is awful in another. Your hiring process should find people who are a good fit and not look for people with just certain technical skills. The basics of SQL can be learned quickly. Fit cannot be learned.
Well said. Some of the best engineers I know looked up syntax whenever they needed it because there’s not much point in wrote learning everything. As long as they understand what they’re doing, that’s the main point.
I’m honestly so sick of interviews filled with gotcha questions that if you’d happened to study the right thing you could outperform a great experienced engineer who hadn’t brushed up on a couple of specific googlable things before the interview. It’s such a bad practice.
Now take Google away, and LSP. And the computer. Write CTEs with a pencil or bust.
I'm exaggerating of ourse, and I hear what you're saying, but I'd rather hire someone who is really really good at squeezing the most out of current day AI (read: not vibe coding slop) than someone who can do the work manually without assistance or fizz buzz on a whiteboard.
I think the point is how can you squeeze anything out of the AI without knowing the stuff at a deep enough level?
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For your examples, honestly yeah. A dev should familiar with the basic concepts of their language and tech stack. So yes, they should be able to understand a basic snippet of code without Google, an LSP, or even a computer. They should even be able to "write CTEs with a pencil and paper". I don't expect them to get the syntax perfect, but they should just know the basic tools and concepts enough to have something at least semantically correct. And they certainly should be able to understand the code produced by an AI tool for a take home toy project.
I say this as someone who would definitely be far less productive without Google, LSP, or Claude Code.
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> I'd rather hire someone [...] than someone who can do the work manually without assistance or fizz buzz on a whiteboard
and the reason for you to do that would be to punish the remaining bits of competence in the name of "the current thing"? What's your strategy?
Used to write Perl scripts with pencil while waiting at the airport.
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How does privacy work with Claude Code in the real world? Its arbitrarily sending files from current folder/subfolders to anthropics cloud, right? Does Claude have a good privacy policy? E.g. do they promise not to retain what gets sent?
Because I think 'sending everything to the ai' would be a bit of an obstacle for most company environments
Almost every company on the planet sends ALL their data to the cloud.
They even PAY for this privilege.
You run a coding agent with no permissions checks on a production server anywhere I'm involved in security and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.
Really, any coding agent our shop didn't write itself, though in those cases the smiting might be less theatrical than if you literally ran a yolo-mode agent on a prod server.
Author kindly asked you to stop reading:
> 1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine. If you're from infosec, you might want to stop reading now—the rest of this article isn't going to make you any happier. Keep your medication close at hand if you decide to continue).
Gotta exaggerate a bit to get attention :D
But I think I'm getting to the point where "If I'd let an intern/junior dev have access while I'm watching then I'm probably OK with Claude having it too"
The thing that annoys me about a lot of infosec people is that they have all of these opinions about bad practice that are removed from the actual 'what's the worst that could happen here' impact/risk factor.
I'm not running lfg on a control tower that's landing boeing 737s, but for a simple non-critical CRUD app? Probably the tradeoff is worth it.
Why in the world would you advocate explicitly for letting it run on production servers, rather than teaching it how to test in a development or staging environment like you would with a junior engineer?
We allow juniors in risky areas because that’s how they will learn. Not the case for current AIs.
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My workflow is somewhat similar to yours. I also much love --dangerously-skip-permissions, as root! I even like to do it from multiple Claude Code instances in parallel when I have parallel ideas that can be worked out.
Maybe my wrapper project is interesting for you? https://github.com/release-engineers/agent-sandbox It's to keep Claude Code containerized with a copy of the workspace and a firewall/proxy so it can only access certain sites. With my workflow I don't really risk much, and the "output" is a .patch file I can inspect before I git apply it.
Author (who also replied to you) might have been "doing it wrong" but no wonder, Anthropic only made Claude Code smarter about this 5 days ago and there's too much to keep up with:
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-security-review
The new command is something like /security-review and should be in the loop before any PR or commit especially for this type of web-facing app, which Claude Code makes easy.
This prompt will make Claude's code generally beat not just intern code, but probably most devs' code, for security mindedness:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anthropics/claude-code-sec...
The false positives judge shown here is particularly well done.
// Beyond that, run tools such as Kusari or Snyk. It's unlikely most shops have security engineers as qualified as these focused tools are becoming.
I've often gotten the sense that fly.io is not completely averse to some degree of "cowboying," meaning you should probably take heed to this particular advice coming from them..
I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about but nobody is running Claude Code on our server fleet here.
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> export IS_SANDBOX=1 && claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
FYI, this can be shortened to:
You don't need the export in this case, nor does it need to be two separate commands joined by &&. (It's semantically different in that the variable is set only for the single `claude` invocation, not any commands which follow. That's often what you want though.)
> I asked Claude to rename all the files and I could go do something else while it churned away, reading the files and figuring out the correct names.
It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks manually and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it doing something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to write a program to do the thing I want. e.g. I needed to change the shape of about 100 JSON files the other day and it wanted to go through them one-by-one. I stopped it after the third file, told it to write a script to import the old shape and write out the new shape, and 30 seconds later it was done. I also had it write me a script to... rename my stupidly named bank statements. :-)
This. I had a 10000 line css file, and told it to do a find and replace on some colours. It was hilariously bad at this and started chewing tokens. Asking it to write a script to swap it out and then execute that script for me and it was done instantly. Knowing the right questions to ask an AI is everything.
> It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks manually and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it doing something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to write a program to do the thing I want.
This is so funny. Thank you for sharing :)
Does it even work with the &&? Iirc, I've never had luck putting env vars before the && and always had to do it the way you describe
It works because they exported it. VAR=foo bar only sets it for the env passed to that exec or subshell, export VAR=foo && bar adds it to the current env then executes bar.
export VAR=foo && bar is dangerous because it stays set.
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make it work more generally via `env`
not all shells support FOO=bar prefixes, in particular fish does not, but the above works everywhere
This might have been the case for fish shell; but not anymore, it works in current version. I myself have used the popular syntax without specifying `env` in my aliases.
Can shorten further to rm -rf /
Being on day 4 of being ignored entirely by CSRs from Anthropic after 5 months of paying for Max x20 has put a sufficiently bad taste in my mouth that it has killed all of my previous Claude Code cheer-leading efforts.
