The way Claude Code is going is exactly what I want out of a agentic coding tool with this "unix toolish" philosophy. I've been using Claude code since the initial public preview release, and have seen the direction over time.
The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
If you are tooling your codebase for optimal AI usage (Rules, MCP, etc), you should target a technology that can bridge the gap to headless usage. The fact Claude Code can trivially be used as part of automation through the tools means it's now the default way I thinking about coding agents (Codex, the npm package, is the same).
Disclaimer, I focus on helping companies tool their codebases for optimal agent usage, so I might have a bias here to easily configurable tools.
Not sure about that golden end state. Mine would be being in a room surround by screens with AI agents coding, designing, testing, etc. I would be there in the center giving guidance, direction, applying taste, etc…
All conversational, wouldn’t need to touch the keyboard 99% of the time.
I hate using voice for anything. I hate getting voice messages, I hate creating them. I get cold sweats just thinking about having to direct 10 AI Agents via voice. Just give me a keyboard and a bunch of screens, thanks.
I'm a millennial. I refuse to use voice controls. Never used them in my life and hope I never have to. There's a block in my brain that just refuses to let me talk to a machine to give it orders.
Though I'll gladly call it various foul names when it's refusing to do what I expected it to do.
My jaw hurts after an hour long meeting. I lose my voice after 2 hours. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed finger fatigue, even after 16 hours of typing and playing guitar.
Yeah, I think I’d rather click and type than talk, all day.
Probably worth trying one of the many dictation apps out there based on whisper. They can get most coding terms(lib names, tech stack names) accurately and its one of those things you have to really try for a week before dismissing fully.
Some of us who’ve been in this game for a while consider having healthy hands to be a nice break between episodes of RSI, PT, etc. YMMV of course but your muscle stamina won’t be the problem, it’s your tendons and eventually your joints.
How many of you people having problems with hand health vis a vis typing are still using home row?
I've done more typing than speaking for over 40 years now, and I've never had any carpel tunnel or joint problems with my hands (my feet on the other hand.. hoo boy!) and I've always used a standard layout flat QWERTY keyboard.. but I never bend my hands into that unnatural "home row" position.
I type >60wpm using what 40 years ago was "hunt and peck" and evolved over brute force usage into "my hands know where they keys are, I am right handed so my right hand monopolizes 2/3 of the keyboard, both hands know where every key is so either one can take over the keyboard if the other is unavailable (holding food, holding microphone for when I do do voice work, using mouse, etc)".
But as a result my hands also evolved this bespoke typing strategy which naturally avoids uncomfortable poses and uncomfortable repetition.
I'd wager that probably covers only ~30% of the world population, and considering that people who speak Mandarin for example use other apps, it probably covers an even larger slice of the Whatsapp userbase.
I’m the same. I love that writing allows you to think while typing so that you can review and revise your thoughts before letting them out in the world.
And don’t get me started on video vs text for learning purely non-physical stuff like programming…
I'm another millennial that doesn't like them. I type pretty fast, around 100 WPM, so outside environments where I can't type (e.g. while driving), I just never saw the appeal. Typing has a way of helping me shape my thoughts precisely that I couldn't replicate with first thinking about what I want to say, and then saying it precisely.
But I can appreciate that sitting down in front of a keyboard and going at it with low typing speed seems unnatural and frustrating for probably the majority of people. To me, in front of a keyboard is a fairly natural state. Somebody growing up 15 years before (got by without PCs in their early years) or after me (got by with a smartphone) probably doesn't find it as natural.
It's practice... Consciously try using the voice input for a while and see how you feel after a few days. I ended up liking it for some things more than others. This is typed via voice with minor edits after. This relies on the new models though - the older systems just didn't work as well.
I've consciously tried doing this for the past month on Android when chatting to Claude... when I'm alone. Don't think I could ever feel comfortable doing it around people.
I think I'm marginally faster using speech to text than using a predictive text touch keyboard.
But it makes enough mistakes that it's only very slightly faster, and I have a very mild accent. I expect for anyone with a strong accent it's a non starter.
On a real keyboard where I can touch type, it's much slower to use voice. The tooling will have to improve massively before it's going to be better to work by speaking to a laptop.
Voicemail universally sucks. However, when you're having a synchronous conversation with actual people, do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?
Email. Async comms make sense 99% of the time at my job. Unless there's deep work to be done, or pie-in-the-sky idea fabricating. Or rubber-ducky sessions. But I won't do those with AI.
Email is Calm Technology[0] for collaborative knowledge work, where you expected to spend hours on a single task. If something needs brainstorming, or quick back and forth, you jump on a more synchronous type of conversation (IM, call, in person meeting).
I almost never prefer a phone call, I'd rather go all the way to video/in-person or stick with text. I also prefer to push anything important that isn't extremely small out of instant messaging and to email.
Brainstorming/whiteboarding, 1:1s or performance feedback, team socialization, working through something very difficult (e.g. pair debugging): in-person or video
Incidents, asking for quick help/pointers, small quick questions, social groups, intra-team updates: IM
Bigger design documents and their feedback, trickier questions or debugging that isn't urgent, sharing cool/interesting things, inter-team updates: Email
> do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?
It's hard for me to believe that there are psychopaths among us who prefer call on the phone, slack huddle or even organize meetings instead of just calmly writing messages on IM over coffee.
Yes this is known etiquette eg in China where voice memos are widely used on WeChat.
Sending a voice memo is slightly rude for business as it says I the sender value my time to dash something off more even if it’s inconvenient for you the receiver who has to then stop and listen to it.
Between friends is a bit different as voice has a level of personal warmth.
I would agree but i use voice heavily with AI agents and here is why: no matter how fast i can type, i can speak much faster, and while i do other tasks.
One advantage is speaking is generally faster than typing. Imagine instead of talking to a bunch of AI you’re talking to a room full of coworkers about the architecture to develop.
If that’s the future, that means a massive reduction in software engineers no? What you are describing would require one technical product manager, not a team of software engineers.
I would guess it's most likely both. The world could use a lot more software but it's not an unlimited appetite and the increase in productivity of SWEs will depress wages.
How many places have you worked where there's no backlog in Jira and the engineers legitimately have nothing to do other than sit around waiting for work to get assigned ‽
Define everyone. I know a lot of SWEs who don't take their job for granted, always strive to add value, and try to keep skilled constantly and try to be extremely helpful. Maybe in SV where the salaries are high there is some schadenfreude but I don't see that on general for what is a worldwide industry. In most places it's just a standard job.
I don't understand the pleasure of putting people out of work and the pain on people's lives and careers but I guess that's just me.
Except that AI agents are the new offshoring. The new hotshot developer will be someone who understands what clients want deeply, knows the domain, has sufficient engineering skill to understand the system that needs to be built and is able to guide swarms of coding agents efficiently.
Having all this in one person is super valuable because you lose a lot of speed and fidelity in information exchange between brains. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could hit like 30-50 kloc/day within a few years. I can hit 5-10kloc/day doing this stuff depending on a lot of factors, and that's driving ~2 agents at a time mostly. Imagine driving 20.
You can't just be a solution architect, you have to be a systems architect, which is sort of the culmination of the developer skillset. I don't write code anymore really, but I know the purpose of everything my agents are doing and when they're making mistakes. I also have to know the domain, and be able to interact with clients, but without the technical chops I wouldn't be able to deliver on the level that I do.
