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Comment by arpowers | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone actually gotten productivity improvements from Claude Code?

What’s the use case?

(I tried some things, and it blew up. Thus far my experience w agents in general)

I have used it on a fairly simple Kotlin Android application and was blown away. I have previously been using paid ChatGPT, Github Copilot, and Gemini. In my opinion, it's the complete access to your repo that really makes it powerful, whereas with the other plugins you kind of have to manually feed it the files in your workspace and keep them in sync.

I asked it to add Google Play subscription support to my application and it did, it required minimal tweaking.

I asked it to add a screen for requesting location permissions from the user and it did it perfectly. No adjustment.

I also asked it add a query parameter to my API (GoLang) which should result in a subtle change several layers deep and it had no problems with that.

None of this is rocket science and I think the key is that it's all been done and documented a million times on the Internet. At this point, Claude Code is at least as effective as junior developer.

Yes, I understand that this is a Faustian bargain.

FYI -- Windsurf, Cline, Cursor will all do this also, using Claude models if you set them up that way.

It gives us great productivity. If you write the tests yourself and insist it delivers 100% success without touching the tests themselves, just run them, it is very nice. We wrote a little bit of tooling around it so it instructs and loops until 100% succeed. Even for stuff that's complex enough for seniors to struggle (parsers/compilers), it delivers results after hours instead of days or weeks. But if you miss some tests you can all but guarantee that those things won't work even though an experienced human would automatically do that right as it is illogical for instance. But we would write tests like this for humans as well, so there is not much difference in our workflow; CC delivers faster and far far cheaper. And we tried it all, especially NOT having it integrated into an ide is brilliant. Before we used aider instead of cursor etc as we can control it: we don't want a human sitting there tapping 'yes, please do' or whatnot. We want it to finish, commit a PR and then review.

It's great at mocking up some HTML pages with eg Tailwind and static site generators. Give it some ideas, a bit of copy, a few colours and it'll create some pages filled with plausible sounding text. I can imagine using it in front of clients to give them an idea of what a new site could look like.

Easily adjusted with things like "the colour palette is a bit bright, use more pastels" or "make it more SEO friendly" and it often easily generates a large todo list/set of changes based on minimal input

My friend was mulling over a product concept and I used it to design a landing page and it helped her see how easily you can create a website to sell the product. It took ~15 minutes and I'm a web dev noob. (Obviously setting up a real ecommerce site is a little bit more work)

It makes sense it's good at HTML because of the huge body of public data available.

I've been very successful pointing it to a backlog of manual test cases, using Playwright MCP to execute the test cases against dev as a black box, and generating the corresponding Playwright scripts to add to our automated test repo.

I had hired an actual automated tester with years of experience to write playwright scripts for us. After 3 months he had not produced a single passing test. I managed to build the entire scaffolding myself in 2 weeks having no prior playwright experience.

I use CC in existing code bases to build out new GUI - VueJS/Quasar and it blows me away! For back end Rust code it excels at boilerplate crud handlers back to the db - it copies the style of existing code… I’ll happily pay for it if my boss does not, just work less hours…

The productivity gains decrease with user experience. A high-performing senior engineer won't get a lot, but I think they've reached a point now where even seniors will benefit a fair amount. For me it's not really that they increase my productivity directly, but they let me offload a lot of the cognitive load. I'm getting a similar amount of work done and I don't feel as drained at the end of the day.

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