A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

Does anyone have a link to a video that uses Claude Code to produce clean robust code that solves a non trivial problem (ie not tic tac toe or a landing page) more quickly than a human programmer can write? I don’t want a “demo”, I want a livestream from an independent programmer unaffiliated with any AI company and thus not incentivised to hype.

I want the code to have subsequently been deployed in production and demonstrably robust, without additional work outside of the livestream.

The livestream should include code review, test creation, testing, PR creation.

It should not be on a greenfield project, because nearly all coding is not.

I want to use Claude and I want to be more productive, but my experience to date is that for writing code beyond autocomplete AI is not good enough and leads to low quality code that can’t be maintained, or else requires so much hand holding that it is actually less efficient than a good programmer.

There are lots of incentives for marketing at the grassroots level. I am totally open to changing my mind but I need evidence.

Author here. I think that's a great idea.

I've considered live-streaming my work a few times, but all my work is on closed-source backend applications with sensitive code and data. If I ever get to work on an open-source product, I'll ask about live-streaming it. I think it would be a fun experience.

Although I cannot show the live stream or the code, I am writing and deploying production code for a brownfield project.

Two recent production features:

1. Quota crossing detection system for billable metrics - Complex business logic for billing infrastructure - Detects when usage crosses configurable thresholds across multiple metric types - Time: 4 days while working on other smaller tasks in parallel work vs probably 10 days focused without AI

2. Sentry monitoring wrapper for metering cron jobs - Reusable component wrapping all cron jobs with Sentry monitoring capabilities - Time: 1 day parallelled with other tasks vs 2 days focused

As you can probably tell, my work is not glamorous :D. It's all the head-scratching backend work, extending the existing system with more capabilities or to make it more robust.

I agree there is a lot of hand-holding required, but I'm betting on the systems getting better as time goes on. We are only two years into this AI journey, and the capabilities will most likely improve over the next few years.