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Comment by geitir | Hacker News Reader

When you have that hair raising “am I crazy why are people touting ai” feeling, it’s good to look at their profile. Oftentimes they’re caught up in some ai play. Also it’s good to remember yc has heavy investment in gen ai so this site is heavily biased

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Context is king, too: in greenfield startups where you care little about maintenance and can accept redundant front end frameworks and backend languages? I believe agent swarms can poop out a lot lot lot of code relatively quick… Copy and paste is faster though. Downloading a repo is very quick.

In startups I’ve competed against companies with 10x and 100x the resources and manpower on the same systems we were building. The amount of code they theoretically could push wasn’t helping them, they were locked to the code they actually had shipped and were in a downwards hiring spiral because of it.

Here’s the thing - an awful lot of it doesn’t even compile/run, never mind do the right thing. My most recent example was asking it to use terraform to run an azure container app with an environment variable in an existing app environment. It repeatedly made up where the environment block goes, and and cursor kept putting the actual resource in random places in the file.

I use claude exclusively at my day job with legacy codebases. I'm not using swarms or fancy multi-agent setups. Just sticking to plan mode, giving enough context, and iterating on a spec before starting the actual build.

I'm also not building webapps. I work in data engineering on a large legacy airflow project, internal python libraries, infrastructure with terraform, etc.

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