Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading | Hacker News Reader

Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading

claude.nagdy.me

279 pointstaubek111 comments

I use claude code every day, I've written plugins and skills, use MCP servers, subagent workflows, and filled out the "Find your level" quiz as such.

According to the quiz, I am a beginner!

I was a bit confused by the quiz results as well. But it's just a bug :)

Level ranges for the 10 questions (the score ranges are in the html): Beginner 0~3, Intermediate 4~7, Advanced 8~10

Makes sense. But:

- You get 0 points if you press A/B, 1 point if you press C, 2 points if you press D

- Scoring uses a fallback to Beginner level if your total score exceeds the expected max which is 10

`const t = Object.values(r).find(a => l >= a.min && l <= a.max) ?? r.beginner`

Pressed D 5x then A 5x, got Advanced

And you’ll never guess who wrote it…

Did anyone not get beginner?

I got it as well.

I responded with a mix of mostly B and C answers and got “advanced.” Yet, as pointed out by another commenter, selecting all D answers (which would make you an expert!) gets you called a beginner.

I can only assume the quiz itself was vibe-coded and not tested. What an incredible time we live in.

Or that it's taking into account the Dunning-Kruger effect. In that, if you think you are an expert in all cases, you are really a beginner in everything.

I'm a beginner with agentic coding. I vibe code something most days, from a few lines up to refactors over a few files. I don't knowingly use skills, rarely _choose_ to call out to tools, haven't written any skills and only one or two ad hoc scripts, and have barely touched MCPs (because the few I've used seem flaky and erratic). I answered as such and got... intermediate.

I think it’s just buggy, I had the same results despite of knowing every single question in depth other than building a plugin.

A lot of these quizzes end up measuring whether you use the author's preferred workflow, not whether you're actually effective with the tool.

Those aren't the same thing.

Just ask it to fill it in for you.

Master level.

Hey! Thanks for the feedback on the quiz and you're right, the scoring logic has a bug. Already on my fix list. But the quiz is just the entry point. The real value is the 11 interactive modules and terminal simulators where you practice actual Claude Code commands, config builders that generate real files, and quizzes that explain the "why" when you get it wrong.

Would love to hear what you think of the actual modules.

If the entry point is obviously broken, most people won’t continue on to the “real value”, myself included

There seems to be a particular way that people working with LLMs start speaking - its like utterly confident, leaving no room for self introspection, borderline arrogant, and almost always selling the last thing they output. Hm

Strongly agree with the sentiment, but I'd say if you're familiar with the terminal you may as well just install it and truly 'learn by doing'!

I could see this being great for true beginners, but for them it might be nice to have even some more basics to start (how do I open the terminal, what is a command, etc).

I’m missing something here. Isn’t the best “doing” to actually use Claude to build stuff? The barrier to entry is so low.

Why do you need to memorize slash commands? They are somewhat useful and you can just read them from the autocomplete.

People will do anything to avoid RTFM.

Many of the same people probably use LLMs to avoid having to WTFM, so I’m not surprised.

find your level -> answer D to everything -> you're a beginner! And I thought I have high standards...

I feel there’s a lot of marketing and pure bullshit around LLMs configuration and conventions.

Law of diminishing returns applies here perfectly - you can learn prompting in 2 hours and get 400% performance boost or spend weeks on subagents and skills and Opus and st best it’s another 50% boost but not really - in my case in a good day Sonnet is a genius and on a bad one Opus is an moron. One day the same query consumes 6k tokens, the next 700k.

They want to get you hooked and need to show investors they’re super busy but in fact it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. And prompting, once you learn to give proper context, is far from rocket science.

Is that quiz correct? I have answered mostly C or D and maybe a few of B, but still got "Beginner". How?!

The quiz is super weird too. They A-C are knowledge questions D is something you’ve done.

Despite reading many articles / blog posts about Claude operation, this site had nuance about features that I hadn't encountered. Tests may not work correctly, but the value (for me) was, ironically, reading.

I love the pedagogical approach here and the ability to easily hone in on your level before diving into content. Your approach would work really well for other subjects as well.

thank you to OP -- this was a really easy way to look up how plugins inside of the claude code

This is awesome, thanks for sharing!

Side note: I don’t know what Anthropic changed but now Claude Code consumes the quota incredibly fast. I have the Max5 plan, and it just consumed about 10% of the session quota in 10 minutes on a single prompt. For $100/month, I have higher expectations.

Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investiga...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7mkn3/psa_claud...

