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Comment by tomaytotomato | Hacker News Reader

I updated my original comment to explain my reasoning a bit more clearly.

Essentially I ask an LLM to look at a project and it just sees the current state of the codebase, it doesn't see the iterations and hacks and refactors and reverts.

It also doesn't see the first functionality I wrote for it at v1.

This could indeed be solved by giving the LLM a git log and telling it a story, but that might not solve my issue?

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I'm now letting Claude Code write commits + PRs (for my solo dev stuff), but the benefits have been pretty immense as it's basically Claude keeping a history of it's work that can then be referenced at any time that's also outside the code context window.

FWIW - it works a lot better to have it interact via the CLI than the MCP.

I personally don't have any trouble with that. Using Sonnet 3.7 in Claude Code, I just ask it to spelunk the git history for a certain segment of the code if I think it will be meaningful for its task.

Out of curiosity, why 3.7 Sonnet? I see lots of people saying to always use the latest and greatest 4.5 Opus. Do you find that it’s good enough that the increased token cost of larger/more recent models aren’t worth it? Or is there more to it?

I misremembered :(

4.5 Sonnet, but because I've been stuck on 3.7 Sonnet for so long due to corporate policy I wrote the wrong thing.

And yeah corporate policy. Opus is not available. I prefer Codex for my personal coding but I have not needed to look in the Git history here yet.

Opus is pretty overkill sometimes. I use Sonnet by default. Haiku if I have clearer picture of what I'm trying to solve. Opus only when I notice any of the models struggle. All 4.5 though. Not sure why 3.7. Curious about that too.

I suspect they use the LLM for help with text editing, rather than give it standalone tasks. For that purpose a model with 'thinking' would just get in the way.

speed > thinking longer for smaller tasks.

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