How hard do you really think the job of “technical product manager” is? I'm not asking in a childish "management doesn't do anything" sort of way, but want to frame the question "if software engineers needed to retrain to be technical product managers, how many would sink, and how many would swim?
I can easily see this happening in 2-3 years. Some chat apps already have outstanding voice mode, such as GPT-4o. It's just a matter of integrating that voice mode, and getting the understanding and generated code to be /slightly/ better than it is today.
It seems unlikely that any one individual would be able to output a sufficient amount of context for that to not go off the rails really quickly (or just be extremely inefficient as most agents sit idle waiting for verification of their work)
No. The "golden" end state of coding agents is free and open source coding agents running on my machine (or in whatever machine I want). Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal? For every `ls`, `ps`, `kill`? No sense, right? Well, same for LLMs.
I'm not saying "ban propietary LLMs", I'm saying: hackers (the ones that used to read sites like this) should have as their main tools free and open source ones.
> Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal?
Yes, because hardware and electricity aren't free.
I literally DO pay for every command. I just don't get an itemized bill so there's no transparency about it. Instead, I made some lump-sum hardware payment which is amortized over the total usage I get out of it, plus some marginal increase in my monthly electric bill when I use it.
Sure but the same thing would apply to the original comment, only that it's a locally hosted LLM that you're buying electricity for. That's different than paying rent for the privilege of using those commands and being at the mercy of the providers who choose to modify or EOL those commands as they see fit.
I agree with the sentiment, but isn’t Claude Code (the CLI) FOSS already? (Not sure it’s coupled to Claude the model API either, but if it is I imagine it’s not too hard to fix.)
> Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
I was doing this with Cursor and MCPs. Got about a full day of this before I was rate limited and dropped to the slowest, dumbest model. I’ve done it with Claude too and quickly exhaust my rate limits. And the PRs are only “good to go” about 25% of the time, and it’s often faster to just do it right than find out where the AI screwed up.
> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on.
I see your point but in the other hand how depressing to be left only with the most soul crushing part of software entering - the Jira ticket.
I personally find figuring out what the product should be is the fun part. There still a need for architecting a plan, but the actual act of writing code isn't what gives me personal joy, it's the building of something new.
I understand the craft of code itself is what some people love though!
Thing is, LLMs are already better than people at the "architecting a plan" and "figuring out what the product should be" in details that go beyond high-level vibes. They do that even better than raw coding.
In fact, that's the main reason I like developing quick prototypes and small projects with LLMs. I use them less to write code for me, and more to cut through the bullshit "research" phase of figuring out what code to write, which libraries to pick, what steps and auxiliary work I'm missing in my concept, etc.
They’re great if word count is your measure. But it’s hard for LLMs to know the whole current SOTA and come up with something innovative and insightful. The same as 99% of human proposals.
Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough?
Paired with great execution
LLMs definitely know more of the current SOTA in everything than anyone alive, and that doesn't even count in the generous amount of searching capability granted to them by vendors. They may fail to utilize results fully due to limited reasoning ability, but they more than make up for it in volume.
> Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution
It's more like 0.01%, and it's not the target anyway. The world doesn't run on breakthroughs and great execution, it runs on the 99.99% of the so-so work and incremental refinement.
Say what you will, but this would have the wonderful side effect of forcing people who write JIRA tickets to actually think through and clearly express what it is they want built.
The moment I am able to outsource work for Jira tickets to a level that AI actually delivers a reasonable pull request, many corporate managers will seriously wonder why keep the offshoring team around.
It seems like the Holy Grail here has become: "A business is one person, the CEO, sitting at his desk doing deals and directing virtual and physical agents to do accounting, run factories, manage R&D, run marketing campaigns, everything." That's it. A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer, and a big AI/robotics bill = every business. No pesky employees to pay. That's the ultimate end game here, that's what these guys want. Is that what we want?
Keep going, the end end goal is that even the customers are AI. And the company doesn't sell anything or do anything, it just trades NFTs and stocks and digital goods. And the money isn't real, it's all crypto. This is the ideal, to create nothing, to sell nothing to no one, and for somehow that to mean you created "value" to society and therefore should be rewarded in material terms. And greatly at that, the people setting all this up expect to be at the tippy top of the social ladder for this "contribution".
This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion. It's exactly what you expect from some reinforcement learning algorithm that only knows how to climb a gradient to maximize a singular reward. The concept of commerce has become the proverbial rat in the skinner box. It has figured out how to mainline the heroin drip if it just holds down the shock button and rewires its brain to get off on the pain. Sure it's an artificial high and hurts like hell to achieve it, but what else is there to live for? We made the line going up mean everything, so that's all that matters now. Doesn't matter if we don't want it, they want it. So that's what it's going to be.
The owner (human) would say "build a company, make me a billion dollars" and that would be the only valuable input needed from him/her. Everything else would be derived & executed by the AI swarm, while owner plays video games (or generally enjoy the product of other people's AI-labor) 100% of the time.
I'd argue GPT4 (2022) was already AGI. It could output anything you (or Tim Cook, or any other smart guy) could possibly output given the relevant context. The reason it doesn't right now is we are not passing in all your life's context. If we achieve this, a human CEO has no edge over an AI CEO.
People are figuring this problem out very quickly, therefore the explosion of agentic capabilities happening right now even though the base model fundamentally does the same stuff as GPT4.
Of all the professions that are at the risk of being downsized, I think lawyers are up there. We used to consult our lawyers so frequently about things big and small. We have now completely removed the small stuff from that equation. And most of our stuff is small. There is very little of the big stuff and I think LLMs aren't too far from taking care of that as well.
Yup I have said for the past year to anyone that'll listen, that the concept of hourly (white collar) work will go away.
And there's no better example of hourly work than lawyers.
Personally, I've always disliked the model of billing by the hour because it incentivizes the wrong things, but it is easier to get clients to justify these costs (because they're used to thinking in that framework).
I'd rather take on the risk and find ways to do more efficient work. It's actually FUN to do things that way. And nowadays, this is where AI can benefit in that framework the most.
So far, automation has only ever increased the need for software development. Jevons Paradox plus the recursive nature of software means that there's always more stuff to do.
The real threats to our profession are things like climate change, extreme wealth concentration, political instability, cultural regression and so on. It's the stuff that software stands on that one should worry about, not the stuff that it builds towards.
Maybe I’m not think big picture enough… but have you ever tried using generative AI (i.e., a transformer) to create a circuit schematic? They fail miserably. Worse than Chat GPT-2 at generating text.
The current SOTA models can do some impressive things, in certain domains. But running a business is way more than generating JavaScript.
The way I see it, only some jobs will be impacted by generative AI in the near term. Not replaced, augmented.
Because of human factors, no complains, can do overtime as much as electricity is on, no unions, and everything else that a good CEO to the whims of exponential growth for their shareholder likes to do so much.
Aider is definitely in the same camp. Last time I checked, they weren't optimizing for the full "agent infinitely looping until completion" usecase, and didn't have MCP support.
But it's 100% the same class of tool and the awesome part of the unixy model is hopefully agents can be substituted in for each other in your pipeline for whichever one is better for the usecase, just like models are interoperable.
I tried aider today with a Gemini API key and billing account. It’s not close to the experience I have with Claude Code on Saturday which was able to implement a full feature.
