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I got Claude to make a tool to record all of the prompts in and all of the responses out. but not the actual file changes.

https://github.com/lawless-m/Devolver

it uses hooks to export the session

https://github.com/lawless-m/Devolver/blob/master/HOOKS.md

and then parses the session logs and dumps them out

https://github.com/lawless-m/Devolver/blob/master/JSONL_FORM...

I then have it go to a central location because I use multiple machines and it creates a website so I can see what I've been working on.

    Project | Prompts | Tools | Files | Words In | Words Out | Tokens In | Tokens Out | Cache R/W | Last Activity
    Nawin | 10688 | 74568 | 7724 | 1201.3k | 1379.5k | 592.0k | 83.3k | 3221.4M/199.5M | 2026-01-30 20:31
    Crabbit | 3232 | 14252 | 1348 | 310.4k | 259.1k | 82.7k | 17.6k | 755.0M/51.2M | 2026-01-30 08:22

Reading these figures now, I think it counts its own prompts, you know it talks to itself. There's no way I've typed ten thousand prompts on that project

> Finally: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/44159166

Lord help us

Thanks for sharing!

Like OP, I've been similarly struggling to get as much value from CC (grok et c) as "everyone" else seems to be.

I'm quite curious about the workflow around the spec you link. To me, it looks like quite an extensive amount of work/writing. Comparable or greater than the coding work, by amount, even. Basically trading writing code files for writing .md files. 150 chat sessions is also nothing to sneeze at.

Would you say that the spec work was significantly faster (pure time) than coding up the project would have been? Or perhaps a less taxing cognitive input?

Yes, it's a lot of spec work. But a lot of it is research and exploring alternatives. Sometimes Claude suggests ideas I would have never thought of or attempted on my own. Like a custom python websocket server: https://github.com/Leftium/rift-local

(I also implemented the previous version with only a high-level, basic understanding of websockets: https://rift-transcription.vercel.app/sherpa)

I think of Claude like a "force-multiplier."

I have been able to implement ideas I previously gave up on. I can test out new ideas much faster.

For example, https://github.com/Leftium/gg started out as 100% hand-crafted code. I wanted gg to be able to print out the expression in the code in addition to the value like python icecream. (It's more useful to get both the value and the variable name/expression.) I previously tried, and gave up. Claude helped me add this feature within a few hours.

And now gg has its own virtual dev console optimized for interacting with coding agents. A very useful feature that I would probaly not have attempted without Claude. It's taken the "open in editor" feture to a completely new level.

I have implemented other features that I would have never attempted or even thought about. For example without Claud's assistance https://ws.leftium.com would not have many features like the animated background that resembles the actual sky color.

60 minute forecast was on my TODO list for a long time. Claude helped me add it within an afternoon or so.

Note: depending on complexity of the feature I want to add the spec varies in the level of detail. Sometimes there is no spec outside Claude's plans in the chat session.

[1]: https://github.com/gruns/icecream

Wow thanks for sharing! Could you explain how you made the specs? Did you already know pretty much everything you wanted to cover before hand? Was one CC session enough to go through it?

In my experience, trying to make a plan/specs that really match what I want often ends in a struggle with Claude trying to regress to the mean.

Also it’s so easy to write code that I always have tons of ideas I end up implementing that diverge from the original plan…

- No, I did not know everything I wanted to cover beforehand. Claude helps me brainstorm, research, and elaborate on my ideas. The spec is a living document that I occasionally check in: https://github.com/Leftium/rift-transcription/commits/main/s...

- It was definitely not one CC session. In fact, this spec is a spin-off of several other specs on several other branches/projects.

- I've actually experienced quite the opposite: I suggest an idea for the spec and Claude says "great idea!" Then I change my mind and go in the opposite direction: "great idea!" again. Once in a while, I have to argue with Claude to get my idea implemented (like adding dependencies to parse into a proper AST instead of regex.)

- One tip: it's very useful to explain the "why" to Claude vs the "what." In fact, if you just explain the why/problem without a specific solution, Claude's suggestions may surprise you!

The what-why switch is quite useful, because it also helps you avoid Claude's "great idea!" responses as well.

> It seems to me you expect Claude to be able to one-shot your tool based on a single prompt.

Yes, this is what the hype says doesn't it?

Or... are they all lying?

I guess the AI Koans are still relevant:

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html

That isn't what the hype is. If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching, you should find better sources. You can one-shot some things, and it makes for an impressive demo (oh yay, yet another video game made instantly) but anything larger and more useful will probably be a conversation. (Though not necessarily with a human, AIs can discuss it among themselves too.)

Your first one-shot might be a good rough prototype. From there, you continue the conversation with your refinements. While Claude goes and works on that for 15 minutes - you can go and do other work. Or talk with another Claude in another window to make progress on another project.

A good mental model is to imagine you're talking to a remote developer. You need to give them an extremely detailed spec on the first go if you expect them to get it right the first time. Sometimes it's better to explain "this is my grand vision, but how about we first mockup a prototype to see if that's actually how I want it to work". Sometimes Claude will suggest you talk about your plan together first to remove the ambiguities from the plan, or you can encourage Claude to do that with you.

(Also, the remote developer mindset is useful - treat the remote developer with respect, with humanity, and they're more likely to be helpful towards you and motivated to align with your goals.)

Consider that in an hour or two of conversation, you now have your app, completed, fully debugged... and not once did you look at the code, and you spent half of that time catching up on your other tasks. That's vibe coding.

> If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching

HN - posts and comments - is full of it.

And my personal experiments with the free chatbots contradict it ofc.

Well, I've offered what I can to help. If your experience is mostly free chatbots, I would definitely suggest trying Opus 4.5 or 4.6 in Claude Code. The agentic harness of the software around the model (ie Claude Code) is important. Consider also that some of us have been doing this for a year and have already built our own MCP server tooling to go faster. Giving your AI the same kind of deterministic software tools that you use is important (eg make sure your AI has access to a diff tool, don't make it try and do that "in its head", you wouldn't ask that of a human).

As for listening to Hacker News... yeah, this is one of the worst places (well, Mastodon is worse) and HN is surprisingly AI-doomerish. I don't check in here very often anymore, and as of this week I just get Claude to summarize HN headlines as a morning podcast for me instead.

My own experience: my first few uses of Claude in Dec 2024 seemed rubbish, I didn't get it. Then one day I asked it to make me a search engine. The one shot from that wasn't perfect, but it worked, and I saw it build it in front of my eyes. That was the moment & I kept iterating on it. I haven't used Google or Kagi in almost a year now.

Anyway, hope it helps, but if not using AI makes you feel more comfortable, go with what fills your life with more value & meaning & enjoyment.

> I haven't used Google or Kagi in almost a year now.

So you have the resources to index the whole www on your own?

No, but I index parts of the web that are important to myself, sites I frequently reference. (I have all of Simon Willison's site indexed, for example.) It turns out that a simple SQLite database is a lot more capable and faster than I thought. I index from my laptop, using another tool I built with Claude. I don't crawl or spider, I focus on indexing from sitemap.xml files and RSS feeds. I have about 1.5 Million pages in my local index, and I get search results in 40ms - 70ms, thereabouts.

For every search that doesn't find results - and of course that's still the majority - it falls back to a meta-search combining results from Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia. The core of that metasearch is what Claude 3.5v2 generated for me in a one-shot back in Dec 2024. Kagi is just a metasearch with a very small local index as well, and my main purpose in building this was replacing Kagi for my needs.

The last 10% of my queries were widget queries like currency conversion, distance & temperature conversion etc that I was using for about 10% of my search queries.