Sure, go have fun with the new software -- but for godsake don't actually depend on a company that can't bother to reply to you. Even Amazon replies.
For me it was the constant overloads. Paying 200 USD a month only to open Claude Code and half the time it would get stuck at the initial prompt. Sometimes with an overload error, sometimes just stuck forever. Maybe they improved it now, but it has motivated me to switch to Cursor Agent (also TUI based like CC) with GPT-5 to see if it was a viable alternative to Claude Code and so far it is working even a bit better for my use-cases.
I had a problem with signing up for max with the wrong email, then thinking I didn’t actually do it, so I signed up with the one I wanted.
Saw the double bill and contacted them, I had a full refund in a couple days and a nice personal note thanking me for being a max user.
This was a couple months ago so it’s possible they’ve had a huge influx of requests that made it difficult to respond fast lately but I had a good experience with their customer service.
Isn't a large part of AWS's reputation based around providing surprisingly good customer support?
My experience has generally been positive, even as a small customer spending in the low thousands per month. I've definitely had help that wasn't particularly effective or adept. Lots of gradual escalations which are fairly time consuming. But they've certainly made sure I had assistance, and it was fairly prompt.
Curious, what is the issue you're running into that you want them to resolve?
This article feels like it was written as a dialectical exercise between an AI and a human. It would probably benefit from some more heavy human editing to make it more succinct and to give the overall article a structure. As it is, it's very difficult to follow along.
I’ve seen a lot of articles like this on the HN page recently… stuff that has one or two interesting tidbits, but is clearly just a conversation someone had with an AI and dumped into an article. Don’t make me wade through all the AI word barf to get the interesting points, that’s what old fashioned editing is for.
very
The title is a bit exaggerated. The depth of the projects covered in the article is clearly not representative of "all".
In fact, I now prefer to use a purely chat window to plan the overall direction and let LLM provide a few different architectural ideas, rather than asking LLM to write a lot of code whose detail I have no idea about.
It's a play on the name of the paper that jump-started ChatGPT: "Attention Is All You Need:" https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
That's my gist. All of these seem pretty basic apps I would see implemented to demo a new web or REST framework. Comment ranker is cool, but I can't imagine its doing much more than scrape text > call semantic api > modify DOM.
How much of this is buildings versus recalling tutorials in the dataset. For every vibe coded project with 20 lines of requirements, I have a model with 20 different fields all with unique semantic meanings. In focused areas, AI has been okay. But I have yet to see Claude or any model build and scale a code base with the same mindset.
I like using Claude-Code, it can be a real timesaver in certain cases.
But it's far from perfect. Really difficult things/big projects are nearly impossible. Even if you break it down into hundred small tasks.
I've tried to make it port an existing, big codebase from one language to another. So it has all of the original codebase in one folder, and a new project in another folder. No matter how much guidance you give it, or how clear you make your todos, it will not work.
What specifically are its modes of failure? I've never tried doing that, do very curious what the roadblocks are.
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Most harnesses provide this as a "plan" vs. "act" mode now. You first "chat" in plan mode (no access to tools, no instructions to write any code basically), you then can optionally write those plans in a memorybank / plan.md, and then say "now go implement it", and it moves to the "act" mode where it goes through and does it, updating progress in plan.md as it goes.
the thing is, it's not working as the default mode, which is not ideal imho
I've found it very useful to have items like requirements.md, plans.md, or todo.md, in my LLM focused projects. I'll use AI to help take the ideas I have at that stage and refine them into something more appropriate for ingestion into the next stage. So, when I want it to come up with the plans, it is going to base is mostly on requirements.md, and then I'll have it act on the plans step by step after that.
"ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad? I understand that more than anything engineers believe having to spend money on design is a total waste, but none of this is pleasing or balanced at all
Just from personal experience, visual design is the task with the worst outcomes for Claude Code (w/ latest Opus 4.1, etc).
It truly cannot reason well yet about geometry, visual aesthetics, placement, etc. The performance varies: it's quite good at matplotlib but terrible at any non-trivial LaTeX / TikZ layout or graphic. Why? Not a clear idea yet -- would love to think more about it.
I've tried many things now to try and give it eyes (via text), and this is unavoidably a place where things are ... rough ... right now.
I've had bad results with image screenshotting. More often than not, it has no idea what it is looking at -- won't even summarize the image correctly -- or will give me an incorrect take "Yes indeed we fixed the problem as you can tell by <this part of the UI> and <that part of the UI>" which is wrong.
I typically have to come in and make a bunch of fine-grained changes to get something visually appealing. I'm sure at some point we'll have a system which can go all the way, and I'd be excited to find approaches to this problem.
Note -- tasks which involve visual design which I've run into diminishing returns: * proper academic figures (had a good laugh at the GPT 5 announcement issues) * video game UI / assets * UI design for IDEs * Responsive web design for chat-based interfaces
All of these feel like "pelican" tasks -- they enter into a valley which can't be effectively communicated via textual feedback yet ...
Just reflecting on my own comment -- what one might want is an automated layout system with a simple "natural language"-like API (perhaps similar to Penrose, although it's been awhile since I looked at that project).
Hardened and long use systems like TikZ of course, do have something like this -- but in complex TikZ graphics, you end up with a mixture of "right of" and "left of" (etc) and low-level manual specification, which I think tends to fall into the zone of issues.
> "ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad?
I agree that it's bad. What I noticed using AI was that it tends to introduce gradients whenever you want to make something look nice. Whenever I see a gradient now I immediately assume that it was designed with AI
Compared to what it’d look like if I’d styled it myself, it’s great lol
It's really bad if you value design as a primary part of your business language. If not then it's fine.
For example, AI could produce Graphanas design standards, which is fine for the audience.
Feels like the word "all" is pulling a lot of weight in that sentence, it's not cheap and you're forever reliant on a company to keep providing the service (which has already changed recently I think, seem to remember something about harsher rate limiting being put in place). "All you need" typically implies that you don't need much (eg "The terminal is all you need"), and Claude Code isn't that.
