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A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

(www.sanity.io)
548 points kmelve | 6 comments | 02 Sep 25 19:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.038s | source | bottom
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ale ◴[02 Sep 25 22:21 UTC] No.45109875[source]▶
It’s about time these types of articles actually include the types of tasks being “orchestrated” (as the author writes) that aren’t just plain refactoring chores or React boilerplate. Sanity has quite a backlog of long-requested features and the message here is that these agents are supposedly parallelizing a lot of the work. What kind of staff engineer has “80% of their code” written by a “junior developer who doesn't learn“?
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mindwok ◴[03 Sep 25 03:12 UTC] No.45111902[source]▶
IMO “junior developer who doesn't learn“ is not quite right. Claude is more like an senior, highly academic engineer who has read all the literature but hasn't ever written any code. Amazing encyclopaedic knowledge, zero taste.

I've been building commercial codebases with Claude for the last few months and almost all of my input is on taste and what defines success. The code itself is basically disposable.

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1. all2 ◴[03 Sep 25 04:35 UTC] No.45112275[source]▶
> The code itself is basically disposable.

I'm finding this is the case for my work as well. The spec is the secret sauce, the code (and its many drafts) are disposable. Eventually I land on something serviceable, but until I do, I will easily drop a draft and start on a new one with a spec that is a little more refined.

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2. dotancohen ◴[03 Sep 25 08:04 UTC] No.45113350[source]▶
I just like to add that the database design is the real secret sauce, important even more than external APIs in my opinion.
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3. mattmanser ◴[03 Sep 25 10:51 UTC] No.45114289[source]▶
Well, not DB design really, you can achieve the same thing by defining your POCOs well. I switched entirely to code-first design years ago. If you haven't worked with a good ORM, you're really missing out, though I admit there was quite a bit of friction at first.
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4. bjornsing ◴[03 Sep 25 11:14 UTC] No.45114422[source]▶
So how do you best store and iterate on the spec? One way I guess would be to work on a branch an modify Claude.md to reflect what the branch is for. Is that a good approach? Are there others?
5. dotancohen ◴[03 Sep 25 11:49 UTC] No.45114641{3}[source]▶
No, I really am talking about how the database is organised. Tables representing objects, normalisation, etc. Whether or not it is accessed through the application with an ORM.
6. all2 ◴[03 Sep 25 16:29 UTC] No.45117683[source]▶
This is something that I've stumbled into as well. DB models AND dataflow. Getting both of those well spec'd makes things a lot easier.