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Comment by skerit | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Claude-Code for a few weeks now, and honestly, calling this just "ergonomic" tasks feels like a huge understatement. This thing is straight up writing code for me - real, functional code that actually works. I'm being ridiculously productive with it.

I've even finally found the time to tackle some hobby projects that have been sitting on my back burner for literally years. Claude just tears through problems at breakneck speed. And you know what? It's actually fun again! I forgot how enjoyable coding could be when you're not getting bogged down in the tedious stuff.

Sure, maybe the big revolutionary applications haven't materialized yet, but when a tool can take something that would have taken me days and knock it out in an afternoon? That doesn't feel like just "making things more comfortable" - that feels pretty transformative to me, at least for how I work.

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I have used all the 'new' AI since the first preview of copilot and yeah, claude code seems to make a real difference. Previously, I used aider which is similar, but not having to point out the files to work with is the major difference I would say. It works very well and now I use it simply to control everything I do. It's the future as far as I am concerned. If we manage to have this local running in a few years, the world will be a much different place...

Wild. I evaluate LLMs about once per year, and can't wait for the generative AI bubble to burst.

I most recently asked for a privilege-separated JMAP client daemon (dns, fetcher, writer) using pledge() and unveil() that would write to my Maildir, my khal dir and contacts whenever it had connectivity and otherwise behave like a sane network client.

I got 800 lines of garbage C. Structs were repeated all over the place, the config file was #defined four times, each with a different name and path.

> Wild. I evaluate LLMs about once per year, and can't wait for the generative AI bubble to burst.

Strange thing to respond to people having great success with it. You clearly want it to fail, but why?

https://esgnews.com/ai-boom-drives-150-surge-in-indirect-emi...

Not to mention the ethical / copyright / misbehaving scrapers.

“Haters gonna hate”, as the old saying goes.

In think the people having success, probably have more experience with them. It sounds like "I tried using one of these new horseless carriages and it didn't go well, these things are useless"

You need to do it in smaller, incremental steps. Outline the overall architecture in your head, ask the AI to create empty structs/classes. Build it. Ask it to implement one part, leaving others empty. Test it. Ask it to add the next thing, and so on.

Every step should only affect a handful of classes or functions, that you can still keep in your head and easily verify. Basically, same thing as if you were doing it by hand, but at a higher abstraction level, so faster and less mentally tiring.

Shameless plug: I am working on a new cross-platform IDE designed for just this kind of workflow. It has basic C/C++ support already: https://sysprogs.com/CodeVROOM/?features=why

> You need to do it in smaller, incremental steps.

This isn't the context of this particular thread through. Its this

"Claude just tears through problems at breakneck speed."

I think, there's nuance. If a human can solve a problem without second thoughts and hesitations (Hey, stop, this doesn't look right. Are there other options?), an LLM will tear through it at breakneck speed.

But if there are things worth hesitating and weighing, LLM will fly past them at cruising speed.

There are plenty of problems of both kinds.

The statement you quoted is ambiguous. I'd say "Claude makes the boring parts of coding super fast, tearing through the stuff I didn't want to do and helping me get to the stuff I did want to do."

I'm an experienced dev (this year is my 10 year anniversary of 'officially' being in the industry). I've been using Claude Code over these last two weeks. It's like a magical code generator tool e.g. protoc; if you can describe the rote and boring "do this tedious x->y translation", then it can probably bang that out with tests in a couple minutes, making it easy for you to focus on the logic. It's not that Claude Code is doing the "programming", it's more like Claude is doing the typing (and it types REALLY fast). Literally imagine if you could type as fast as you could think, like just saying "oh I'll need functions covering x/y/z behaviors and cases, similar to the other functions already present but tailored like <way>." All you had to do was type that sentence and it wrote basically what you would have written, but instantly.

