Claude Code is not worth the time sink for anyone that already knows what they are doing. It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches. The hangover from all this wasted investment is going to be so painful.
There are two folders , one for the home directory and one for the project root. You put a CLAUDE.md file in either folder which essentially acts like a pre-prompt. There are like 5 'magic phrases' like "think hard", 'make a todo', 'research..' , and 'use agents' -- or any similar set of phrases that trigger that route.
Every command can be ran in the 'REPL' environment for instant feedback, it itself can teach you how to use the product, and /help will list every command.
The hooks document is a bit incomplete last I checked, but it's a fairly straightforward system, too.
That's about it -- now explain vi/vim/emacs/pycharm/vscode in a few sentences for me. The 'time sink' is like 4 hours for someone that isn't learning how to use the computer environment itself.
I agree. It’s a lot faster to tell it what I want and work on something else in the meantime. You end up ready code diffs more than writing code but it saves time.
Comments like this remind me that there's a whole host of people out there who have _no idea_ what these tools are capable of doing to ones productivity or skill set in general.
> It's not that hard to write boilerplate and standard llm auto-predict was 95% of the way to Claude Code, Continue, Aider, Cursor, etc without the extra headaches.
Uh, no. To start - yea, boilerplate is easy. But like a sibling comment to this one said - it's also tedious and annoying, let the LLM do it. Beyond that, though, is that if you apply some curiosity and that "anyone that already knows what they are doing" level prior knowledge you can use these tools to _learn_ a great deal.
You might think your way of doing things is perfect, and the only way to do them - but I'm more of the mindset that there's a lot of ways to skins most of these cats. I'm always open to better ways to do things - patterns or approaches I know nothing about that might just be _perfect_ for what I'm trying to do. And given that I do, in general, know what I'm asking it to do, I'm able to judge whether it's approach is any good. Sometimes it's not, no big deal. Sometimes it opens my mind to something I wasn't aware of, or didn't understand or know would apply to the given scenario. Sometimes it leads me into rabbit holes of "omg, that means I could do this ... over there" and it turns into a whole ass refactor.
Claude code has broadened my capabilities, professionally, tremendously. The way it makes available "try it out and see how it works" in terms of trying multiple approaches/libraries/databases/patterns/languages and how those have many times led me to learning something new - honestly, priceless.
I can see how these tools would scare the 9-5 sit in the office and bang out boilerplate stuff, or to those who are building things that have never been done before (but even then, there's caveats, IMO, to how effective it would/could be in these cases)... but to people writing software or building things (software or otherwise) because they enjoy it or because they're financial or professional lives depend on what they're building - absolutely astonishing to me anyone who isn't embracing these tools with open arms.
With all that said. I keep the MCP servers limited to only if I need it in that session and generally if I'm needing an MCP server in an on-going basis I'm better off building a tool or custom documentation around that thing. And idk about all that agent stuff - I got lucky and held out for Claude Code, dabbled a bit with others and they're leagues behind. If I need an agent I'ma just tap on CC, for now.
Context and the ability to express what you want in a way that a human would understand is all you need. If you screw either of those up, you're gonna have a bad time.
Well said. People seem to be binary: I code with it or I don’t.
Very few folks are talking about using the LLMs to sharpen THE DEVELOPER.
Just today I troubleshot an issue that likely would’ve taken me 2-3 hours without additional input. I wrapped it up and put a bow on it in 15 minutes. Oh, and also wrote a CLI tool fix the issue for me next time. Oh and wrote a small write up for the README for anyone else who runs into it.
Like… if you’re not embracing these tools at SOME level, you’re just being willfully ignorant at this point. There’s no badge of honor for willfully staying stuck in the past.
I’m still using it for home use, it’s totally adequate for one person code bases. Once you have teams and tribal knowledge to consider, Claude is a waste of time. It valuable for non-commercial or hobbyist grade work.
