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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, it's actually fun again. The evening hours I used to burn with video games and weed are now spent with claude code, rewriting and finishing up all my custom desktop tools and utilities I started years ago.

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I had a lot of fun making 'tools' like this, but once I settled into a complicated problem (networking in a multiplayer game), it has become frustrating to watch Claude give back control to me without accomplishing anything, over and over again. I think I need to start using the SDK in order to force it to its job.

I've got it using dbus, doing funky stuff with Xlib, working with pipewire using the pulseaudio protocol which it implemented itself (after I told it to quit using libraries for it.) You can't one-shot complicated problems, at least not without extensive careful prompting, but at this point I believe I can walk it through pretty much anything I can imagine wanting done.

I mean, yes. This is what Claude is good for: helping solve problems that aren't difficult or complex, just time consuming.

The thing is a lot of software jobs boil down to not difficult but time consuming.

It’s still better letting Claude slog through all that boilerplate and skeletal code for you so that you can take the wheel when things start getting interesting. I’ve avoided working on stuff in the past just because I knew I wouldn’t be motivated enough to write the foundation and all the uninteresting stuff that has to come first.

I've enjoyed using it for coming up with the structure of a project. I'll ask in search mode for structures of other similar projects if I'm not sure. I also enjoy making human-readable .md or .txt documentation files for myself very quickly with it.

Try giving codex IDE a go, now included with ChatGPT. Had equal frustrations with Claude making bad decisions, in contrast gpt5 codex high is extremely good!

I've found that in those cases, I likely am better off doing it myself. The LLMs I've used will frequently overfit the code when it gets complicated. I am working on a language learning app and it so often will add special-casing for words occurring in the tests. In general, as soon as you leave boiler-plate territory, I found it will start writing dirtier and dirtier code.

This kind of stuff is where my anxiety rises a bit. Another example like this is audio code - it compiles and “works” but there could be subtle timing bugs or things that cause pops and clicks that are very hard to track down without tracing through the code and building that whole mental model yourself.

There’s a great sweet spot though around stuff like “make me this CRUD endpoint and a migration and a model with these fields and an admin dashboard”.

I had ChatGPT write from spec an assignment I failed to complete during university, that has always stuck with me as something I would like to finish.

I still spend my evening hours like that and do ai-assisted coding in the background

Depends on the game tbh, having claude ping me for attention every few minutes disrupts most games too much, but with turn-based or casual games it works out well. OpenTTD and Endless Sky are fun to play while claude churns.

I really didn't need the cognitohazard thought that I could play Factorio and still somehow get things done

I'm 10 months clean on factorio, been doing the 12 step program for it. Feeling real tempted to relapse now...

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