> Literally imagine if you could type as fast as you could think

This is exactly how vibe coding has been feeling to me lately, I do read all the code while it writes it, and I command the AI to write/edit/fix the code, so its like faster programming but we're still on the director seat

also focusing on logic, and the problems at hand, and not syntax, API, or function signatures, allows one to build at much faster speed and focusing on architecture and actual UX and not just code

It just feels like one continuous no true scottsman argument. Oh, you used tech X? Oh no, you gotta use the latest and greatest Y, that's what really makes the difference. 2 weeks go by. You're having all those problems with Y? Oh but that's because you're not using the latest and greatest Z, that makes all the difference, that's where it's really at. Oh, you're not using Z the way I use it? No, you can't do that, you have use it in the special way I use it, that's how it'll work. Oh, that still has problems? That's because you're not using the just-released super-XYZ model, that's really different! Rinse and repeat for many months now.

I had same experience with Windsurf since December. Their slogan was "Experience a true flow state" and I though it was spot on.

These days, with explision of options and alternatives and visible augmentation of their skills (tasks orchestration, mcps, etc) I have temporary reverse of that feeling as I struggle to settle on one approach/tool/editor, and always in half-baked experiementation stage with these tools, that also evolve quicker that I can try them out.

> Claude just tears through problems at breakneck speed. And you know what? It's actually fun again! I forgot how enjoyable coding could be when you're not getting bogged down in the tedious stuff.

yes I've been addicted to vibe coding too but i don't share the sentiment here.

This only holds true as long as you don't run into a bug that llm throws up its hands. Now you have no option but to read and understand code.

At no moment, you can 100% delegate the validation of the information you receive. That’s also valid with humans, feelings and thoughts.

You're a young guy that just dabbled in coding or are you a senior software developer?

Idk, I’ve been doing this for 15 years professionally and many years before and it’s still amazing to me

I'll add to the sibling comment and say I've been writing software for money for 25+ years, have a CS degree, and have found immense leverage with these tools. I put in the time on hobby projects over the past couple years to figure out how best to integrate it all into my work, and now I'm in a place where it's saving me significant amounts of time every time I produce code, and I'm getting the quality of results the project demands. I use gemini-2.5-pro, claude-4-sonnet, and o3 for different purposes, and have a variety of techniques to avoid pitfalls and get the results I'm looking for. There are a lot of ways to unsatisfactory results, but it's possible to get usable results that save time. I've shared my enthusiasm and seen other devs dabble, get poor results, and go back to their practiced methods of writing software–so I'm not surprised to see so many skeptics and naysayers. It isn't easy or obvious how to make this stuff work for you in larger codebases and for meatier problems. That doesn't mean it's impossible, and it doesn't mean it's not worth it to climb the learning curve. As the models and tools get better, it's getting a lot easier, so I suspect we'll see the number of people denying the utility of LLM-generated code to shrink. Personally, I'd rather be reaping the benefits as early as possible, because I can get more stuff done faster and more pleasantly.

Hello could you tell us what makes you use all of gemini-2.5-pro, claude-4-sonnet, and o3 for different purposes?

Senior developer, decades of experience

I think more often you'll find it's the mediocre coders (like myself) that have trouble using AI. The software developers and CS majors just know exactly what to tell it to do and in the *exact* language it could best be understood. That's just my experience.

Also, I get caught up in multiple errors that will never go away and, since I'm stepping out of my wheelhouse with libraries or packages I'm completely unfamiliar with, I'm completely helpless but to diagnose what went wrong myself and improve upon my code prompting skills.

Don't get me wrong. AI makes possible many things for me. However, I think professional coders probably accomplish much more.

If you've mentored junior devs, talking to the AI in such a way that gives good results is pretty similar, so that may be why.

Knowing how to talk to your wife, your kids and your AI are key to a happy life :)

I'm not OP but my experience with Cursor is similar. I have a B.S. in computer science from UW-Madison and have been a full-time professional software developer since 1998. This stuff is the real deal. I mostly see people not willing to put in the time to learn. There is a big learning curve here--don't let the fact that it's English trick you into thinking there's no skill involved. Your experience is actually what makes this work; greener devs will be unable to get the AI out of a rut or keep it on the straight and narrow, but an experienced dev can sprinkle in some occasional wisdom and get the machine going again. This stuff is fool's gold for "vibe coders" but rocket fuel for experienced developers using it as a tool.

Weird, it doesn't even generate comments in the right language when I try to use it.

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