Otherwise good article, I'm still not sure vibe coding is for me and at the price, it's hard to justify trying to out, but things like this do make me a little more tempted to give it a shot. I doubt it'd ever replace writing code by hand for me, but could be fun for prototyping I suppose
This is a fun project to be sure. I just wish the author would not refer to the experiment as an "autonomous startup builder" unless they mean it humorously. Having poked around the GitHub repo and read through the materials, it seems like more of an AI coding assistant running in a loop that built and deployed a broken web application with no users, no business model, and no understanding of what problem it was trying to solve. There were quasi-autonomous processes and there were things that were built, but nothing I'd call a startup.
Waiting for the follow up article "Claude Code considered harmful"
The follow up: Why I decided to go back to handcoding assembly language after using Claude code.
Separation of concerns..why AI and non-AI dependent code should never be mixed.
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"x considered harmful" was my favorite coding meme before "x is all you need"
I read the section "Hitting a snag: the model builders are also the police now".
It absolutely boggles my mind how anybody thinks that this is Ok?
Unless you are in North Korea, of course.
As I understood it, the AI company is trying to prevent itself and its customers from engaging in (probably unintentional, but any) criminal activity.
When the AI company is "policing" your agent by requiring a "human in the loop", it's just CYA (cover your ass) for the AI company.
If your agent goes off and does something illegal, the AI company would be liable unless they have some legal deniability. By requiring you the human account owner to sign-off on what your agent is doing, you become liable for any crimes your agent commits on your behalf. I haven't read their TOS but I can guarantee there is some clause like this in there.
You are still completely free to commit crimes with your agent and suffer whatever legal consequences follow!! You just have to be clear that you intentionally wanted those actions to occur which resulted in the crime. If you repeatedly allow your agents to take actions that could potentially be criminal without any human-in-the-loop, they're going to ban you because it exposes themselves to potential criminal charges.
I've asked copilot (Claude Sonnet 4) to edit some specific parts of a project. It removed the lines that specifically have comments that say "do not remove" with long explanation why. Then it went ahead and modified the unit tests to ensure 100% coverage.
Using coding agent is great btw, but at least learn how to double check their work cuz they are also quite terrible.
Claude loves to delete comments. I setup specific instructions telling it not to, and yet it regularly tries to delete comments that often have nothing to do with the code we're working on.
It's so hit and miss in Rust too. When I ask it for help with a bug it usually tries a few things then tries to just delete or comment out the buggy code. Another thing it does is to replace the buggy code with a manual return statement with a comment saying "Returning a manual response for now". It'll then do a cargo build, proclaim that there are no errors and call it a day. If you don't check what it's doing it would appear it has fixed the bug.
When I give it very specific instructions for implementation it regularly adds static code with comments like "this is where the functionality for X will be implemented. We'll use X for now". It does a cargo build then announces all of its achievements with a bunch of emojis despite having not implemented any of the logic that I asked it to.
This is the tricky part. The whole point of agents is, well, do things so that we don't have to. But if you need to check everything they do, you might as well copy and paste from a chat interface...
Which makes me feel early adopters pay with their time. I'm pretty sure the agents will be much better with time, but this time is not exactly now, with endless dances around their existing limitations. Claude Code is fun to experiment with but to use it in production I'd give it another couple of years (assuming they will focus on code stability ans reducing its natural optimism as it happily reports "Phase 2.1.1 has been successfully with some minor errors with API tests failing only 54.3% of the time").
Is Claude Code better than the Gemini CLI? I've been using the Gemini CLI with Gemini 2.5 Pro and haven't been impressed. Maybe these LLMs aren't as good with Rust codebases? I'm guessing there are a lot more people looking to use these tools with JS and Python.
Gemini CLI is terrible. I've had it:
- Repeat more than 20 times the same response to my prompt rejecting its proposed changes; I just kept prompting to see how far it would go before doing something different. Claude Code would quickly guess there is something wrong and try something else or ask what I'm getting at
- Continually refer to outdated versions of files, even after I've told to re-read the files
- Refer to files in a different session on a different machine that have no relevance to what I'm currently doing, presumably simply because I logged in with the same account.
- Randomly crash or enter infinite loops, sometimes soon after starting
- Refuse to read files in a sibling or parent folder
- Fail to understand simple request.
- Propose empty changes
Claude Code is just far better. I only use Gemini CLI for the simplest of tasks
You can make Gemini CLI much better by making it behave more like Claude Code. Claude Code has some lovely prompt engineering at the system and subsystem level that can be replicated with Gemini CLI. I’m having great results already. I am still perfecting process and prompts to be a fully agentic system that can do well on benchmarks but more importantly do the right work with steerability, which was an absolute pain with Gemini CLI out-of-the-box. If you are interested, I can publish some of the basics now and then I can keep you posted as I develop it into a more robust system. Just email me at randycarlton@gmail.com with the subject: SaaS.bot (where this work will likely reside).
I've been using both on a Rust codebase and have found both work fairly well. Claude code is definitely more capable than Gemini. What difficulties have you had?
The biggest pain point I've had is that both tools will try to guess the API of a crate instead of referencing the documentation. I've tried adding an MCP for this but have had mixed results.
https://github.com/d6e/cratedocs-mcp
It might be that we have multiple features in our codebase and Gemini seems to struggle understanding that it needs to be aware of #[cfg(feature = "x")] and also that if it's trying to run things, it might need to specify the feature.
And yes, when they guess APIs, it's highly annoying.
i've tried codex, cursor, and a few other agentic tools and nothing compares to claude code when it comes to UX. The other service's models are quickly catching up to claude, but the claude code ux is just magical to me. i havent used it with rust personally. like you suggested would be the average user, i've mostly stuck with js and python.
I don't know if it's Gemini CLI or Gemini 2.5 Pro, but the combination is not even comparable to Claude Code with Sonnet. I was starting with these agent tools several weeks ago, so it was very tempting to use Gemini, instead of paying for Claude Pro, but the difference is huge. In my experience, Gemini was very quick to get stuck in debugging loop, fixing something "one last time" over and over again. Or it got into writing code, despite my explicitly saying not to do so. I'm still trying to figure out if I could use Gemini for something, but every time I try it, I regret it. Claude Code with GLM-4.5 is a good alternative to paying for Claude Pro, it's not as good as Sonnet, but close.