The main difference is I interact with Claude Code only through conversation. Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools, the model and Aider. For example, constantly having to add files and parse the less than ideal console output compared to how Claude code handles user feedback.
"Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools"
I personally see that as a plus, because other tools are lacking on the tool side. Aider seems to have solid "traditional" engineering behind its tooling.
"constantly having to add files"
That's fair. However, Aider automatically adds files that trigger it via comments and it asks to add the files that are mentioned in the conversation.
"parse the less than ideal console output"
That's fair too. Still, the models aren't there yet, so I value tools that don't hide the potential crap that thee models produce 20-30% of the time.
The vision of submitting a feature request and receiving a ready-to-review PR is equally compelling and horrifying from the standpoint of strategy management.
Like Anthropic and most big tech companies, they don't want to show off the best until they need to. They used to stockpile some cool features, and they have time to think about their strategy. But now I feel like they are in a rush to show off everything and I'm worried whether the management has time to think about the big picture.
Setting aside predictions about the future and what is best for humanity and all that for a moment this is just such a bummer on a personal level. My whole job would become the worst parts of my job.
(please pardon the self-promotion) This is exactly what my product https://cheepcode.com does (connects to your Linear/Jira/etc and submits PRs to GitHub) - I agree that’s the golden state, and that’s why I’m rushing to get out of private beta as fast as I can* :) It’s a bootstrapped operation right now which limits my speed a bit but this is the vision I’ve been working towards for the past few months.
*I have a few more safety/scalability changes to make but expecting public launch in a few weeks!
> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
Isn’t that effectively the promise of the most recently released OpenAI codex?
From the reviews I’ve been able to find so far though, quality of output is ehh.
played around with connecting https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master via mcp to create a prd which basically replaces the ticket grooming process and then executing it with claude code creating a branch named like the ticket and pushing after having created the unit tests and constant linting.
Claude Code is my favorite way to use LLMs for coding.
However I feel what we really need is to have an open source version of it where you can pass any model and also you can compare different models answers.
(Aider and other alternatives really doesn't feel as good to use as Claude Code)
I know this is not what anthropic would want to do as it removes their moat, but as a consumer I just want the best model and not be tied to an ecosystem. (Which I imagine is the largest fear of LLM model providers)
OpenAI codex is probably the closest to what you're talking about, its open source and you can use models from any provider. It's not as good as claude code right now but I bet it wont take long for them to catch up.
Aider has had support for Python and shell scripting [0] for a long time.
I made a screencast [1] recently that included ad-hoc bash scripting aider as part of the effort to add support for 130 new programming languages. It may give a flavor for how powerful this approach can be.
Freaking love Aider. MCPs are supported soon as well. Testing a development branch. Then you can actually develop end to end using PR, tickets etc using models you trust.
You can disable the automatic commits, but you cannot disable the automatic modification of files. One nice thing about Claude Code is that you can give it feedback on a patch before it is even applied.
Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I can easily spend $20+ using Claude Code for 2 hours. I've stopped using it because it was too expensive for my personal projects.
Thanks, this is helpful. I tried Claude Code, and thought it had a lot of potential, but I was on track to spend at least $20/day.
For a tool that radically increases productivity (say 2x), I think it could still make sense for a VC funded startup or an established company (even $100/day or $36k/year is still a lot less than hiring another developer). But for a side project or bootstrap effort, $36k/year obviously significantly increases cash expenses. $100/month does not, however.
So, I'm going to go back and upgrade to Max and try it again. If that keeps my costs to $100/month, thats a really different value proposition.
Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you saying I can use Claude Code for a flat rate of $100/month? What are the limits? What if I use more than $100 worth of Code in a month? Their website doesn't seem to make it clear.
Edit:
Found the answer to my own questions
> Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours[1]
Really tempted to go for this as well. Only wish I could access flat rate Claude through VS Code Cline (or an extension like it) as well - that would be the complete package. $100 / month + ~$$ / day in API credits is gonna get pricey.
I’ve really enjoyed the recent latent space podcasts. I don’t think there is any person†/podcast (or perhaps other content) approaching your general output while maintaining the high SNR. I am continually amazed at the volume and value of public work you’re producing over the last (half?) decade while still growing various businesses. I hope others can find similar productivity gradients. I know you roughly share what works for you but it is not so easy to reproduce.
thanks man, this was nice to read :) idk if it helps but my principles (tm) are here http://learninpublic.org/
i do feel like SNR * quantity could be higher, but its still a challenge to even keep it where it is today. my work life balance/stress levels aren't the best and everyone expects everything from me.
If I was making an AI code assistant, the last thing I would do is to lock it in to a particular foundation model provider.
The only possible way for this to be a successful offering is if we have just now reached a plateau of model effectiveness and all foundation models will now trend towards having almost identical performance and capabilities, with integrators choosing based on small niceties, like having a familiar SDK.
Other than the command/arguments there isn't much locking you in. It's just input/output. Swap it out for something else or simply wrap it. There's not much going on here.
Claude Code could already be used in non-interactive mode, and by extension it could be integrated into other apps in the same manner as any other UNIX command line utility.
This SDK currently supports only command line usage. Isn't that just what we already had?
I don't understand what's actually new here. What am I missing?
I would also recommend Codebuff (https://www.codebuff.com/), a great CLI code assistant comparable to Claude Code, which can save a lot on token costs.
(I am not affiliated with this project, just a user.)
> You may not access or use, or help another person to access or use, our Services in the following ways:
> 2. To develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services.
Can somebody please tell me what software product or service doesn’t compete with general intelligence?
Imagine selling intelligence with a legal term that, under strict interpretation, says you’re not allowed to use it for anything.
Is it so vague it’s unenforceable?
How do we own the output if we can’t use it to compete with a general intelligence?
Is it just a “lol nerd no one cares about the legal terms” thing? If no one cares then why would they have a blanket prohibition on using the service ?
We’re supposed to accept liability to lose a lawsuit just to accept their slop? So many questions
When you have model lock in, it’s a big detriment to use because if anyone comes out with SOTA models, and you have already invested infra development on this, you are stuck. Even if you open it up, it’s likely not to work as your model is likely trained specifically on that CLI. Just look at Codex CLI, you can use Gemini 2.5 pro, but it will get randomly stuck or fail a lot vs OpenAI models
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis on the HN user sentiment on the varying AI models over time. I'd be curious to see what that looks like. Increasingly, I'm seeing more and more people talk positively about Gemini and Google (and having used Gemini recently, I align with that sentiment)
I think Bard (lol) and Gemini got a late start and so lots of folks dismissed it but I feel like they've fully caught up. Definitely excited to see what Gemini 3 vs GPT-5 vs Claude 4 looks like!
I'm using Windsurf IDE so have all the main models available. Mainly doing Python, JS, HTML, CSS, some Go. I have found Claude 3.7 outperforms Gemini 2.5 and ChatGPT 4.1, 4o, Deepseek, etc, for my work in most cases.
I suspect that I experience some performance throttling with Gemini 2.5 in my Windsurf setup because it's just not as good as anecdotal reports by others, and benchmarks.
I also seem to run up against a kind of LLM laziness sometimes when they seemingly can't be bothered to answer a challenging prompt ... a consequence of load balancing in action perhaps.
I’ve tried Gemini 2.5 Pro a couple of times and honestly don’t like its output. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is much better at correctly understanding and executing my imprecise prompts.
