So you’re telling me you spent 20 dollars and an entire day for 200 lines of JavaScript and 75 lines of python and this to you constitutes a working re-creation of Claude Code?
This is why expectations are all out of whack.
This is why expectations are all out of whack.
Keep in mind this is the commenters first attempt. And I'm surprised he paid so much.
Using Aider and Sonnet I've on multiple occasions produced 100+ lines of code in 1-2 hours, for under $2. Most of that time is hunting down one bug it couldn't fix by itself (reflective of real world programming experience).
There were many other bugs, but I would just point out the failures I was seeing and it would fix it itself. For particularly difficult bugs it would at times even produce a full new script just to aid with debugging. I would run it and it would spit out diagnostics which I fed back into the chat.
The code was decent quality - better than what some of my colleagues write.
I could probably have it be even more productive if I didn't insist on reading the code it produced.
It seems to me people’s perspective on code gen has largely to do with their experience level of actually writing code.
Just as a coworker used it to develop an AI code review tool in a day. It's not fancy - no bells and whistles, but it's still impressive to do it in a day with almost no manual coding.
Not sure it’s a narrow reading. This is my point, if it’s a basic or rudimentary version people should be explicit about that. Otherwise these posts read like hype and only lead to dissatisfaction and disappointment for others.
Reading something literally is by definition the narrowest interpretation.
Doesn't Code have a similar option?
Was this using technologies you aren't familiar with? If not, the output rate seems pretty low (very human-paced, just with an extra couple bucks spent.)
More importantly, the 100-300 lines was very low effort for me. That does have its downsides (skills atrophy).
1. It’s a learning experience 2. Looking at the chat transcripts, many of those dollars are burned for stupid reasons (Claude often fails with the insertLines/replaceLines functions and break files due to miss-by-1 offset) that are probably fixable 3. Remember that Claude started from a really rudimentary base with few tools — the bootstrapping was especially inefficient
Next experiment will be on an existing codebase, but that’s probably for next weekend.