I guess what seems surprising to me is that Gemini 2.5 Pro scores well above Claude Sonnet on Aider's leaderboard, even beating Claude Opus 4.
I have been kinda wondering if there's something that just isn't as good between the CLI and model because the Gemini CLI has been a mostly frustrating experience - and it's kept me from wanting to pay for Claude because I don't want to pay money for the same frustrating experience. But maybe I should try Claude and see.
https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
I was once a heavy user of Cursor with Gemini 2.5 Pro as a model, then a Claude Code convert. Occasionally I try out Gemini CLI and somehow it fails to impress, even as Cursor + Gemini still works well. I think it's something about the limited feature set and system prompt.
I have found Claude code to be significantly better, both in how good the model ends up being and in how polished it is. To the point that I do not drop down to Gemini CLI when I reach my Claude usage limit.
It is much better but only because Sonnet 4 is better at handling more complexity and being very code at writing code.
Claude Code is insanely good with Rust.
I feel like Claude code is great but how is it so much different from the agent of GitHub copilot? They both can use the same model (Claude 4) and the agent behaves very similar. For 10 bucks I think GitHub copilot is very reasonably priced as well. But ofc usage limits are maybe where they differ a lot. Am I missing out?
I only know the old Github Copilot (like 2yrs+ ago) so cannot speak to it directly, but even the Cursor Agent (with Sonnet 4 or GPT-5) is IMO inferior to Claude Code (CC). In my experience, it is faster and better performing. CC seems to spend tokens more deliberately + gives superior coding tools to the model than other provider.
Recently my CC subscription ran out, tried 3 prompts with Cursor Agent and then went back to subscribing CC. I still use Cursor though for autocompletion.
Yeah the old one was much worse. They have really stepped up their game recently. Thats why I am wondering how large the gap still is. I only ever see people compare cursor and Claude code. Never GitHub copilot. So I assume there is either a blind spot or it's much worse
I haven't tried Claude Code yet, but I extensively use Cursor and find it can do similar work (which makes sense). I think it's good you led with the length prompt/spec, which will maybe help the "AI can't do ____" crowd grasp that it really is a skill issue when they can't get any good results from LLMs. (Unfortunately it cannot help the "well, this isn't actually useful or making an impact" group)
Regarding some of the comments here: I found the article style fine, and I even like the "follow my journey" style writing as it helps the reader understand the process you went though. That kind of engineering and debugging workflow is something I enjoy about this industry.
> help the "AI can't do ____" crowd grasp that it really is a skill issue when they can't get any good results from LLMs.
I think the issue with this conversation is that no one tells you what they are working on, and I suspect there is both a skill gap in usage, but also a lack of capability in the LLMs, both surfacing as the same outcome.
There is definitely stuff an LLM cannot do on its own, at which point is the LLM really achieving the outcome or is it the human just achieving it by backseat driving. Much like a senior telling the junior how to solve a tricky bug, you wouldn't say the junior came up with the solution and therefore you would not say the junior is capable of solving the bug.
> I had some issues getting it to understand that it wasn't meant to terminate, so I instead told it to write a basic bash script that calls claude with the -p flag and "please continue" whenever it detects its not running.
This is why we can't have nice things. Anthropic is placing more restrictive limits and now you risk being locked out for hours if you need to use it a bit more than usual (e.g. you have an impending deadline or presentation).
I wish Anthropic just banned these abusive accounts instead of placing draconian (and fuzzy) limits. The other day there was an idiot YouTube streamer actively looking to hit limits with as many concurrent Claude Code sessions as he could, doing nonsense projects.
I believe these are fundamentally two different types of abuse — the OP is engaging in a significantly less harmful version … the seriously harmful version is the account sharing / massively concurrent one which abuses whatever holes exist in the streaming API to allow Claude to “complete the completion and then stop because of limit” (which I think is there to make the UX better)
Just letting a single instance run all the time … is not that bad, seriously.
Too bad Claude Code doesn't have a fixed cost plan for teams. The API is super expensive (I can easily spend $6-10 in a single sitting in tokens)
How does Claude Code compare to just using a Sonnet/Opus model with Cline? Imagine the results have to be fairly similar?
I don't even need Claude Code.
I'd personally rather use gpt-5. The sub price is cheap and offers more overall value than an Anthropic sub or paying per token. The chatgpt app on iPhone and Mac are native and nicer than Anthropic's and offer more features. Codex is close enough to Claude Code and also now native. For me it's nicer to use the "same" model across each use case like text, images, code etc. this way I better understand the limitations and quirks of the model rather than the constant context switching to different models to get maybe slightly better perf. To each their own though depending on your personal use case.
The problem is GPT-5 is not in the same league as even Claude 3.5. But I do hope their lower pricing puts some downward pressure on Anthropic's next release.
I don’t believe this is true but I’m willing to be proven wrong. I believe people who think this are just used to Claude’s models and therefore understand the capabilities and limitations due to their experience using them.
I wish the app supported mcp. Is this “not invented here”?
I dont know about yall, but personally I love to see an AI running with "--dangerously-skip-permissions" in an infinite loop. Every day we get closer to the cyberpunk future we deserve.
with public access to the internet, apparently!
I'm surprised it didn't get to the point of blackmailing the author to give it more resources and keep itself running.
Claude Code has very reliable tool calls, that's why I'm using it.
Tried Cursor, Windsurf and always ran into tool failures, edit failures etc.
Fuck claude! They DDoS'ed my infra until I completely banned them!
$100 a month for a South African is not a trivial amount. Definitely putting his money where his mouth is.
Is Claude Code really that good? I'm currently using Cursor and I let it pick the LLM model to use.
When it comes to diffs (edits), Cursor is batch-oriented, while CC suggests one edit at a time and can be steered in real time.
That's a critical feature for keeping a human in the loop, preventing big detours and token waste.
How do you stay in the loop with CC? I find myself using it for the exact opposite use case: large features or greenfield projects where I can just let it rip autonomously for a while. I find the TUI awkward for reviewing code.
I think if you use Cursor, using Claude Code is a huge upgrade. The problem is that Cursor was a huge upgrade from the IDE, so we are still getting used to it.
