I randomly stumbled across Tekwetu who've made a pretty good step-by-step example of coding with Claude Code, using MCPs, etc.[1]. None of the upsell or gushing. It's a pretty simple app with a backend, with a slightly complicated storage mechanism.

I was watching to learn how other devs are using Claude Code, as my first attempt I pretty quickly ran into a huge mess and was specifically looking for how to debug better with MCP.

The most striking thing is she keeps on having to stop it doing really stupid things. She slightly glosses over those points a little bit by saying things like "I roughly know what this should look like, and that's not quite right" or "I know that's the old way of installing TailwindCSS, I'll just show you how to install Context7", etc.

But in each 10 minute episodes (which have time skips while CC thinks) it happens at least twice. She has to bring her senior dev skills in, and it's only due to her skill that she can spot the problem in seconds flat.

And after watching much of it, though I skipped a few episodes at the end, I'm pretty certain I could have coded the same app quicker than she did without agentic AI, just using the old chat window AIs to bash out the React boilerplate and help me quickly scan the documentation for getting offline. The initial estimate of 18 days the AI came up with in the plan phase would only hold truye if you had to do it "properly".

I'm also certain she could have too.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erKHnjVQD1k

It's worth a watch if you're not doing agentic coding yet. There were points I was impressed with what she got it to do. The TDD section was quite impressive in many ways, though it immediately tried to cheat and she had to tell it to do it properly.