Gemini 2.5 Flash on the other hand has excellent. I’ve started using it to rewrite whole files after talking the changes through with Claude, because it’s just so ridiculously fast (and dependable enough for applying already outlined changes).
You can try my project Plandex[1] to use Gemini in a way that's comparable to Claude Code without copy-pasting. By default, it combines models from the major providers—Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
The default planning/coding models are still Sonnet 3.7 for context size under 200k, but you can switch to Gemini with `\set-model gemini-preview`.
I really like the idea of Claude Code but its rare that I fully spec out a feature on my first request and I can't see how it can be used for frontend features that require a lot of browser-centric iteration/debugging to get right.
I can't say that I don't love Gemini. I use it a lot, and the huge context window does help. But I can also say that I much prefer how Claude writes code.
I'm building a browser based tool that runs on your computer, with full tool access of course, that works with all the major models and is far better and more ergonomic to use than code, codex, etc.
If you (or anyone else reading this) wants to try out the upcoming beta give me a ping. (see profile.)
Hasn't this been invented already in multiple shapes and forms..? I wrote my own version clai[1] over a year ago which does exactly this, only that it has tools support + is multi vendor.
Honestly though, CLI tools for accessing LLMs (including piping content in and out of them) is such a clearly good idea I'm glad to see more tools implementing the pattern.
What is really needed is a usable multiplexed pipeline management and event system.
Then you can instrument through metaprogramming. For instance, an alert system could be:
"If the threshold goes over 1.0, contact the on-call person through their preferred method" - which may work ... maybe.
Or:
if any( "check_condition {x}", condition_set ):
find_person("on call", right now).contact("preferred")
... the point is to divide everything up into small one-shots, parallelize them, use it as glue/api. Then you get composability. If you can get a framework for coroutines going then it's real game on. The final step is "needs based pulling" which is an inversion of mcp - contextual streams as event based sub-systems.
Things are still too slow for this to be not painful but that won't be the case forever.
Currently everything is linear. Doesn't have to be ... really doesn't.
The way Claude Code is going is exactly what I want out of a agentic coding tool with this "unix toolish" philosophy. I've been using Claude code since the initial public preview release, and have seen the direction over time.
The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
If you are tooling your codebase for optimal AI usage (Rules, MCP, etc), you should target a technology that can bridge the gap to headless usage. The fact Claude Code can trivially be used as part of automation through the tools means it's now the default way I thinking about coding agents (Codex, the npm package, is the same).
Disclaimer, I focus on helping companies tool their codebases for optimal agent usage, so I might have a bias here to easily configurable tools.
Not sure about that golden end state. Mine would be being in a room surround by screens with AI agents coding, designing, testing, etc. I would be there in the center giving guidance, direction, applying taste, etc… All conversational, wouldn’t need to touch the keyboard 99% of the time.
That's what I want and look forward one day
Is this a me thing, or a millenial thing?
I hate using voice for anything. I hate getting voice messages, I hate creating them. I get cold sweats just thinking about having to direct 10 AI Agents via voice. Just give me a keyboard and a bunch of screens, thanks.
I'm a millennial. I refuse to use voice controls. Never used them in my life and hope I never have to. There's a block in my brain that just refuses to let me talk to a machine to give it orders.
Though I'll gladly call it various foul names when it's refusing to do what I expected it to do.
You guys all sound like you have more hands than I do. And nothing else in them.
My jaw hurts after an hour long meeting. I lose my voice after 2 hours. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed finger fatigue, even after 16 hours of typing and playing guitar.
Yeah, I think I’d rather click and type than talk, all day.
Probably worth trying one of the many dictation apps out there based on whisper. They can get most coding terms(lib names, tech stack names) accurately and its one of those things you have to really try for a week before dismissing fully.
1. Superwhisper - https://superwhisper.com
2. Macwhisper - https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper
3. Carelesswhisper - https://carelesswhisper.app
Remind me: 20 years
Some of us who’ve been in this game for a while consider having healthy hands to be a nice break between episodes of RSI, PT, etc. YMMV of course but your muscle stamina won’t be the problem, it’s your tendons and eventually your joints.
Voice as an interface is a life changer if you've ever had any bit of RSI at any point.
How many of you people having problems with hand health vis a vis typing are still using home row?
I've done more typing than speaking for over 40 years now, and I've never had any carpel tunnel or joint problems with my hands (my feet on the other hand.. hoo boy!) and I've always used a standard layout flat QWERTY keyboard.. but I never bend my hands into that unnatural "home row" position.
I type >60wpm using what 40 years ago was "hunt and peck" and evolved over brute force usage into "my hands know where they keys are, I am right handed so my right hand monopolizes 2/3 of the keyboard, both hands know where every key is so either one can take over the keyboard if the other is unavailable (holding food, holding microphone for when I do do voice work, using mouse, etc)".
But as a result my hands also evolved this bespoke typing strategy which naturally avoids uncomfortable poses and uncomfortable repetition.
> My jaw hurts after an hour long meeting
I’m very sorry for you if this is literally true. I would urge you to seek medical help, as this is not normal at all.
You may want to try listening to others during meetings rather than talk ceaselessly
The only AI feature I want added to WhatsApp is transcribing voice messages!
I don't get why this isn't a feature for a long time yet
There is but needs to be enabled. Go to Settings > Chats > Voice message transcripts and turn the feature on
English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian only
I'd wager that probably covers only ~30% of the world population, and considering that people who speak Mandarin for example use other apps, it probably covers an even larger slice of the Whatsapp userbase.
I think it is less than 20% of world population are native speakers and will receive audio messages in those languages.
On my iPhone I can choose from hundreds of languages
For transcribing WhatsApp audio messages?
Awesome, thanks!
I’m the same. I love that writing allows you to think while typing so that you can review and revise your thoughts before letting them out in the world.
And don’t get me started on video vs text for learning purely non-physical stuff like programming…
I'm another millennial that doesn't like them. I type pretty fast, around 100 WPM, so outside environments where I can't type (e.g. while driving), I just never saw the appeal. Typing has a way of helping me shape my thoughts precisely that I couldn't replicate with first thinking about what I want to say, and then saying it precisely.
But I can appreciate that sitting down in front of a keyboard and going at it with low typing speed seems unnatural and frustrating for probably the majority of people. To me, in front of a keyboard is a fairly natural state. Somebody growing up 15 years before (got by without PCs in their early years) or after me (got by with a smartphone) probably doesn't find it as natural.
It's practice... Consciously try using the voice input for a while and see how you feel after a few days. I ended up liking it for some things more than others. This is typed via voice with minor edits after. This relies on the new models though - the older systems just didn't work as well.
I've consciously tried doing this for the past month on Android when chatting to Claude... when I'm alone. Don't think I could ever feel comfortable doing it around people.
I think I'm marginally faster using speech to text than using a predictive text touch keyboard.
But it makes enough mistakes that it's only very slightly faster, and I have a very mild accent. I expect for anyone with a strong accent it's a non starter.
On a real keyboard where I can touch type, it's much slower to use voice. The tooling will have to improve massively before it's going to be better to work by speaking to a laptop.
Voicemail universally sucks. However, when you're having a synchronous conversation with actual people, do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?
Email. Async comms make sense 99% of the time at my job. Unless there's deep work to be done, or pie-in-the-sky idea fabricating. Or rubber-ducky sessions. But I won't do those with AI.