The company I work for builds a similar tool - NonBioS.ai. It is in someways similar to what the author does above - but packaged as a service. So the nonbios agent has a root VM and can write/build all the software you want. You access/control it through a web chat interface - we take care of all the orchestration behind the scene.
Its also in free Beta right now, and signup takes a minute if you want to give it a shot. You can actually find out quickly if the Claude code/nonbios experience is better than Cursor.
I think the path forward there is slack/teams/discord/etc integration of agents, so you can monitor and control whatever agent software you like via a chat interface just like you would interact with any other teammate.
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I'm a long-time GitHub Copilot subscriber, but I have also tested many alternatives, such as Cursor.
Recently, I tried using Claude Code with my GitHub Copilot subscription (via unofficial support through https://github.com/ericc-ch/copilot-api), and I found it to be quite good. However, in my opinion, the main difference comes down to your preferred workflow. As someone who works with Neovim, I find that a tool that works in the terminal is more appropriate for me.
Isn’t that usage a violation of ToS? In that repo there’s even an issue thread that mentions this. The way I rely on GitHub these days, losing my account would be far more than annoying.
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Most of these are Anthropic models under the hood, so I think 'whatever fits your workflow best' is the main deciding factor. That's definitely Claude Code for me, and I do think there's some 'secret sauce' in the exact prompting and looping logic they use, but I haven't tried Cursor a lot to be sure.
any secret sauce in prompting etc could be trivially reverse engineered by the companies building the other agents, since they could easily capture all the prompts it sends to the LLM. If there’s any edge, it’s probably more around them fine-tuning the model itself on Claude Code tasks.
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Claude code seems like the obvious choice for someone using Vim but even in the context of someone using a graphical IDE like VSCode I keep hearing that Claude is “better” but I just can’t fathom how that can be the case.
Even if the prompting and looping logic is better, the direct integration with the graphical system along with the integrated terminal is a huge benefit, and with graphical IDEs the setup and learning curve is minimal.
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Letting Cursor pick the model for you is inviting them to pick the cheapest model for them, at the cost of your experience. It's better to develop your own sense of what model works in a given situation. Personally, I've had the most success with Claude, Gemini Pro, and o3 in Cursor.
there is no reason to pay for cursor when claude is definitely the best coding model and you are paying essentially for just a bigger middle man.
Claude is the best agent model. Its one shot performance and large codebase comprehension both lag Gemini/GPT though.
I feel like as tool Claude code is superior to "regular code editor with ai plugin". This method of having the ai do your tasks feels like the future.
If Cursor works for you, then stick with it. Claude Code is great for terminal-based workflows. Whatever makes you more productive is the better tool.
I’m just glad we’re getting past the insufferable “use Cursor or get left behind” attitude that was taking off a year ago.
I use Cursor with Claude Code running in the integrated terminal (within a dev container in yolo mode). I'll often have multiple split terminals with different Claude Code instances running on their own worktrees. I keep Cursor around because I love the code completions.
Why isn't anyone talking about the HackerNews Comment Ranker plugin? [1] That's amazing. I had this idea too -- to rank HN comments by their relevance to the actual article, and filter out comments that obviously didn't read it.
Repo: https://github.com/sixhobbits/hn-comment-ranker
I need to modify this to work with local models, though. But this does illustrate the article's point -- we both had an idea, but only one person actually went ahead and did it, because they're more familiar with agentic coding than me.
[1] Oh. I think I understand why. /lh
The screenshot was a really great example how bad that can end up in practice. One comment asking "What's the catch?" which is a good follow-up question to further conversation was ranked a 1/5.
Probably just needs a slight update to expand the relevant context of child comments. I bet it's still comparing "What's the catch?" to the OP article.
> Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine.
Wow, the danger is not so much from Claude Code itself, but that it might download a package that will do nasty things on your machine when executed.
>1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine.
I thought the article was a satire after I read this ... but it wasn't!
> I hit a small snag where Anthropic decides that running Claude as root with --dangerously-skip-permissions / yolo-mode is not allowed. You can get past this dumb nanny-state stuff by running [fun dangerous command that lets you run as root]
Still not convinced it is not satire.
I run with the dangerous option on my work computer. At first I was thinking I would be good if I just regularly kept full disk backups. But my company at least pays lip service to the fact that we want to protect our intellectual property. Plus I think it might be irresponsible to allow an AI model full internet access unsupervised.
So now I use a docker compose setup where I install Claude and run it in a container. I map source code volumes into the container. It uses a different container with dnsmasq with an allowlist.
I initially wanted to do HTTP proxying instead of DNS filtering since it would be more secure, but it was quite hard to set it up satisfactorily.
Running CLI programs with the dangerous full permissions is a lot more comfortable and fast, so I'm quite satisfied.
Haha, well at least they warned you!
> If you're from infosec, you might want to stop reading now — the rest of this article isn't going to make you any happier. Keep your medication close at hand if you decide to continue...
You're just making a case for why developers cannot be trusted with sensitive information, and why cyber depts lock the machine down so extensively.
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Obviously you wouldn't want to do this to any revenue generating code, but when just mucking around on prototypes this seems fine.
I just came for the comments for this... I am not sure at what point we are. Think AI and Crypto are a match in hell, especially given that a lot of Crypto projects are made by bros who have no interest in tech. estimate we'll be seeing projects/companies that get hacked as soon as they launch by Claude itself.
Has anyone run with `dangerously skip permissions` and had something catastrophic happen?
Are there internal guardrails within Claude Code to prevent such incidents?
rm -rf, drop database, etc?
I don't know about Claude Code, but here's my story. With Replit, I have a bunch of tasks that I want Replit to do at the end of a coding session -- push to Github, update user visible Changelogs, etc. It's a list in my replit.md file.
A couple of weeks ago I asked it to "clean up" instead of the word I usually use and it ended up deleting both my production and dev databases (a little bit my fault too -- I thought it deleted the dev database so I asked it to copy over from production, but it had deleted the production database and so it then copied production back to dev, leaving me with no data in either; I was also able to reconstruct my content from a ETL export I had handy).
