Claude Code with Sonnet 4 is so good I've stopped using Aider. This has been hugely productive. I've been able to write agents that Claude Code can spawn and call out to for other models, even.
In addition, after a 3 hour session I told it to create a CLAUDE.md that would help it program similarly to me, based on my preferences. I then edited that file a bit, and that has helped a lot.
Use the @ thing to prod it read some relevant files for context (kind of like with Aider)
I find it helps to have a CLAUDE.md file with instructions and thorough documentation. This is on a ~30k LOC Python codebase with type-checking and tests. YMMV with other languages.
Claude Code now also has a PyCharm plugin (and probably other JetBrains IDEs) that also shows you diffs in the pycharm editor.
I view the files, and then review the changes in magit, and either approve some or all of them and commit them, or tell claude to do some thing else.
it works astonishingly well.
I’m building a non-trivial platform as a solo project/business and have been working on it since about January. I’ve gotten more done in two nights than I did in 3 months.
I’m sure there are tons of arguments and great points against what I just said, but it’s my current reality and I still can’t believe it. I shelled out the $100/mo after one night of blowing through the $20 credits I used as a trial.
It does struggle with design and front end. But don’t we all.
Before those 3 months you mentioned, how much did you spend time coding on average (at work, or as a hobby) percentagewise?
I’m not sure how to answer the question on percentage of time coding. I quit my job as a director where coding wasn’t part of the job but have kept up on side stuff and architecture at work. Since the new year when I started this it’s been in bursts, some weeks or nights I’ll go super hard coding and others I’ll focus on other stuff. I go to conferences and study a lot on the subject of the industry so that’s what I do in bursts of the non-coding time.
I hired a virtual assistant to help with the non-coding things so lately it’s been a lot more.
In general I’d estimate at least 50% of my work on this thing since January has been coding but it’s really hard to gauge. Claude over the past 3 days has surpassed my personal coding productivity over the past 3 months though, if it wasn’t clear what I was saying.
What I've seen is people feel more productive, until the reality of all the subtle problems start to set in. Even skilled engineers usually only end up with 10 or 20% productivity gains by the time they reduce its usecase to where it's actually not total dog shit, or by the time they go back around and fix all the problems.
The highest quality product I know of where the creator has talked about his use of AI is ghostty, and he's not claiming massive improvements, just that it's definitely helpful.
Hopefully it’s obvious that Claude will not have simply written the entire thing but you might get a sense of what it can do quickly as part of a whole - maybe similar to your last sentence but I suppose I am claiming massive improvements (in productivity, no warranty on quality yet).
Also keep in mind I’m entirely solo here. I fully agree with your points that the proof is in the pudding and obviously there’s nuance to all of it. But yeah, I’m not exaggerating with my commentary above.
And how much time would you say you spend wrangling the AI, meaning either repromting or substantially editing what you get back?
AiderDesk lets you save snapshots of a point in time, so I create "presets" to restore sets of context files and/or conversation history (you can restore one or both), which is a really nice bonus. You can also add/remove context as needed without the manual copy/pasting work when I forget to include something or accidentally included too much. Its VS Code extension makes adding/removing files from context seamless.