A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

I've come around on something like this. I start by putting a little effort into a prompt and into providing context, but not a ton - and see where Claude Code gets with it. It might even get what I asked for working in terms of features, but it's garbage code. This is a vibe session, not caring about the code at all, or hardly at all.

I notice what worked and what didn't, what was good and what was garbage -- and also how my own opinion of what should be done changed. I have Claude Code help me update the initial prompt, help me update what should have been in the initial context, maybe add some of the bits that looked good to the initial context as well, and then write it all to a file.

Then I revert everything else and start with a totally blank context, except that file. In this session I care about the code, I review it, I am vigilant to not let any slop through. I've been trying for the second session to be the one that's gonna work -- but I'm open to another round or two of this iteration.

and do you find this takes longer or shorter than just doing it yourself from scratch?

I’m with you. Sometimes it really just feels like we’re just tacking on the cognitive load of managing the drunk senior in addition to the problem of hand instead of just dealing with the problem at hand.