Comment by atq2119
2 days ago
Having used Claude Code in anger for a while now, I agree that given the state of these agents, we can't stop writing code by hand. They're just not good enough.
But that also doesn't mean they're useless. Giving comparatively tedious background tasks to the agents that I check in on once or twice an hour does feel genuinely useful to me today.
There's a balance to be found that's probably going to shift slowly over time.
To me the biggest benefit has been getting AI to write scripts that automate some things for me that are tedious but not needed to be deployed. Those scripts don’t have to be production-grade and just have to work.
Similar experience. I just tried Claude for the first time last week, and I gave it very small tasks. "Create a data class myClass with these fields<•••> and set it up to generate a database table using micronaut data" was one example. I still have to know exactly what to do, but I find it very nice that I didn't have to remember how to configure micronaut data, (which tbf is really easy) I just had to know that that's what I wanted to use. It's not as revolutionary as the hype, but it does increase productivity quite a bit, and also makes programming more fun I think. I get to focus on what I want to build, instead of trying to remember jdbc minutiae. Then I just sanity check the generated code, and trust that I will spot mistakes in that jdbc connection. It felt like the world's most intuitive abstraction layer between me and the keyboard, a pretty cool feeling.
Just for fun, once I had played a bit with it like that, I just told it to finish the application with some vague Jira-epic level instructions on what I wanted in it and then fed it the errors it got.
It eventually managed to get something working but... Let's just say it's a good thing this was a toy project I did specifically to try out Claude, and not something anyone is going to use, much less maintain!
> Just for fun, once I had played a bit with it like that, I just told it to finish the application with some vague Jira-epic level instructions on what I wanted in it and then fed it the errors it got.
Would you finish the application with "some vague Jira-epic level instructions"? Or, even if you don't formally make tickets in Jira for them, do you go from vague Jira-epic-sized notions to ticket-sized items? If I had a mind-control helmet that forced you to just write code and not let you break down that jira-epic in your thoughts, do you think the code would be any good? I don't think mine would be.
So then, why does it seem reasonable that Claude would be any good, given such a mental straight jacket? Use planning mode, the keyword "ultrathink" and the phrase "do not write code", and have it break down the vage Jira epic into ticket-sized items, and then have it break it into sub tickets that are byte-sized tasks, and then have it get to work.
I mean, I didn't really expect it to work, I just wanted to see what would happen. I'd had pretty good results thus far and wondered how far I could push it. Jira-epic-style prompts was, not surprisingly, pushing it too far.
It did manage to get the application working though, with only a couple of "this thing broke, plz fix" style prompts, and it did better than I had thought it would to fulfill my intention, give how vague I was.
My point was that if you're going to build an actual product, you should probably not use Claude in that way. Break down the epics to smaller more manageable chunks however, and Claude can do an amazing job! I'll definitely keep experimenting with it this way, it's way better than full-manual coding, or at least that's my initial impression of about a week of experimentation!