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Ask HN: How are you productively using Claude code?

23 points nocobot | 1 comments | 13 Jul 25 08:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.223s | source

I tend to be sceptical when it comes to LLM based coding tools but many people seem to be raving about huge productivity gains which I wouldn’t mind as well.

However when trying cc it left me vey disappointed. For context I’m working on a relatively greenfield rust project and gave it tasks that I would consider appropriate for a junior level colleague like:

- change the return type of a trait and all it’s impls

- refactor duplicate code into a helper function

- replace some of our code with an external crate

it didn’t get any of them correct and took a very long time. Am I using the tool wrong?

How are you using cc or other agentic tools?

1. whinvik ◴[13 Jul 25 14:18 UTC] No.44550629[source]▶
Maybe someone has better insights but what I have seen is that Claude Code is not amazing on greenfield. I mean it will generate something, which will probably work, but the solution can often be over-engineered, or hacky.

I think we have to build up enough code for it to start appearing like brownfield, before Claude knows how to engineer correctly. Which kind of makes sense if we view Claude Code as a junior engineer with infinite stamina.

I also actually like to spin up Claude Code and Gemini in parallel to see what each one comes up with. Gemini will often do the simpler approach, but not often fully featured, and my solution often ends up taking the 2 solutions and refining in Cursor to come up with the final solution.