Email is Calm Technology[0] for collaborative knowledge work, where you expected to spend hours on a single task. If something needs brainstorming, or quick back and forth, you jump on a more synchronous type of conversation (IM, call, in person meeting).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology
I almost never prefer a phone call, I'd rather go all the way to video/in-person or stick with text. I also prefer to push anything important that isn't extremely small out of instant messaging and to email.
Brainstorming/whiteboarding, 1:1s or performance feedback, team socialization, working through something very difficult (e.g. pair debugging): in-person or video
Incidents, asking for quick help/pointers, small quick questions, social groups, intra-team updates: IM
Bigger design documents and their feedback, trickier questions or debugging that isn't urgent, sharing cool/interesting things, inter-team updates: Email
IM, 100%. Otherwise only the loud people ever speak, whether or not they have anything useful to say.
> do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?
It's hard for me to believe that there are psychopaths among us who prefer call on the phone, slack huddle or even organize meetings instead of just calmly writing messages on IM over coffee.
receiving audio = slow
sending audio = fast
Yes this is known etiquette eg in China where voice memos are widely used on WeChat. Sending a voice memo is slightly rude for business as it says I the sender value my time to dash something off more even if it’s inconvenient for you the receiver who has to then stop and listen to it. Between friends is a bit different as voice has a level of personal warmth.
I don't know. I'm 40 but I do like pair programming so…
I would agree but i use voice heavily with AI agents and here is why: no matter how fast i can type, i can speak much faster, and while i do other tasks.
One advantage is speaking is generally faster than typing. Imagine instead of talking to a bunch of AI you’re talking to a room full of coworkers about the architecture to develop.
If that’s the future, that means a massive reduction in software engineers no? What you are describing would require one technical product manager, not a team of software engineers.
Or a massive increase in the amount of software that gets written.
If the cost of writing software goes down, demand for it will presumably go up...
I would guess it's most likely both. The world could use a lot more software but it's not an unlimited appetite and the increase in productivity of SWEs will depress wages.
Just like chainsaws depressed the wages of lumberjacks, and cars decreased the need for people to move around.
Only if there is something for that software to do.
How many places have you worked where there's no backlog in Jira and the engineers legitimately have nothing to do other than sit around waiting for work to get assigned ‽
> that means a massive reduction in software engineers
That's exactly what everyone is hoping for. Well, everyone except software engineers, of course
Define everyone. I know a lot of SWEs who don't take their job for granted, always strive to add value, and try to keep skilled constantly and try to be extremely helpful. Maybe in SV where the salaries are high there is some schadenfreude but I don't see that on general for what is a worldwide industry. In most places it's just a standard job.
I don't understand the pleasure of putting people out of work and the pain on people's lives and careers but I guess that's just me.
The valuable skills will be creativity, taste, curation, prioritisation etc.
All those skills can be applied to engineering as well. What makes Fabrice Bellard great? Its not just technical skill I think.
I think some of the most successful people will be a subset of engineers but also Steve Jobs types and artists
Most companies don't care about developers of their level, rather they offshore to the lowest bid.
Except that AI agents are the new offshoring. The new hotshot developer will be someone who understands what clients want deeply, knows the domain, has sufficient engineering skill to understand the system that needs to be built and is able to guide swarms of coding agents efficiently.
Having all this in one person is super valuable because you lose a lot of speed and fidelity in information exchange between brains. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could hit like 30-50 kloc/day within a few years. I can hit 5-10kloc/day doing this stuff depending on a lot of factors, and that's driving ~2 agents at a time mostly. Imagine driving 20.
I know how it feels, because I have been in enough projects driving offshoring teams.
Here is an unwanted advice, it is not going to be the new hotshot developer, rather hotshot technical and solution architects.
The dream of CASE tools is finally here, pump the requirements into the software factory (aks instruction files), and the replicator handles the rest.
You can't just be a solution architect, you have to be a systems architect, which is sort of the culmination of the developer skillset. I don't write code anymore really, but I know the purpose of everything my agents are doing and when they're making mistakes. I also have to know the domain, and be able to interact with clients, but without the technical chops I wouldn't be able to deliver on the level that I do.
Yes.
How hard do you really think the job of “technical product manager” is? I'm not asking in a childish "management doesn't do anything" sort of way, but want to frame the question "if software engineers needed to retrain to be technical product managers, how many would sink, and how many would swim?
I can easily see this happening in 2-3 years. Some chat apps already have outstanding voice mode, such as GPT-4o. It's just a matter of integrating that voice mode, and getting the understanding and generated code to be /slightly/ better than it is today.
That future's maybe closer than that.
https://zackproser.com/blog/openai-codex-review
It seems unlikely that any one individual would be able to output a sufficient amount of context for that to not go off the rails really quickly (or just be extremely inefficient as most agents sit idle waiting for verification of their work)
Basically the Star Trek model of computing.
All that’s really needed for this to work is a team of writers and plot conveniences.
And a general acceptance that every week something will go horribly wrong.
In this "end state" what would the AI mind machine even have to code?
That sounds like torture for me lol
No. The "golden" end state of coding agents is free and open source coding agents running on my machine (or in whatever machine I want). Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal? For every `ls`, `ps`, `kill`? No sense, right? Well, same for LLMs.
I'm not saying "ban propietary LLMs", I'm saying: hackers (the ones that used to read sites like this) should have as their main tools free and open source ones.
> Can you imagine paying for every command you run in your terminal?
Yes, because hardware and electricity aren't free.
I literally DO pay for every command. I just don't get an itemized bill so there's no transparency about it. Instead, I made some lump-sum hardware payment which is amortized over the total usage I get out of it, plus some marginal increase in my monthly electric bill when I use it.
Sure but the same thing would apply to the original comment, only that it's a locally hosted LLM that you're buying electricity for. That's different than paying rent for the privilege of using those commands and being at the mercy of the providers who choose to modify or EOL those commands as they see fit.
I agree with the sentiment, but isn’t Claude Code (the CLI) FOSS already? (Not sure it’s coupled to Claude the model API either, but if it is I imagine it’s not too hard to fix.)
Claude Code is closed source and Anthropic does take downs of decompilations.
Anthropic also announced something along those lines today as well, in beta: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action...
How did you find this? It doesn't pop up on any news sections on their site. I want to be on top of these kinds of things too!
In the age of hallucinations and AI summaries, actually getting news from the source is a revolutionary concept.
Fwiw, it was in their newsletter they sent out yesterday (it's how I learned about it).
> Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
I was doing this with Cursor and MCPs. Got about a full day of this before I was rate limited and dropped to the slowest, dumbest model. I’ve done it with Claude too and quickly exhaust my rate limits. And the PRs are only “good to go” about 25% of the time, and it’s often faster to just do it right than find out where the AI screwed up.
> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on.
I see your point but in the other hand how depressing to be left only with the most soul crushing part of software entering - the Jira ticket.
I personally find figuring out what the product should be is the fun part. There still a need for architecting a plan, but the actual act of writing code isn't what gives me personal joy, it's the building of something new.
I understand the craft of code itself is what some people love though!
Thing is, LLMs are already better than people at the "architecting a plan" and "figuring out what the product should be" in details that go beyond high-level vibes. They do that even better than raw coding.