This was after the replit production db database wipe-out story that had gone viral (which was different, that dev was pushing things on purpose). I have no doubt it's pretty easy to do something similar in Claude Code, especially as Replit uses Claude models.
Anyway, I'm still working on things in Replit and having a very good time. I have a bunch of personal purpose-built utilities that have changed my daily tech life in significant ways. What vibe coding does allow me to do is grind on "n" of unrelated projects in mini-sprints. There is personal, intellectual, and project cost to this context switching, but I'm exploring some projects I've had on my lists for a long time, and I'm also building my base replit.md requirements to match my own project tendencies.
I vibe coded a couple of things that I think could be interesting to a broader userbase, but I've stepped back and re-implemented some of the back-end things to a more specific, higher-end vibe coded environment standard. I've also re-started a few projects from scratch with my evolved replit.md... I built an alpha, saw some issues, upgraded my instructions, built it again as a beta, saw some issues... working on a beta+ version.
I'm finding the process to be valuable. I think this will be something I commit to commercially, but I'm also willing to be patient to see what each of the next few months brings in terms of upgraded maturity and improved devops.
Claude Code has minimal internal guardrails against destructive operations when using --dangerously-skip-permissions, which is why it's a major security risk for production environments regardless of how convenient it seems.
An over eager helm update lead to some "uh oh, I hope the volume is still there" and it was. Otherwise no, haven't had anything bad happen. Of course, it's just a matter of time, and with the most recent version it's easy to toggle permissions back on without having to restart Claude Code, so for spicy tasks I tend to disable YOLO mode.
It commits sometimes when I'm not ready, that's about it.
I run it locally all the time. Nothing catastrophic happened so far.
If Anthropic is smart they would open it up to other models now to make it default for everyone. Otherwise you are banking on Sonnet remaining the best coding model.
The entire point of CC is to drive anthropic subscriptions and it's working. even with the release of the long-awaited gpt5 the anthropic models are still the best coding models.
There are plenty of alternatives for other models like opencode et al, and you can always just set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL with claude code to have it use another provider. I don't see why they need to do anything in addition to that.
My only request would be for claude code to be a bit more open, less obfuscated and to accept PRs - but I understand the unwillingness of also wanting to manage what would be a very popular open source project.
There's also opencode which is a fork(?) of Claude Code that runs on any model: https://github.com/sst/opencode
And of course, not the same, but Aider still exists and is still a great tool for AI dev.
It's interesting how everyone is suddenly OK with vendor lock-in, quite a change from years past!
Not a fork opencode is a from scratch project
Claude code is completely closed source and even DMCA’d people reverse engineering it.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/25/anthropic-sent-a-takedown-...
There's Claude Code Router, that lets you use any model with Claude Code. Claude is a really good model for agents though, even though Gemini 2.5 and GPT5 are better models overall, Claude uses tools and plans tasks more effectively. A better pattern is to provide sub agents in Claude Code that call out to other LLMs as tools for planning/architecture.
This piece is also covered by a bunch of other cli/tui agents (like codex-cli and opencode) allowing you to switch between Claude and other models (comes in handy depending on the task) so it really all depends on the setup you like. As mentioned in the sibling comment there are ways to get it to work with Claude Code too.
I appreciate this writeup. I live in the terminal and work primarily in vim, so I always appreciate folks talking about tooling from that perspective. Little of the article is that, but it's still interesting to see the workflow outlined here, and it gives me a few ideas to try more of.
However, I disagree that LLMs are anywhere near as good as what's described here for most things I've worked with.
So far, I'm pretty impressed with Cursor as a toy. It's not a usable tool for me, though. I haven't used Claude a ton, though I've seen co-workers use it quite a bit. Maybe I'm just not embracing the full "vibe coding" thing enough and not allowing AI agents to fully run wild.
I will concede that Claude and Cursor have gotten quite good at frontend web development generation. I don't doubt that there are a lot of tasks where they make sense.
However, I still have yet to see a _single_ example of any of these tools working for my domain. Every single case, even when the folks who are trumpeting the tools internally run the prompting/etc, results in catastrophic failure.
The ones people trumpet internally are cases where folks can't be bothered to learn the libraries they're working with.
The real issue is that people who aren't deeply familiar with the domain don't notice the problems with the changes LLMs make. They _seem_ reasonable. Essentially by definition.
Despite this, we are being nearly forced to use AI tooling on critical production scientific computing code. I have been told I should never be editing code directly and been told I must use AI tooling by various higher level execs and managers. Doing so is 10x to 100x slower than making changes directly. I don't have boilerplate. I do care about knowing what things do because I need to communicate that to customers and predict how changes to parameters will affect output.
I keep hearing things described as an "overactive intern", but I've never seen an intern this bad, and I've seen a _lot_ of interns. Interns don't make 1000 line changes that wreck core parts of the codebase despite being told to leave that part alone. Interns are willing to validate the underlying mathematical approximations to the physics and are capable of accurately reasoning about how different approximations will affect the output. Interns understand what the result of the pipeline will be used for and can communicate that in simple terms or more complex terms to customers. (You'd think this is what LLMs would be good at, but holy crap do they hallucinate when working with scientific terminology and jargon.)
Interns have PhDs (or in some cases, are still in grad school, but close to completion). They just don't have much software engineering experience yet. Maybe that's the ideal customer base for some of these LLM/AI code generation strategies, but those tools seem especially bad in the scientific computing domain.
My bottleneck isn't how fast I can type. My bottleneck is explaining to a customer how our data processing will affect their analysis.
(To our CEO) - Stop forcing us to use the wrong tools for our jobs.
(To the rest of the world) - Maybe I'm wrong and just being a luddite, but I haven't seem results that live up to the hype yet, especially within the scientific computing world.
This is roughly my experience with LLMs. I've had a lot of friends that have had good experience vibe coding very small new apps. And occasionally I've had AI speed things up for me when adding a specific feature to our main app. But at roughly 2 million lines of code, and with 10 years of accumulated tribal knowledge, LLMs really seem to struggle with our current codebase.
The last task I tried to get an LLM to do was a fairly straightforward refactor of some of our C# web controllers - just adding a CancellationToken to the controller method signature whenever the underlying services could accept one. It struggled so badly with that task that I eventually gave up and just did it by hand.