That explains things. Im getting this: API Error: 400 {"error":{"message":"Budget has been exceeded! Current cost: 271.29866200000015, Max budget: 200.0","type":"budget_exceeded","param":null,"code":"400"}}

So I completetly ran out of tokens and haven’t even used it at all for the past couple of days, and last week my usage was very light. Let me scratch that, all my usage has been very light since I got this plan at work. It’s a an enterprise subscription I believe, hard to tell since it doesn’t connect directly to Anthropic, rather it goes through a proxy on Azure.

Im not liking this at all and all, so flaky and opaque. Not possible to get a breakdown on what the usage went on, right? Do we have to contact Anthropic for a refund or will they restore the bogus usage?

This is a serious problem with the fact that it's nearly impossible to understand what a "token" is and how to tame their use in a principled way.

It's like if cars didn't advertise MPG, but instead something that could change randomly.

Like if cars measured fuel efficiency or range using the knobs in the tread on your tire.

Relevant post: https://modal.com/blog/dollars-per-token-considered-harmful

(disclaimer: I work with the author)

I completely agree that requests are what should be charged for. But I think there are two things, given that requests aren't all going to cost the same amount:

1. Estimate free invoicing the requests and letting users figure it out after the fact. 2. Somehow estimating cost and telling users how much a request will cost.

We have 1, we want 2.

Also, certain models are more verbose than the others. We are basically at the mercy of a model who likes to ramble a lot.

im fiarly certain the knob on the machine that controls length of redundant comments and docblocks is cranked to 11. it makes me curious how much of their bottom line is driven by redundant comment output.

Anthropic really needs to opensource claude code.

One of the biggest turnoffs as a claude code user is the CC community cargo culting the subreddit because community outreach is otherwise poor.

I noticed 1M context window is default and no way not to use it. If your context is at 500-900k tokens every prompt, you’re gonna hit limits fast.

I had to double check that they'd removed the non-1M option, and... WTF? This is what's in `/config` → `model`

    1. Default (recommended)    Opus 4.6 with 1M context · Most capable for complex work
    2. Sonnet                   Sonnet 4.6 · Best for everyday tasks
    3. Sonnet (1M context)      Sonnet 4.6 with 1M context · Billed as extra usage · $3/$15 per Mtok
    4. Haiku                    Haiku 4.5 · Fastest for quick answers

So there's an option to use non-1M Sonnet, but not non-1M Opus?

Except wait, I guess that actually makes sense, because it says Sonnet 1M is billed as extra usage... but also WTF, why is Sonnet 1M billed as extra usage? So Opus 1M is included in Max, but if you want the worse model with that much context, you have to pay extra? Why the heck would anyone do that?

The screen does also say "For other/previous model names, specify with --model", so I assume you can use that to get 200K Opus, but I'm very confused why Anthropic wouldn't include that in the list of options.

What a strange UX decision. I'm not personally annoyed, I just think it's bizarre.

`/model opus` sets it to the original non-1M Opus... for now.

Thanks. I quickly burned through $100 in credit when I started using Opus 4.6 in OpenCode via OpenRouter. My session stopped and was getting an error not representative of credit availability, so was surprised after a few minutes when I finally realized Opus just destroyed those credits on a bullshit reasoning loop it got stuck in. Anthropic seems to know that the expanded context is better for their bottom line as they've defaulted it now.

And as others have said it's very easy to burn token usage on the $100/month plan. It's getting to the point where it's going to very much make sense to do model routing when using coding tooling.

Not sure why you were downvoted because this is actually correct. Can also use --model opus

export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_1M_CONTEXT=1

Anthropic is not building good will as a consumer brand. They've got the best product right now but there's a spring charging behind me ready to launch me into OpenCode as soon as the time is right.

Would you use Opus if you switched to OpenCode?

I'd like to use Opus with OpenCode right now to combine the best TUI agent app with the best LLM. But my understanding is Anthropic will nuke me from orbit if I try that.

You can use Opus with OpenCode anytime you want, just not with the Claude plan. You can use it via API with any provider, including Anthropic's API. You can use it with Github Copilot's plan. The only thing you can't do without getting banned is use OpenCode with one of Claude's plans.

I keep seeing this "you can use the inconvenient and unpredictably costly way all you want" pedantic kneejerk response so often lately.

It's like saying well humans can fly with a paraglider. It is correct and useless. Most here won't have cash to burn with unbounded opus api usage.

If you want to use Opus with a different coding harness along with a coding plan, you can use Github CoPilot. It even has built in authentication with OpenCode.

