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Comment by paustint | Hacker News Reader

I recently listened to this episode from the Claude Code creator (here is the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQU9o_5rHC4) and it sounded like their development process was somewhat similar - he said something like their entire codebase has 100% churn every 6 months. But I would assume they have a more professional software delivery process.

I would (incorrectly) assume that a product like this would be heavily tested via AI - why not? AI should be writing all the code, so why would the humans not invest in and require extreme levels of testing since AI is really good at that?

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I've gotta say, it shows. Claude Code has a lot of stupid regressions on a regular basis, shit that the most basic test harness should catch.

I feel like our industry goes through these phases where there's an obvious thought leader that everyone's copying because they are revolutionary.

Like Rails/DHH was one phase, Git/GitHub another.

And right now it's kinda Claude Code. But they're so obviously really bad at development that it feels like a MLM scam.

I'm just describing the feeling I'm getting, perhaps badly. I use Claude, I recommended Claude for the company I worked at. But by god they're bloody awful at development.

It feels like the point where someone else steps in with a rock solid, dependable, competitor and then everyone forgets Claude Code ever existed.

There are plenty of competitors! I’ve been using Copilot, RovoCLI, Gemni, and there’s OpenAI thing.

This aren't competitors, they're clones, it's a different thing.

CC leads and they follow.

I use Claude Code because Anthropic requires me to in order to get the generous subscription tokens. But better tools exist. If I was allowed to use Cursor with my Claude sub I would in a heartbeat.

I mean, I'm slowly trying to learn lightweight formal methods (i.e. what stuff like Alloy or Quint do), behavior driven development, more advanced testing systems for UIs, red-green TDD, etc, which I never bothered to learn as much before, precisely because they can handle the boilerplate aspects of these things, so I can focus on specifying the core features or properties I need for the system, or thinking through the behavior, information flow, and architecture of the system, and it can translate that into machine-verifiable stuff, so that my code is more reliable! I'm very early on that path, though. It's hard!

I heard from somebody inside Anthropic that it's really two companies, one which are using AI for everything and the other which spends all their time putting out fires.

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