In fact, that's the main reason I like developing quick prototypes and small projects with LLMs. I use them less to write code for me, and more to cut through the bullshit "research" phase of figuring out what code to write, which libraries to pick, what steps and auxiliary work I'm missing in my concept, etc.
They’re great if word count is your measure. But it’s hard for LLMs to know the whole current SOTA and come up with something innovative and insightful. The same as 99% of human proposals. Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution
LLMs definitely know more of the current SOTA in everything than anyone alive, and that doesn't even count in the generous amount of searching capability granted to them by vendors. They may fail to utilize results fully due to limited reasoning ability, but they more than make up for it in volume.
> Can LLMs come up with the 1% ideas that breakthrough? Paired with great execution
It's more like 0.01%, and it's not the target anyway. The world doesn't run on breakthroughs and great execution, it runs on the 99.99% of the so-so work and incremental refinement.
Say what you will, but this would have the wonderful side effect of forcing people who write JIRA tickets to actually think through and clearly express what it is they want built.
Yeah, that’ll be the product-oriented engineers / engineer-oriented product folks.
We will drop the narrow-minded deadweight that can only collect naive requirements, and the coding side that can only implement unambiguous tickets.
AKA Junior engineers
In that timeline, it wouldn't matter anymore since the people complaining about the poor JIRA tickets would be gone.
Anyone working on offshoring projects already knows how fun this happens to be.
The moment I am able to outsource work for Jira tickets to a level that AI actually delivers a reasonable pull request, many corporate managers will seriously wonder why keep the offshoring team around.
It seems like the Holy Grail here has become: "A business is one person, the CEO, sitting at his desk doing deals and directing virtual and physical agents to do accounting, run factories, manage R&D, run marketing campaigns, everything." That's it. A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer, and a big AI/robotics bill = every business. No pesky employees to pay. That's the ultimate end game here, that's what these guys want. Is that what we want?
Keep going, the end end goal is that even the customers are AI. And the company doesn't sell anything or do anything, it just trades NFTs and stocks and digital goods. And the money isn't real, it's all crypto. This is the ideal, to create nothing, to sell nothing to no one, and for somehow that to mean you created "value" to society and therefore should be rewarded in material terms. And greatly at that, the people setting all this up expect to be at the tippy top of the social ladder for this "contribution".
This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion. It's exactly what you expect from some reinforcement learning algorithm that only knows how to climb a gradient to maximize a singular reward. The concept of commerce has become the proverbial rat in the skinner box. It has figured out how to mainline the heroin drip if it just holds down the shock button and rewires its brain to get off on the pain. Sure it's an artificial high and hurts like hell to achieve it, but what else is there to live for? We made the line going up mean everything, so that's all that matters now. Doesn't matter if we don't want it, they want it. So that's what it's going to be.
"This is I guess what happens when you follow capitalism to its logical conclusion"
This.
I am amazed that people usually are blind to this trajectory.
Surely at that point the CEO would be AI as well.
The owner (human) would say "build a company, make me a billion dollars" and that would be the only valuable input needed from him/her. Everything else would be derived & executed by the AI swarm, while owner plays video games (or generally enjoy the product of other people's AI-labor) 100% of the time.
I'd argue GPT4 (2022) was already AGI. It could output anything you (or Tim Cook, or any other smart guy) could possibly output given the relevant context. The reason it doesn't right now is we are not passing in all your life's context. If we achieve this, a human CEO has no edge over an AI CEO.
People are figuring this problem out very quickly, therefore the explosion of agentic capabilities happening right now even though the base model fundamentally does the same stuff as GPT4.
When it can come up with something new, then I might be with you.
> A single CEO, (maybe) a lawyer...
Of all the professions that are at the risk of being downsized, I think lawyers are up there. We used to consult our lawyers so frequently about things big and small. We have now completely removed the small stuff from that equation. And most of our stuff is small. There is very little of the big stuff and I think LLMs aren't too far from taking care of that as well.
Yup I have said for the past year to anyone that'll listen, that the concept of hourly (white collar) work will go away.
And there's no better example of hourly work than lawyers.
Personally, I've always disliked the model of billing by the hour because it incentivizes the wrong things, but it is easier to get clients to justify these costs (because they're used to thinking in that framework).
I'd rather take on the risk and find ways to do more efficient work. It's actually FUN to do things that way. And nowadays, this is where AI can benefit in that framework the most.
But I know I'm probably in the minority.
If this happens, everyone is his personal CEO from that moment on.
Yes, I want it. It would 100* our GDP, and make people significantly more independent.
Mix it with open source unbiased AI, living on a land large enough to feed you and your family, and cheap energy, and utopia is here.
So far, automation has only ever increased the need for software development. Jevons Paradox plus the recursive nature of software means that there's always more stuff to do.
The real threats to our profession are things like climate change, extreme wealth concentration, political instability, cultural regression and so on. It's the stuff that software stands on that one should worry about, not the stuff that it builds towards.
Maybe I’m not think big picture enough… but have you ever tried using generative AI (i.e., a transformer) to create a circuit schematic? They fail miserably. Worse than Chat GPT-2 at generating text.
The current SOTA models can do some impressive things, in certain domains. But running a business is way more than generating JavaScript.
The way I see it, only some jobs will be impacted by generative AI in the near term. Not replaced, augmented.
Why would they pay you six figures to outsource to AI when they could pay offshore a fraction of that to do the same?
Because of human factors, no complains, can do overtime as much as electricity is on, no unions, and everything else that a good CEO to the whims of exponential growth for their shareholder likes to do so much.
Offshoring team?
No, any team.
Including the management team?
Yes. You are seriously overestimating the power most management has. If ownership could build a company without them, they would in a heartbeat.
Management only appears to have power because ownership wants workers to point their ire to them instead of at the real power.
I guess their customers will be AI, too, at some point? Where does this lead?
Okay, okay, you got me :D
That will be the next step.
Can't you have that already?
Put the Aider CLI into a GitHub action that's triggered by an issue creation and you're good to go.
Aider is definitely in the same camp. Last time I checked, they weren't optimizing for the full "agent infinitely looping until completion" usecase, and didn't have MCP support.
But it's 100% the same class of tool and the awesome part of the unixy model is hopefully agents can be substituted in for each other in your pipeline for whichever one is better for the usecase, just like models are interoperable.
I tried aider today with a Gemini API key and billing account. It’s not close to the experience I have with Claude Code on Saturday which was able to implement a full feature.
The main difference is I interact with Claude Code only through conversation. Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools, the model and Aider. For example, constantly having to add files and parse the less than ideal console output compared to how Claude code handles user feedback.
"Aider felt much more like I was talking to two different tools"
I personally see that as a plus, because other tools are lacking on the tool side. Aider seems to have solid "traditional" engineering behind its tooling.
"constantly having to add files"
That's fair. However, Aider automatically adds files that trigger it via comments and it asks to add the files that are mentioned in the conversation.
"parse the less than ideal console output"
That's fair too. Still, the models aren't there yet, so I value tools that don't hide the potential crap that thee models produce 20-30% of the time.
The vision of submitting a feature request and receiving a ready-to-review PR is equally compelling and horrifying from the standpoint of strategy management.
Like Anthropic and most big tech companies, they don't want to show off the best until they need to. They used to stockpile some cool features, and they have time to think about their strategy. But now I feel like they are in a rush to show off everything and I'm worried whether the management has time to think about the big picture.
