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Ask HN: How are you productively using Claude code?

23 points nocobot | 2 comments | 13 Jul 25 08:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.458s | 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?

Show context
jameshiew ◴[15 Jul 25 12:19 UTC] No.44570369[source]▶
I've barely tried Claude Code but looking to experiment with it as well after hearing a lot of good things about it. I've had good experiences with the GitHub Copilot agent in VS Code for working with Rust, specifically with Sonnet 4.

Refactoring duplicate code into a helper function should be achievable with current agents. To replace existing code with an external crate , you could try giving the agent access to a browser (e.g. playwright-mcp), and instructing it to browse the crate docs. For anything that involves using APIs that may be past the knowledge cutoff for the agent's model, it's definitely worthwhile to have some MCP tools on hand that'll let it browse for up-to-date info - the brave-search and context7 MCPs are good.

replies(1): >>44573082 #
1. Atotalnoob ◴[15 Jul 25 16:40 UTC] No.44573082[source]▶
Could you share your mcp configuration? I am having trouble getting GitHub copilot to work with mcp.
replies(1): >>44582067 #
2. jameshiew ◴[16 Jul 25 13:24 UTC] No.44582067[source]▶
This is my `mcp.json` in VS Code (requires `uvx` and `npx` to be available):

  {
   "servers": {
    "context7": {
     "command": "npx",
     "args": [
      "-y",
      "@upstash/context7-mcp"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "fetch": {
     "command": "uvx",
     "args": [
      "mcp-server-fetch"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "git": {
     "command": "uvx",
     "args": [
      "mcp-server-git"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "playwright": {
     "command": "npx",
     "args": [
      "@playwright/mcp@latest"
     ],
     "type": "stdio"
    },
    "brave-search": {
     "command": "npx",
     "args": [
      "-y",
      "@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search"
     ],
     "env": {
      "BRAVE_API_KEY": "${input:brave-api-key}"
     },
     "type": "stdio"
    }
   },
   "inputs": [
    {
     "type": "promptString",
     "id": "brave-api-key",
     "description": "Brave Data for AI API Key",
     "password": true
    }
   ]
  }
The Sonnet 4 agent usually defaults to using `fetch` for getting webpages, but I've seen it sometimes try playwright on it's own. It seems the brave-search MCP server is deprecated now, so actually it's probably not the best option as a search MCP (you also need to sign up for an API key), right now it works well though!