Claude Code Is My Computer
steipete.me
steipete.me
This post is generated. Meaning, it wasn't written with the same aim towards truth and relevance that we assume writers have. It looks like writing, and fools readers into thinking it's writing.
But it's just text. What's the purpose in reading it as opposed to any other generated text?
It sounds like that's what you've done here, in which case I don't feel that you are wasting my time by having me read something that you haven't even reviewed yourself.
That is not what happened here: the author provided a lot more input than the finished article, and used the LLM to help crunch that down to as good a version as possible of the points there wanted to make.
As long as a human put time and effort into making something, then I'm willing to consider putting my effort toward reading/watching. If someone just spends 5 seconds to throw a prompt out there, that's when I get annoyed.
Why? Do you care more about the origin than the quality?
Because they are linked. AI content can be generated so frivolously and at such volume you easily be overwhelmed by low quality garbage. Humans can also generate crap, but a much slower pace and I think that AI being so good at crap generation that it will push out any humans in the space that used to meek out any work here. So, what we are left with is AI content that is mostly low-effort crap, with maybe some rigorously reviewed bits that are good here and there, and the human-content which will mostly be people who care enough to make quality content otherwise they would be already posting AI schlock.
The end is that using AI as a proxy indicator for garbage will be right more than its wrong. So if I see something is AI generated, I should give it a pass and not waste my limited time resource on it.
so that if it has sloppy mistakes or doesn't reflect your thinking well, you do want others to trust your work less?
If it was dictated or transcribed, it's somehow lesser and unworthy of attention?
No. I don't know where you got that from.
1. List of uses that are nothing but claims with zero tangible repeatable steps.
2. One vague statement about using it to bootstrap a machine... yeah lets see it.
I don't see any use cases for Claude code that I have not already tried with Goose or Dagger Agents. And I don't have to let those loose on my OS to use them.But hey the author made a zero proof claim that they can re-bootstrap with claude anyway...
Then at the end you are challenged to
"Got a crazier Claude workflow? Ping me @steipete."
IDK You didn't share any details beyond some vague use cases. Pretty much the same half working stuff from 2 years ago.
Yo, Steipete. Since claude is such a banger why don't you have it generate the config that you can share as proof. I'm not gonna wait though since its all hot air.
Is this marketing hype for the post or does it actually do all this? I know it's relatively new, but I haven't been able to find a resources to do such a setup? Only posts glorifying that it's capable of such tasks. If anyone else has had better luck with such complex tasks, would love to find out more.
It's also amazing at using the CLI (I've been a terminal nerd for years, and yet watching claude 4 pipe those unix commands to work around the fact it can't use interactive TUI's yet, is pretty amazing)
You can give it tools either via funciton call, MCP, or just terminal unix shell.
Prompt it right, and the agentic stuff is like magic imho
Here you go
Programming: a powerful skillset, one of the few things that can give you autonomy and agency besides money. Doable on basic computer hardware with no internet connection. Self-reinforcing, investing in yourself.
Prompting: requires expensive subscriptions to someone else's computer, someone else's software. They can turn it off, they control it. Spending your days QAing software and reviewing code and describing in worse language what you want the computer to do, over and over, until you test your way to something approximating what you wanted. Not to mention incinerating the environment.
I know which of the two I prefer.
its nit really choosing one ot the other imho
they supplement each other
Having solid backups is good protection against errors that delete data, but I'm more worried about problems that leak my private data - especially to malicious attackers.
Think malicious instructions hidden on websites or in emails that cause Claude Code to steal API keys or account credentials and exfiltrate them to an attacker.
Right now, it is unlikely that such prompt injection attacks are being targeted against specific individuals. I know they are theoretically possible though, and that's enough to prevent me from trying this out.
If you had any respect for your readers you’d put this as a disclaimer right at the top. I can’t be bothered to read anything you can’t be bothered to write.
Presumably the fact you have a personal blog means you must enjoy some aspect of writing, so what’s the end game here?
I mean you do you I guess—it’s your blog and I’m nobody. But if I’m reading someone’s thoughts I want _their_ words, not something filtered through a machine.
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/ai-will-incr...
At the end of the day all do the same. a cli tool that can call tools and use them as needed.
If you have reasonable guard rails for your AI, you can throw much more at it.
Let it write tests before implementing something, ensure the code is in version control before promoting a change, etc.
But the constant Git churn created a lot of traffic and collisions in that folder. And when I googled it, apparently it's just not a good idea to sync Git projects in iCloud.
I really want to easily sync my folders so that I can just get a new macbook and recreate my environment.
Anyone have any tips?
you might copy the code working dir in read mode only or whatever idk\
Not even kidding, it worked for Peter (OP’s article)
My brother-in-law just accidentally stepped on my laptop and it literally broke into pieces. Fortunately, I have an extra laptop that I can use instead. Please recreate my environment on the new laptop.
I've found migrating ~/library over is problematic even with built in migration assistant, especially if this is their third or later machine being transfered between.