You should use some of those agents yourself to fix some glaring issues at your landing page.
Setting aside predictions about the future and what is best for humanity and all that for a moment this is just such a bummer on a personal level. My whole job would become the worst parts of my job.
(please pardon the self-promotion) This is exactly what my product https://cheepcode.com does (connects to your Linear/Jira/etc and submits PRs to GitHub) - I agree that’s the golden state, and that’s why I’m rushing to get out of private beta as fast as I can* :) It’s a bootstrapped operation right now which limits my speed a bit but this is the vision I’ve been working towards for the past few months.
*I have a few more safety/scalability changes to make but expecting public launch in a few weeks!
> The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
Isn’t that effectively the promise of the most recently released OpenAI codex?
From the reviews I’ve been able to find so far though, quality of output is ehh.
It totally is!
I bias a bit to wanting the agent to be a pluggable component into a flow I own, rather than a platform in a box.
It'll be interesting to see where the different value props/use cases of a Delvin/v0 vs a Codex Cloud vs Claude Code/Codex CLI vs Cursor land.
Thats the promise. The reality is that it's just a subpar version of Claude Code which doesn't support MCP.
golden age consultant paycheck
played around with connecting https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master via mcp to create a prd which basically replaces the ticket grooming process and then executing it with claude code creating a branch named like the ticket and pushing after having created the unit tests and constant linting.
Claude Code is my favorite way to use LLMs for coding.
However I feel what we really need is to have an open source version of it where you can pass any model and also you can compare different models answers.
(Aider and other alternatives really doesn't feel as good to use as Claude Code)
I know this is not what anthropic would want to do as it removes their moat, but as a consumer I just want the best model and not be tied to an ecosystem. (Which I imagine is the largest fear of LLM model providers)
OpenAI codex is probably the closest to what you're talking about, its open source and you can use models from any provider. It's not as good as claude code right now but I bet it wont take long for them to catch up.
https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main
You might be interested in the OpenCode project: https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode
It's still under development but looks promising.
> (Aider and other alternatives really doesn't feel as good to use as Claude Code)
What does Claude Code do better than Aider?
I've self-plugged too hard of late. But check my previous comments for a service I wrote in go, which is exactly what you're asking for.
Question: I agree, but doesn't that other model need to be trained so it knows how to work with MCP servers? Or that isn't an issue?
https://termineer.io/
You can use Claude Code as an MCP server so you can kinda do this already.
Aider has had support for Python and shell scripting [0] for a long time. I made a screencast [1] recently that included ad-hoc bash scripting aider as part of the effort to add support for 130 new programming languages. It may give a flavor for how powerful this approach can be.
[0] https://aider.chat/docs/scripting.html
[1] https://aider.chat/docs/recordings/tree-sitter-language-pack...
Freaking love Aider. MCPs are supported soon as well. Testing a development branch. Then you can actually develop end to end using PR, tickets etc using models you trust.
That's great news! Love Aider too and that's the main thing that's missing right now. Oh the things I will build.
How close can you get Aider to Claude Code? Ie i liked the Claude Code UX, but i don't use it because i prefer Gemini 2.5 Pro.
I don't really want it committing and stuff, i mostly like the UX of Claude Code. Thoughts?
You can turn off auto commit
You can disable the automatic commits, but you cannot disable the automatic modification of files. One nice thing about Claude Code is that you can give it feedback on a patch before it is even applied.
That's the whole point of /architect mode, no? You refine the solution in the prompt before aider asks you if you want to apply the changes.
No, I just tried this on the latest version of Aider and it automatically made the change with architect mode enabled.
https://aider.chat/docs/config/options.html#--auto-accept-ar...
Then use /ask mode. If this still edits your files something is broken.
I’m ok with auto commit because I’m ok with just reversing it. Got to make sure you have a branch
Aider could really profit from a polished GitHub Actions workflow.
Add a file to your repo and you can talk to any model via issues.
more context from the claude code team: http://latent.space/p/claude-code
you can skim the transcript but some personal highlights:
- anthropic employees, with unlimited claude, average to $6/day of usage
- headless claude code as a "linux" utility that you use everywhere in CI is pretty compelling
- claude code as a user extensible platform
- future roadmap of claude code: sandboxing, branching, planning
- sonnet 3.7 as a persistent, agentic model
"- anthropic employees, with unlimited claude, average to $6/day of usage"
From the link:
"Apparently, there are some engineers inside of Anthropic that have spent >$1,000 in one day!"
The question is what is the P50, P75, and P95 spend per employee?
Agree. That would be a great insight as well as what type of activities cause the explosion in spend.
they probably wouldnt share so i didnt ask
Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I can easily spend $20+ using Claude Code for 2 hours. I've stopped using it because it was too expensive for my personal projects.
I briefly commented on how I approach cost control before, if useful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737060
But that doesn't really explain things. You're making an active effort to reduce your costs. Anthropic engineers get unlimited API usage for free.
I was listening to this podcast yesterday and I also did a double take when I heard the $6 per day number.
Great advice, thanks.
Claude max plan has Claude code bundled into the price. $100/month isn't cheap, but the RoI is there for me personally.
Thanks, this is helpful. I tried Claude Code, and thought it had a lot of potential, but I was on track to spend at least $20/day.
For a tool that radically increases productivity (say 2x), I think it could still make sense for a VC funded startup or an established company (even $100/day or $36k/year is still a lot less than hiring another developer). But for a side project or bootstrap effort, $36k/year obviously significantly increases cash expenses. $100/month does not, however.
So, I'm going to go back and upgrade to Max and try it again. If that keeps my costs to $100/month, thats a really different value proposition.
Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you saying I can use Claude Code for a flat rate of $100/month? What are the limits? What if I use more than $100 worth of Code in a month? Their website doesn't seem to make it clear.
Edit:
Found the answer to my own questions
> Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every 5 hours[1]
Damn. That's a really good deal
[1] https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-cla...
Really tempted to go for this as well. Only wish I could access flat rate Claude through VS Code Cline (or an extension like it) as well - that would be the complete package. $100 / month + ~$$ / day in API credits is gonna get pricey.
I have been using Claude Code a lot since the Max plan change and I've never hit the limits myself.
Thanks, I was just commenting on "- anthropic employees, with unlimited claude, average to $6/day of usage".
Maybe engineers at Anthropic use it less because they fully understand the limitations and drawbacks
Why not use Claude Max Plan? Starts at $100.
I’ve really enjoyed the recent latent space podcasts. I don’t think there is any person†/podcast (or perhaps other content) approaching your general output while maintaining the high SNR. I am continually amazed at the volume and value of public work you’re producing over the last (half?) decade while still growing various businesses. I hope others can find similar productivity gradients. I know you roughly share what works for you but it is not so easy to reproduce.
† simonw, gwern
thanks man, this was nice to read :) idk if it helps but my principles (tm) are here http://learninpublic.org/
i do feel like SNR * quantity could be higher, but its still a challenge to even keep it where it is today. my work life balance/stress levels aren't the best and everyone expects everything from me.
Agree 100%
How neutral was the podcast vs being a sales pitch for this?
If I was making an AI code assistant, the last thing I would do is to lock it in to a particular foundation model provider.
The only possible way for this to be a successful offering is if we have just now reached a plateau of model effectiveness and all foundation models will now trend towards having almost identical performance and capabilities, with integrators choosing based on small niceties, like having a familiar SDK.
