Comment by spicyusername
7 hours ago
I can confirm that they are completely useless for real programming
And I can confirm, with similar years of experience, that they are not useless.
Absolutely incredible tools that have saved hours and hours helping me understand large codebases, brainstorm features, and point out gaps in my implementation or understanding.
I think the main disconnect in the discourse is that there are those pretending they can reliably just write all the software, when anyone using them regularly can clearly see they cannot.
But that doesn't mean they aren't extremely valuable tools in an engineer's arsenal.
I feel like I have to be strategic with my use of claude code. things like frequently clearing out sessions to minimize context, writing the plan out to a file so that I can review it more effectively myself and even edit it, breaking problems down into consumable chunks, attacking those chunks in separate sessions, etc. it's a lot of prep work I have to do to make the tool thrive. that doesn't mean it's useless, though.
Same. I started coding before hitting puberty, and Im well into my 30s.
If you know the problem space well, you can let LLMs(I use Claude and ChatGPT) flesh it out.
> I use Claude and ChatGPT
Both for code? For me, it's Claude only for code. ChatGPT is for general questions.
Yes, I use them in tandem. Generally Claude for coding and ChatGPT when I run out of tokens in Claude.
I also use ChatGPT to summarise my project. I ask it to generate mark down and PDFs, explaining the core functionality.