Doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve spent over $1,000 on Claude Code at this point and the return is worth it. The spend feels cheap compared to output.
In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.
In contrast - I’m not interested in using cheaper, less-than, services for my livelihood.
I'm curious, what was the return? What did you do with the 1k?
It's notable to me because there are to my knowledge no other Ruby wm's (there's at least one that allows scripting with Ruby, I believe, but not the whole codebase), the X11 bindings are custom (no Xlib or XCB), and there are few great examples that fits into the structure of my wm. Yet it made it work. The code was ugly, and I haven't committed it yet as I want to clean it up (or get Claude to) but my priority was to be able to use the second monitor without spending more than a few hours on it, and starting with no idea how multi-monitor support in X11 worked.
Since then, Claude Code has added Xinerama support to my X11 bindings, and selection support to enable a systray for my pager, and written the systray implementation (which I also didn't have the faintest clue how worked, and so had Claude explain to me before starting).
I use it for work too, but for these personal projects priority has been rough working code over beauty, because I use them every day and rely on the features, and want to spend as little time as possible on them, and so the work has been very different from how I work with Claude for work projects where I'll work in much smaller chunks, polish the result etc.
(updated for better example)
It is not a challenging technical thing to do. I could have sat there for hours reading the conversion from v1 to v2 to v3 to v4. It is mostly just changing class names. But these changes are hard to do with %s/x/x, so you need to do them manually. One by One. For hundreds of classes. I could have as easily shot myself in the head.
> Could you anonymize and share your last 5-10 prompts?
The prompt was a simple "convert this site from tailwind v1 to v4". I use neovim copilot chat to inject context and load URLs. I have found that prompts have no value, it is either something the LLM can do or not.
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ca49f356bdd2ab7bb7a366ef...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d9f1d9f9b4379d6551ba967c...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/e74b5b0f714e0429750ef6b0...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/91f1a08d9c27698310d63e06...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/7f7cb63aceb7560e51c02a9d...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/94080dde34bfca3dd9c48f14...
- https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/ea3a5c3a31799236115abc76...
Taken from 2 recent systems. 90% of my interaction is assurance, debugging, and then having claude operate within the meta context management framework. We work hard to set the path for actual coding - thus code output (even complex or highly integrated) usually ends up being fairly smooth+fast.
When I "wake" CC up I usually use a prompt like this to preface any complex work: https://gist.github.com/backnotprop/d2e4547fc4546eea071b9b68... (the goal is to get all relevant context in-memory).
For most planning I use Gemini. I copy either the entire codebase (if less than ~200k tokens) or select only that parts that matter for the task in large codebases. I built a tool to help me build these prompts, keep the codebase organized well in xml structure. https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower
Could you explain why there is no punctuation?
i use it for very targeted operations where it saves me several roundtrips to code examples and documentation and stack overflow, not spamming it for every task i need to do, i spend about $1/day of focused feature development, and it feels like it saves me about 50% as many hours as i spend coding while using it.
AI coding saves me a lot of time writing high-quality code, as it takes care of the boilerplate and documentation/API lookups, while I still review every line, and vibe coding lets me quickly do small stuff I couldn't do before (e.g. write a whole app in React Native), but gets really brittle after a certain (small) codebase size.
I'm interested to hear whether Claude Code writes less brittle code, or how you use it/what your experience with it is.
Claude Code was the first assistant that gelled for me, and I use it daily. It wrote the first pass of multi-monitor support for my window manager. It's written the last several commits of my Ruby X11 bindings, including a working systray example, where it both suggested the whole approach and implemented it, and tested it with me just acting as a clicking monkey (because I haven't set up any tooling to let it interact with the GUI) when it ran test scripts.
I think you just needs to test the two side by side and see what works for you.
I intend to give Aider a go at some point again, as I would love to use an open source tool for this, but ultimately I'll use the one that produces better results for me.
The two worst ways of burning API credits I've found with Claude Code are:
1. Getting argumentative/frustrated with the model if it goes off the rails and continuing to try to make something work when the model isn't getting anywhere.
If it really isn't getting something in the first few prompts, stop and rethink. Can you go back and set a smaller task? Like writing test cases that it's broken approach would fail? If it's not making forward progress after a couple of prompts, it's not likely to unless you split up the task and/or provide more details. This is how you burn $10 instead of $0.60 for a task that "should" be simple. It's bad at telling you something is hard.
2. Think about when you either /compact (trims the context but retains important details) or clear the context entirely. E.g. always clear when moving to another task unless they're closely related. Letting it retain a long context is a surefire way of burn through a lot (and it also slows you down a lot, not least because there's a bug that affects some of us - maybe related to TERM settings? no idea - where in some cases it will re-print the entire history to the terminal, so between tasks it's useful to quit and restart)
Also use /init, but also ask it to update CLAUDE.md with lessons learned regularly. It's pretty good at figuring things out, such as how my custom ORM for a very unusual app server I'm working on works, but it's a massive waste of tokens to have it re-read the ORM layer every time instead of updating CLAUDE.md.
This.
I was fighting with Claude for a good chunk of yesterday (usage limits seemed broken so it didn't really time me out) and most of that was getting it to fix one small issue with three test cases. It would fix one test and break the others, round and round we go. After it broke unrelated tests I had to back out all the changes and, by then, I understood the problem well enough so could direct it how to fix it with a little help from Deepseek.
As there are a bunch of other sections of code which suffer from the same problem I can now tell it to "look at the fixed code and do it like that" so, hopefully, it doesn't flail around in the dark as much.
Admittedly, this is fairly complicated code, being an AST to bytecode compiler with a bunch of optimizations thrown in, and part of the problem was a later optimization pass undoing the 'fixes' Claude was applying which took quite a while to figure out.
Now I just assume Claude is being intentionally daft and treat it as such with questions like "why would I possibly want a fix specifically designed to pass one test instead of a general fix for all the cases?" Oh, yeah, that's its new trick, rewriting the code to only pass the failing test and throwing everything else out because, why not?
The best one I've seen is when it tries to disable a test because it can't make the code pass it.
You do need to treat it as if it's trying to sneak stuff past you sometimes because you do get the occasional bout of what in a human I'd have treated as "malicious compliance", at a level well beyond stupidity.