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Comment by jeremywho | Hacker News Reader

My workflow is to use Claude desktop with the filesystem mcp server.

I give claude the full path to a couple of relevant files related to the task at hand, ie where the new code should hook into or where the current problem is.

Then I ask it to solve the task.

Claude will read the files, determine what should be done and it will edit/add relevant files. There's typically a couple of build errors I will paste back in and have it correct.

Current code patterns & style will be maintained in the new code. It's been quite impressive.

This has been with Typescript and C#.

I don't agree that what it has produced for me is hobby-grade only...

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I've been using it the same way. One approach that's worked well for me is to start a project and first ask it to analyse and make a plan with phases for what needs to be done, save that plan into the project, then get it to do each phase in sequence. Once it completes a phase, have it review the code to confirm if the phase is complete. Each phase of work and review is a new chat.

This way helps ensure it works on manageable amounts of code at a time and doesn't overload its context, but also keeps the bigger picture and goal in sight.

I find that sometimes this works great and sometimes it happily tells you everything works and your code fails successfully and if you aren’t reading all the code you would never know. It’s kind of strange actually. I don’t have a good feeling when it will get everything correct and when it will fail and that’s what is disconcerting. I would be happy to be given advice on what to do to untangle when it’s good and when it’s not. I love chatting with Claude code about code. It’s annoying that it doesn’t always get it right and also doesn’t really interact with failure like a human would. At Least in my experience anyways.

Of course, everything needs to be verified - I'm just trying to figure out a process that enables it to work as effectively as it can on large code bases in a structured way. Committing each stage to git, fixing issues and adjusting the context still comes into play.

Any particular reason you prefer that over Claude code?

I'm on windows. Claude Code via WSL hasn't been as smooth a ride.

That's exactly how you should do it. You can also plug in an MCP for your CI or mention cli.github.com in your prompt to also make it iterate on CI failures.

Next you use claude code instead and you make several work on their own clone on their own workspace and branches in the background; So you can still iterate yourself on some other topic on your personal clone.

Then you check out its tab from time to time and optionally checkout its branch if you'd rather do some updates yourself. It's so ingrained in my day-to-day flow now it's been super impressive.

One can also integrate with, say, a running PyCharm with the Jetbrains IDE MCP server. Claude Desktop can then interact directly with PyCharm.

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