Git is designed with a remote server in mind, just do it that way. Get github or git lab or setup your own remote host.
I have my code folders in Dropbox on OSX but I believe my process should work for you. I work in node and have a number of monorepos with nested node_modules folders. I run my idempotent dev-files.command script [2] with or without "--nono" in any monorepo and it handles the entire git aliasing and dropbox folder ignore for node_modules process. I use --nono if I ever need to clear out all of the node_modules and do a fresh pnpm install.
1. https://git-scm.com/docs/gitrepository-layout
2. https://gist.github.com/chiragmehta/a41bd33356b6a2f84075d23d...
The downside is that git history is pretty useful, so it would suck to not sync it.
But you gave a real solution to the problem.
Edit: I remember now that one problem with iCloud was that doing something like switching Git branches or checking out commits causes a catastrophic sync cascade in the code folder itself.
Maybe Dropbox is better at dealing with that kind of thing in general. But that's pretty annoying for any syncing system to deal with, heh.
I guess the simplest solution is to just get into the habit of pushing every little project to github.
I tried the same with Google Drive at work and had lots of issues, but recently it seems to have stabilized.
So two possibilities come to mind:
1. I, somehow, use every single one of those tools wrong.
2. Or; you and the other people raving about Claude code are solving trivial problems.
Of course, I'm human so I'm inclined to believe I do not use all tools wrong. But reading your experience and those similar to yours I can't help but think two things:
- you are solving incredibly rote, already solved, problem that the LLMs are just able to spit out by heart. I do too, and yet I don't have the same AI successes so damn your problems must be especially trivial.
- You are so wildly overpaid that paying hundreds (I even saw people "boasting" about spending thousands a day !) of dollar a month is perfectly justifiable.
I don't think I'm wrong on the last point, and if I can see it then employers will be able to see it too. Why on earth would anyone pay 600$/h (your rates according to one of your post), when apparently I can just pay 200$/mo and get the same thing?
And don't tell me "because it takes skill to use Claude Code", you just wrote a blog post telling it mostly doesn't (apparently).
Don't take this whole post as a mean criticism (and if it reads like it, I'm sorry), I am just truly flabergasted.
Every time I see a post like yours, I see the reply saying "yeah you're using it wrong". I can't say either 1 or 2 is true, but if you saw the recent post[0] about cloudflare making an API entirely with Claude, it could be more of a case of not using the tools to their potential.
I use these tools a lot and I would say they fail 50% of the time for my use cases and I baby them every step
”Is it just me” is such a flawed mindset. The reality is staring you in the face
Sometimes you have to learn how to frame the problem in a way to get the results that you want. These tools need lots of context, not just about the rest of the code base but the problem itself. You can think of it a bit like how the early adopters of high level programming languages had to fight against compilers to get the assembly output that they wanted.
For example, if I tell an LLM to generate a python script that finds the square of a number I might want: def square(x): return x * x
but it may give me: print("Enter a number:") x = int(input()) print("The square is", x * x)
This is a very very simple example but I think it illustrates my point. If you provide enough context to the exact problem you want to solve the results are astronomically better.
The carbon footprint of typing a post out by hand, for example, is negligible in comparison to the carbon footprint of a massive datacentre running hundreds of prompts for many minutes to perform otherwise trivial tasks. A laptop that is already quite powerful is barely using any of its own compute in favour of requiring an utterly enormous amount somewhere else in the world.
It just feels like a colossal waste especially when you're going back to the same LLM many times to refine or correct its output.
I setup a new computer in ~15 minutes top. Everything is here: https://github.com/Frizlab/frizlabs-conf. Only thing I have to do first is install brew basically.
I don’t see how the OP is paying enough attention to know that terrible things are not happening. Sure, he can roll back, but that only works well for obvious problems that he catches in time.
I haven’t heard that it is inherently dangerous to use popular tools of the normal sort without carefully scrutinizes every output. But there are many horror stories about the unreliability of LLMs.
Do make sure your AWS/fly/etc accounts have budget caps (a wise idea anyway).
Haven't looked back since. This is about the same jump in productivity I had when switching from vscode to cursor and now to claude code with an agent.
It feels like managing a very intelligent junior dev that learns and adapts. I'm quite happy to read that more people are using it as this will only help claude code improve.
That’s a lie. I simply added “.*” to the whitelist. It’s a regex.
Or just use Migration Assistant?
Are... are you serious? Markdown formatting? The formatting standard that's designed to be essentially plain text?
I purposely had it on YOLO. Everything was backed up idc really. Its been a bug with claude on cursor getting around permissions. It was the day claude 4 came out and I wanted to see what it could do with YOLO. It was kinda funnny but annoying, could be catastrophic for someone who doesn't back up everything obsessively.
How recently did this occur? What did you ask it in your prompt? What did it say as the explanation for why it was doing that?
Spoke like a man who really, really takes that Roko thing seriously.
I'm a little envious of how all that must feel. Must be a real trip.