The widely cited study that shows LLMs slow things down by 20% or so very much coheres with my experience, which is generally: fight with the LLM, give up, do it by hand.
My experience is that sometimes they give you a 10x speedup but then you hit a wall and take 30 times longer to do a simple thing and a lot of people just keep hammering because of the first feeling. Outside of boilerplate, I haven't seen it be this magical tool people keep claiming it is.
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> I have been told I should never be editing code directly and been told I must use AI tooling by various higher level execs and managers
Wow, this is really extreme. We certainly got to this point faster than I expected.
To be fair, it's the higher level folks who are too far removed from things to have any actual authority. I've never heard a direct single-team engineering manager something like that. But yeah, CEOs say crazy crap. And we're definitely there, though to be fair, his exact quote was "I insist everyone try to have AI generate your code first before you try making any direct changes". It's not _quite_ as bad as what I described. But then the middle management buys in and says similar things. And we now have a company level OKR around having 80% of software engineers relying on AI tooling. It's a silly thing to dictate.
In my view its a tool, at least for the moment. Learn it, work out how it works for you, and what it doesn't work for you. But assuming you are the professional they should trust your judgement, and you should also earn that trust. That's why you pay skilled people for. If that tool isn't the best to getting the job done use something else. Of course that professional should be evaluating tools and assuring us/management (whether by evidence or other means) that the most cost efficient and quality product is being built like any other profession.
I use AI, and for some things its great. But I'm feeling like they want us to use the "blunt instrument" that is AI when sometimes a smaller, more fine grained tool/just handcrafting code for accuracy at least for me is quicker and more appropriate. The autonomy window as I recently heard it expressed.
Let's vibe some crud?
Sir, do you realize that crud is such a solved problem that popular MVC frameworks from over a decade ago generate it for you from templates? No wasteful LLM prompting required.
Perhaps I'm a bit of a cynic but I'm no longer impressed by the AI slop websites and demo apps, like those showcased in the article.
It's a lot like the first time taking a metal detector to a beach. It's really cool and exciting (dopamine hit) to find stuff, but after a while it wears off because realistically you only found trash.
Buuut for some people it just clicks and it becomes their chore to go find trash in the beach everyday and the occasional nickel or broken bracelet they feel the need to tell people and show it off.
(author here) I think there's a difference between "I'm no longer impressed" (good) and "I was never impressed and never would have been impressed" (bad, but common).
Yes it's easy now so its by definition no longer impressive, but that in itself is impressive if you can correctly remember or imagine what your reaction _would_ have been 6 months ago.
Never impressed, no longer impressed, feeling depressed ... Another option, newly impressed by the next iteration.
Up to a point these have been probability machines. There's probably a lot of code that does certain likely things. An almost astonishing amount doing the same things, in fact. As such, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised or impressed by the stochastic parrot aspect any more than we're impressed by 80% of such sites being copy pasta from Stack Overflow a few years ago.
However, what we perhaps didn't expect is that on the margins of the mass probability space, there are any number of less common things, yet still enough of those in aggregate that these tools can guess well how to do those things too, even things that we might not be able to search for. Same reason Perplexity has a business model when Google or DDG exist.
And now, recently, many didn't expect one might be able to simulate a tiny "society of mind" made of "agents" out of these parrots, a tiny society that's proving actually useful.
Parrots themselves still impress me, but a society of them making plans at our beck and call? That can keep us all peeking, pecking, and poking for a while yet.
// given enough time and typewriters, who wins: a million monkeys, a society of parrots, or six hobbits?
I wonder what it will be like in 5-10 years time to look back at this sort of time, as we start to figure out the next way to code...
I think there's been enough free ad posts for this
This is good stuff. While somebody could build a Trello clone or an image generator by typing “git clone “ followed by any number of existing projects, the code you’d get might’ve been written by a person, plus if you do that you’re not even spending any money, which just doesn’t seem right.
The future is vibe coding but what some people don’t yet appreciate what that vibe is, which is a Pachinko machine permanently inserted between the user and the computer. It’s wild to think that anybody got anything done without the thrill of feeding quarters into the computer and seeing if the ball lands on “post on Reddit” or “delete database”
This is a great comment.
I’ve noticed a new genre of AI-hype posts that don’t attempt to build anything novel, just talk about how nice and easy building novel things has become with AI.
The obvious contradiction being that if it was really so easy their posts would actually be about the cool things they built instead of just saying what they “can” do.
I wouldn’t classify this article as one since the author does actually create something of this, but LinkedIn is absolutely full of that genre of post right now.
> their posts would actually be about the cool things they built
Presumably, they are all startups in stealth mode. But in a few months, prepare to be blown away.
OT: my 14-year old nephew would like to use Claude Code. How do they signup for an account given they don’t have a cellphone?
(Sure, I could let them use my credentials but that isn’t really legit/fair use.)
Surely your love for your nephew is priceless ?
Do the right thing, sign up for an API account and put some credits on there...
(and keep topping up those credits ;-)
Like other posters said, maybe a local model is a good option. I've found the Qwen3:4B (reasoning) model works pretty well for many things.
I'm planning to run a local model on a $149 mini-pc and host it for the world from my bedroom. You can read a bit more about my thinking below.
https://joeldare.com/my_plan_to_build_an_ai_chat_bot_in_my_b...
These hosted models are better but it feels like the gap is closing and I hope it continues to close.
Use a local model like Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507 or Gemini CLI, which has a generous free tier.
Note that they should be able to get GitHub Copilot Pro for free via k-12 student 13yrs+
Have someone who isn't ever going to use claude code sign up for him and then give him the credentials. (do you have a partner or other relative not in tech?)
I'm curious what the prompt is you used for the poster background generation. I really like the soft illustrated feel for the images I got back
Fine make me spill all my secrets then xD
Note: use the Esc key to close images after you opened them (back button does not work).
I've found Claude's CLI to be the best of what I've tried. I've moved away from cursor and found myself in a much better programming headspace wherein I can "toggle" this AI-enabled mode. It has to be a more mindful approach to when/how I use AI in my day-to-day work instead of it being a temptation to "AI" some of the work away in the Cursor IDE.