Other than the command/arguments there isn't much locking you in. It's just input/output. Swap it out for something else or simply wrap it. There's not much going on here.
"Lock i-"
At this point Claude Code is a software differentiator in the agent coding space.
I am building things related to AI code assistants - we were hacking ways to integrate Claude Code - it was the first thing we wanted to build around.
It's too early to care about lock in.
Need the best, will only build around the best.
Claude Code could already be used in non-interactive mode, and by extension it could be integrated into other apps in the same manner as any other UNIX command line utility.
This SDK currently supports only command line usage. Isn't that just what we already had?
I don't understand what's actually new here. What am I missing?
I don't either - not sure why noone has commented on this as far as i can see
I would also recommend Codebuff (https://www.codebuff.com/), a great CLI code assistant comparable to Claude Code, which can save a lot on token costs.
(I am not affiliated with this project, just a user.)
> You may not access or use, or help another person to access or use, our Services in the following ways: > 2. To develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services.
Can somebody please tell me what software product or service doesn’t compete with general intelligence?
Imagine selling intelligence with a legal term that, under strict interpretation, says you’re not allowed to use it for anything.
Is it so vague it’s unenforceable?
How do we own the output if we can’t use it to compete with a general intelligence?
Is it just a “lol nerd no one cares about the legal terms” thing? If no one cares then why would they have a blanket prohibition on using the service ?
We’re supposed to accept liability to lose a lawsuit just to accept their slop? So many questions
This is what happens when you let lawyers say what they want.
You changed the word artificial to general which obviously changes the meaning
When you have model lock in, it’s a big detriment to use because if anyone comes out with SOTA models, and you have already invested infra development on this, you are stuck. Even if you open it up, it’s likely not to work as your model is likely trained specifically on that CLI. Just look at Codex CLI, you can use Gemini 2.5 pro, but it will get randomly stuck or fail a lot vs OpenAI models
The new GitHub action is exactly what I have been looking for https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action... but there doesn't seem to be a way to use it with the Claude Code's Max plan?
As it only accepts an API key as far as I can tell.
This is great! Especially the GitHub Actions issue/PR integration[0] that’s paired with this is exactly what I’ve been wanting!
[0]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action...
I'll try when they start supporting claude via copilot. Can't use at work anything else.
You can use this in the cloud through a nice UI in https://cloudcoding.ai/chat
https://cloudcoding.ai/ is a way to use a similar claude code sdk in the cloud!
I don't understand why this isn't just baked into cursor/windsurf? I think in reality that's where most devs will use it.
Claude has been left in the dust by Gemini with its million token session and ability to upload a zip file of my entire code base.
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis on the HN user sentiment on the varying AI models over time. I'd be curious to see what that looks like. Increasingly, I'm seeing more and more people talk positively about Gemini and Google (and having used Gemini recently, I align with that sentiment)
I think Bard (lol) and Gemini got a late start and so lots of folks dismissed it but I feel like they've fully caught up. Definitely excited to see what Gemini 3 vs GPT-5 vs Claude 4 looks like!
I'm using Windsurf IDE so have all the main models available. Mainly doing Python, JS, HTML, CSS, some Go. I have found Claude 3.7 outperforms Gemini 2.5 and ChatGPT 4.1, 4o, Deepseek, etc, for my work in most cases.
I suspect that I experience some performance throttling with Gemini 2.5 in my Windsurf setup because it's just not as good as anecdotal reports by others, and benchmarks.
I also seem to run up against a kind of LLM laziness sometimes when they seemingly can't be bothered to answer a challenging prompt ... a consequence of load balancing in action perhaps.
Windsurf is about to lose its ability to use other models since it got bought by OpenAI. Still very cool tool though!
Who cares about sentiment when you can just look at a proxy for usage: https://openrouter.ai/rankings
EDIT: Specifically: https://openrouter.ai/rankings/programming?view=week
Gemini hit the top of a bunch of leaderboards recently so it probably prompted folks to try Gemini out and they found it useful.
Context is only one part of it. I tried using Gemini and got sub par results. comment-laden code with not not following instructions.
I’ve tried Gemini 2.5 Pro a couple of times and honestly don’t like its output. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is much better at correctly understanding and executing my imprecise prompts.
Gemini 2.5 Flash on the other hand has excellent. I’ve started using it to rewrite whole files after talking the changes through with Claude, because it’s just so ridiculously fast (and dependable enough for applying already outlined changes).
This is Claude Code.
The two work really well with Gemini as a planner and Claude Code as an executor.
and then get the honor of copy and pasting all of the changes afterward?
You can try my project Plandex[1] to use Gemini in a way that's comparable to Claude Code without copy-pasting. By default, it combines models from the major providers—Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
The default planning/coding models are still Sonnet 3.7 for context size under 200k, but you can switch to Gemini with `\set-model gemini-preview`.
1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
“Make me a bash script which creates all the files using heredoc”
Works for a reasonable chunk of files say 5 to 10 that aren’t too big.
No doubt they’ll get to better file access.
Anyhow I’m quite happy to do the copy and paste because Geminis coding and debugging capability is far better than Claude.
I'm using this https://github.com/coffeegrind123/gemini-code to use Claude Code with Gemini and it's working perfectly
Cursor with gemini-2.5 MAX and agentic mode.
I really like the idea of Claude Code but its rare that I fully spec out a feature on my first request and I can't see how it can be used for frontend features that require a lot of browser-centric iteration/debugging to get right.
I can't say that I don't love Gemini. I use it a lot, and the huge context window does help. But I can also say that I much prefer how Claude writes code.
claude code still has the best UX IMHO. But I would love to have the million token context, for sure
I'm building a browser based tool that runs on your computer, with full tool access of course, that works with all the major models and is far better and more ergonomic to use than code, codex, etc.
If you (or anyone else reading this) wants to try out the upcoming beta give me a ping. (see profile.)
How are you uploading zip files of code to Gemini?
In AI Studio select file upload then select a zip file.
They just need to release a useful model which can actually code now!
Pretty cool ngl. I think I'll try it
I’ve cancelled my subscription. Sorry guys…
Hasn't this been invented already in multiple shapes and forms..? I wrote my own version clai[1] over a year ago which does exactly this, only that it has tools support + is multi vendor.
[1]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai
Looks quite similar to my https://llm.datasette.io tool as well.
Honestly though, CLI tools for accessing LLMs (including piping content in and out of them) is such a clearly good idea I'm glad to see more tools implementing the pattern.
It's very surprising that it has taken this long to see a first-party CLI like this.
OpenAI have had a bad one for a couple of years. It looks something like this:
What is really needed is a usable multiplexed pipeline management and event system.
Then you can instrument through metaprogramming. For instance, an alert system could be:
"If the threshold goes over 1.0, contact the on-call person through their preferred method" - which may work ... maybe.
Or:
if any( "check_condition {x}", condition_set ): find_person("on call", right now).contact("preferred")
... the point is to divide everything up into small one-shots, parallelize them, use it as glue/api. Then you get composability. If you can get a framework for coroutines going then it's real game on. The final step is "needs based pulling" which is an inversion of mcp - contextual streams as event based sub-systems.
Things are still too slow for this to be not painful but that won't be the case forever.
Currently everything is linear. Doesn't have to be ... really doesn't.