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A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

(www.sanity.io)
548 points kmelve | 1 comments | 02 Sep 25 19:34 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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. sanitycheck ◴[03 Sep 25 09:13 UTC] No.45113726[source]▶
Eh, Claude is like a magical spaniel that can read and write very quickly, with early-stage alzheimers, on amphetamines.

Yes it knows a lot and can regurgitate things and create plausible code (if I have it run builds and fix errors every time it changes a file - which of course eats tokens) but having absolutely no understanding of how time or space works leads to 90% of its great ideas being nonsensical for UI tasks. Everything is needing very careful guidance and supervision otherwise it decides to do something different instead. For back end stuff, maybe it's better.

I'm on the fence regarding overall utility but $20/month could almost be worth it for a tool that can add a ton of debug logging in seconds, some months.