OpenCode with a Copilot Business sub and Opus 4.6 as the model works well

I'm looking at their plans (https://github.com/features/copilot/plans) it seems like the limits might be pretty low, even with the Pro+ plan which is 2x the cost of Claude Pro. It seems like Claude Pro might be 10-20x the Opus tokens for only twice the price.

Copilot has a totally different billing model. It's request based rather than token based. Counter-intuitively, in our case at least, it is way cheaper than token based pricing. One request can sometimes consume 2-4 million tokens but is billed as a single request (or it's multiplier if using a premium model like opus).

do you pay for the full context every prompt? what happened with the idea of caching the context server side?

You don't. Most of the time (after the first prompt following a compaction or context clear) the context prefix is cached, and you pay something like 10% of the cost for cached tokens. But your total cost is still roughly the area under a line with positive slope. So increases quadratically with context length.

It helps a ton but it doesn't last forever and you still have to pay to write to the cache

I've been jumping from Claude -> Gemini -> GPT Codex. Both Claude and Gemini really reduced quotas and so I cancelled. Only subbed GPT for the special 2x quota in March and now my allocation is done as well.

I decided to give opencode go a try today. It's $5 for the first month. Didn't get much success with Kimi K2, overly chatty, built too complex solutions - burned 40% of my allocation and nothing worked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

But Minimax m2.7. Wow, it feels just like Claude Opus 4.6. Really has serious chops in Rust.

Tomorrow/Wednesday will try a month of their $40 plan and see how it goes.

Minimax 2.7 is great. Not close to Claude but good enough for a lot of coding tasks.

GLM-5 (and 5.1) is surprisingly impressive too I’m finding.

They need to get to profitability because that sweet sweet Saudi subsidy cash is gone gone.

They wont be profitable at this point...they just dont realise they are eating their own tail.

I've heard this a few times lately, but this past weekend I built a website for a friend's birthday, and it took me several hours and many queries to get through my regular paid plan. I just use default settings (Sonnet 4.6, medium effort, thinking on).

I'm guessing Opus eats up usage much, much faster. I don't know what's going on, since a lot of people are hitting limits and I don't seem to be.

Update: Maybe the difference is that I think I was just using the vscode extension at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586176

I go back and forth between vscode and claude in the terminal, but that day I think I did vscode.

what they changed was peak vs off-peak usage metering.

using it on the weekend gets you more use than during weekdays 9-5 in US eastern time.

I waited until off peak hours to use Opus 4.6 to do some research. One prompt consumed 100% of my 5h limit and 15% of my weekly usage. Even off peak it's still insane. Opus didn't even manage to finish what it was doing.

I'm surprised it's during east coast working hours and not west coast.

the speculation i read was that it's trading hours, and they're getting a lot of load from the finance industry

Technically, this was Friday morning, so I think I was still in peak hours.

Even with Opus I don’t usually hit limits on the standard plan. But I am not doing professional work at the moment and I actually alternate between using the LLM and reading/writing code the old fashioned way. I can see how you’d blow through the quota quickly if you try to use LLMs as universal problem solvers.

Have had similar issues with costs sometimes being all over the map. I suspect that the major providers will figure this out as it’s an important consideration in the enterprise setting

This is a very normal thing to be the top comment on an article on how to use Claude Code.

I'm very surprised to see enshittification starting so early. I was expecting at last 3-4 years of VC subsidized gravy train.

This has been 6 months of constant decline so at this point I am wondering when they cliff it like wework

Looks like they are falling victim to their own slop. This smells a lot like the Amazon outages caused by mandated clanker usage.

Reminds me of when I would mess with my friends on "pay per text" plans by sending them 10 text messages instead of just 1. I should start paying attention to unattended laptops and blow up some token usage in the same manner.

It's almost like an evolution of bobby tables.

things are rough out there right now

Why wpuld anyone want to "learn" how to use some non-deterministic black box of bullshit that is frequently wrong? When you get different output fkr the same input, how do you learn? How is that beneficial? Why would you waste your time learning something that is frequently changing at the whims of some greedy third party? No thanks.

One of the things you can learn is how to get consistently useful results out of it despite it being a non-deterministic black box.

Because you will soon be working for it unless you learn to make it work for you.

It's fucking insane that we all have to pay rent every month to an AI company just to keep doing our jobs.

there is certainly a future where this isn't the case. Learning how to use AI and use it in your workflows will likely for sure be a part of any serious dev's future, but being beholden to a data center does not seem to reflect reality. Consider all the 5m-8m models and how powerful they are today compared to what the best models did 2 years ago. If you want to stay absolute bleeding edge model wise, sure you'll be stuck at a data center for some time...

