Comment by cadamsdotcom

The right set of techniques is highly situational and HN is full of people just dipping their toes into agentic coding.

I’ve been using Claude Code for over a year and built a 300k+ saas codebase with it.

I use zero skills, zero MCPs, zero adornments to the base model.

I have built something very different from what others have: my “stack” is a collection of Claude Code hooks that force the model to do test driven development, also known as TDD or “red/green/refactor”. It’s a process for building software that’s decades old, but was always a PITA to do solo. It’s kind of like the scene in karate kid - wax on, wax off…

- Write failing tests. - Watch them fail (if they pass, whoops! Your tests are wrong!) - Write code that makes the tests pass - Witness them pass - Optionally refactor (since you have tests that you saw fail and made pass - you can refactor with impunity) - Repeat from start..

The agent is forced through this loop. The automation is deterministic and uses a state machine. Automation forces the model write end to end tests and unit/integration/component tests before it’s permitted to write code. Witnessing tests fail first proves that they test something, and depending on e2e tests means that in a year of building I’ve never had to hand my model a browser. Instead it will write Playwright code to validate its work, and that becomes forever part of the codebase, preventing regressions forever.

Even despite this, I test everything manually and review every line I merge.

It takes 10x as long to get a change into shape for merging as the model spent building it. Even though it emerged in a working state from the model no lint errors.

Working at this level of complexity for 40-50 hours a week, you end up glad for the weekend - or glad to do prototypes. When you can do stuff that’s one-shottable you absolutely should.

When I want something as simple as you’re describing, I write prompts and test by hand. I rarely if ever read the code.

In other words, it’s highly situational.

If you want to see my process, the codebase is at https://codeleash.dev.

Thanks for reading!