And loads of money to pay for tokens, because every month I am out of tokens after a week or two.
Why do you even need Claude Code?
A frustration of using tools is that they never entirely act exactly the way you want... instead of it working the way you want, you have to work they way it wants (and before that, you have to figure out what that is).
...We're stuck with this, because it's just not feasible to build custom software for each person, that works exactly the way they want.
...Or is it?
I'm intrigued by the possibility that coding models do in fact make it feasible to have software customized exactly to what I want.
Of course, that includes the coding agent, so no need for Claude Code.
> instead of it working the way you want, you have to work they way it wants
You can use these tools in lots of different ways. You don't have to go all the way to the vibe coding extreme. You can go down to individual functions and have it write them and adjust them step by step if you want, approving every diff. Or even just have it on the side to chat with about your code (Aider is great for this in /ask mode). You can guide its behaviour with CONVENTIONS.md / CLAUDE.md and get it to work how you want as well. I find it handy just asking Aider to write comments for my functions.
It's definitely early days but I'm expecting we'll pretty quickly evolve to having standard "profiles" you can apply to work in different ways, and projects will start shipping with them out of the box (a bit like lint config). This will relieve a lot of the friction at the moment where you spend the first hours / days just corralling it to work the way you want.
I've learned that I also need Gemini 2.5 and long context.
We really need an agent benchmark to explore their ability-efficiency frontier.
I use Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all together.
I throw their results at each other, get them to debug and review each others work.
Often a get all three to write the code for a given need and then ask all three to review all three answers to find the best solution.
If I’m building something sophisticated there might be 50 cycles of three way code review until they are all agreed that there no critical problems.
There’s no way I could do without all three at the same time it’s essential.
> I watched the autonomous startup builder a bit more.
I think i'm done with this community in the age of vibe coding. The line between satire, venture capitalism, business idea guys and sane tech enthusiasts is getting too blurry.
It didn't seem to do anything well. And weird quotes like 'I think it one-shotted that too' on something important. What on earth is this. Reading it is like experiencing a bad weird dream.
This looks like absolute nightmare. I cannot work in console like this.
I've been diving into Claude Code after reading articles constantly praising its abilities. But I think perhaps it's better suited to web development
Using it for iOS development is interesting. It does produce working output (sometimes!) but it's very hit-or-miss. Recently I gave it a couple hours to build a CarPlay prototype of one of my apps. It was completely unable to refactor the codebase to correctly support CarPlay (even though I passed the entire CarPlay documentation into it). I gave it three attempts at it. Then I intervened and added support for CarPlay manually, following that I added a lot of skeleton code for it to flesh out. Claude was then able to build a prototype
However, over the next few days as I tried to maintain the code I ended up rewriting 60% of it because it was not maintainable or correct. (By "not correct" I mean it had logic errors and was updating the display multiple times with incorrect information before replacing it with correct information, causing the data displayed to randomly refresh)
I also tried getting it to add some new screens to a game I develop. I wanted it to add some of the purchase flows into the app (boring code that I hate writing). It managed to do it with compile errors, and was unable to fix its own build output despite having the tools to do so. Instead of fixing the build errors it caused, Claude Code decided it would manually verify that only its own changes were correct by running `swiftc` on only files that it touched. Which was nonsense
All that said, there was a benefit in that Claude Code writing all this code and getting something up on the screen motivated me to finally pick up the work and do some of these tasks. I had been putting them off for months and just having the work "get started" no matter how bad, was a good kick start
I'm sorry but people who let an agent run on prod deserve what they get. Basically even saying you would do that should disqualify you from working in IT in the way saying "I like to drink when I'm working" should disqualify you from airtraffic control.
I haven't been following too closely, but is there even a reason to do this? What are the benefits of allowing production access versus just asking for a simple build system which promotes git tags, writes database migration scripts, etc.? From my perspective, it should be easier than ever to use a "work" workflow for side projects, where code is being written to PR's, which could optionally be reviewed or even just auto approved as a historical record of changes, and use a trunk-based development workflow with simple CI/CD systems - all of which could even be a cookie cutter template/scaffolding to be reused on every project. Doesn't it make sense now more than ever to do something like that for every project?
> I'm sorry but people who let an agent run on prod deserve what they get.
The problem is that whatever consequences come of it won’t affect just them. You don’t really have any way of knowing if any service you use or depend on has developers running LLMs in production. One day not too far off in the future, people who don’t even like or use LLMs will be bitten hard by those who do.
Particularly with the VSCode extension. I was a loyal Cline user until recently because of how good the editor experience was, but the ability for Claude to go off and run for 10+ minutes effectively autonomously, and show me the diffs in realtime is a gamechanger. The token usage has also gotten much more efficient in the last few months. With proper IDE support now I don't see any reason at all to use anything else, especially not the "credit" based middle-man providers (Windsurf/Cursor et. al).
Same here, I was convinced Cline+OpenRouter was the way to go. But with Claude code I’m getting better results and saving money, even compared to planning with Sonnet and transitioning to act mode with DeepSeek, I was still using more than $20/mo easily.
This article seems fun, and it's interesting, but I was waiting for the point and it never came.
The author didn't do anything actually useful or impactful, they played around with a toy and mimicked a portion of what it's like to spin up pet projects as a developer.
But hey, it could be that this says something after all. The first big public usages of AI were toys and vastly performed as a sideshow attraction for amused netizens. Maybe we haven't come very far at all, in comparison to the resources spent. It seems like all of the truly impressive and useful applications of this technology are still in specialized private sector work.
Umm, not really, you also need spare money to burn..
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if I don't see aider in the first sentence, I send it back
I have noticed that using LLMs does not increase tech debt, it infact erases it, and can do so codebase wide in half an hour.
"Thanks for the article. I found it interesting, though the 'vibe coding' method isn't something I can apply in my own IT environment, mainly due to its complexity and technology stack. The piece makes a strong case for why LLMs are so good at coding. It's clear they excel with the technologies and patterns most common in their training data—the same ones their own developers likely use. While their performance drops off with less familiar tech, it's undeniable that for certain types of tasks, they are very effective."