Why isn't this just kinda seen as a repeat of the original birth of computers? Consider the IBM 350 (3.5mb) rented in the 50s for thousands per month. Now I have a drawer filled with SD cards that go up to 128gb that i cant even give away.

you literally don't have to. you can literally just keep doing your job the way that you always have.

I probably won't have a job for much longer if I do that, unfortunately

I don't think that is true.

To be clear I think AI coding agents are massively over hyped and turn code bases into unmaintainable buggy messes... I hate them.

But "leadership" everywhere has AI psychosis and at my company I expect I'd eventually be let go if I refused to use it.

hahaha fuck that. speak for yourself man.

No. 100% no. Learn the art of programming. Read K&R. In 5 years we will see "new is old" again. Tokens will become prohibitively expensive and, once more, another $steve.ballmer.2.0 will be yelling "developers ... developers". And Claude Code ... will become another "pentesting" / "linting" tool.

Are people again learning a new set of tools? Just tell the AI what you want, if the AI tool doesn't allow that then tell another Ai tool to make you a translation layer that will convert the natural language to the commands etc. What's the point of learning yet another tool?

I cannot decipher what you mean, have you mixed up the tabs, and wanted to post this somewhere else?

The linked site is a pretty good interactive Claude tutorial for beginners.

I don't understand the purpose of a tutorial for a natural language ai system.

That's like saying there's no point in attending a lecture on "how to get the best out of your time at University" because University courses are taught in spoken language so you could just ask the professors.

Claude Code is a tool that uses natural language ai systems. It itself is not a natural language ai system.

The idea that AI can write code like a seasoned software developer but not being able to use its own tooling that can be learned through 11 chapters tutorial doesn't make any sense.

Ok? I'm just explaining what claude code is, not pontificating about the capabilities of AI.

sounds like you might benefit from a tutorial!

Nope, why would anybody type commands to a machine that does natural language processing? Just tell the thing what you want.

"Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain: just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it. Unerringly. Forever. Without a complaint.

And that’s interesting in itself.

But blind obedience on its own, while initially fascinating, obviously does not make for a very likeable companion. What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how."[0]

- [0] https://www.brynmawr.edu/inside/academic-information/departm...

Yes, but you gotta learn what is possible.

I wouldn't have the thought to say to the machine to compact its context if I didn't know it has context and it can be compacted, right?

Why do I need to tell the machine to compact its context? This feels like homework and/or ceremony.

Because the machine is a tool and tools use proper and improper usage.

Good point, but IMHO the learning material for this should be the basics of LLM.

I think somewhere between 2016 and 2026 the market realized that programmers _love_ writing tools for themselves and others, and it went full bore into catering to the Bike Shedding economy, and now AI is accelerating this to an absurd degree.

Me too, I love writing tools for myself and end up yak shaving all the time but why there's a tutorial for a machine that understand human language? Just type down your inner monologue and it will do it.

honestly, the biggest reason i deep dove on proper .claude stuff, was because im a cheap ass. I saw someone mention their agents/ that delegates to cheaper models, and figure that was a way I could reign in my own overall usage, and its been true so far. Im sure im one of the very few heavy claude code users that still stubbornly sits on the pro version. It won't be forever, if i land an important contract or job, I'll pretty quickly hop to max or whatever, but for my own usage right now, im getting by.

Sure, maybe this stuff isn't crazy relevant 2 years from now, but right now? Giving your agent a clean way to navigate and delegate tasks to keep that context window clean? its 100% vital.

edit: hop to max*

I haven't used Claude, but the problem seems to be not refusal, but cheerful failure. "Sure, I'll help you with that!" And it produces something wrong in obvious and/or subtle ways.

I continue to find the non-stop claude spam fascinating. Gemini and ChatGPT have been very good for my needs, Claude not so much. Every week, if not every day, Claude spam is all over this site. But barely a peep about Gemini or ChatGPT coding capabilities.

That’s good to know your personal preferences. Please keep us posted!

I started with Claude for a basic JS project. It failed over and over. Gemini sorted out the same problems faster. Claude was always wanting to rip out huge blocks of code and replace them. Did it fix the problem? Almost never. It was a small JS code base Claude made itself.

Claude was my first coding AI, I liked it, I wanted to use it. But when I ran out of tokens I went to Gemini and got way better results.

And now every day I see Claude spam like it's the best thing that ever happened. Real world use tells a different story. I didnt just "one off" try it and have a problem. This is week and weeks of issues.

Claude fails basic questions when given very clear prompts - ON VANILLA JAVASCRIPT.

Tool de jour, similar to web framework of the month etc. Gemini and ChatGPT are just as useful

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