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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

I use Claude Code (cli tool) and it's on another level. Not even comparable to code autocomplete à la Copilot or copy/pasting into a LLM chat app. It knows about your whole code base, can use external tools, read documentation, run tests, etc. Even as an experienced developer, it's been a huge productivity boost. The main downside is that it can quickly get expensive.

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You get the same experience inside VS Code with Copilot these days, as long as you select agent mode. Yesterday I even asked it to read documentation off a URL and it asked me permission to fetch the page, summarized it, and applied the API changes needed.

Not really. This is an example of something that Claude Code handles very easily and for Github Copilot, is not even an starter (because can't read SQLite files)

>Read the Sqlite file in this directory and create an UX that would visualize and manage the data. The application should be responsive (so it can be use on mobiles) and should have some graphs when appropiate.

Actually, it can. I've just gone and checked. Agent Mode executed sqlite on the terminal, got the schema, and issued the relevant changes.

Does it really know about the whole codebase? How big are we talking about? Last I tried, some time ago, llm didn't work very well "in the large". But I have never tried Claude Code.

No it doesn’t, it tries to be smart about how it loads context that it thinks it needs to perform a task. In reality, in a large codebase I’ve found manual supplying the exact context to Aider with Anthropic’s models to work better.

Same. It's usually very good at generating greenfield projects from scratch, but once you get going you have to manually provide all context to get good results.

I have tried claude code on a few different size code bases and so far very impressed. The code it generates is usually in the same fashion and tone as the rest of the code base.

I guess I should have said that it has access to all your code. But I think it tries to be smart about which files it reads depending on the task at hand.

Claude Code is by far the most expensive tool I used so far. I generally use it for fronted stuff since it's wonderful there !

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