[jumploops]

Has the author tried Claude Code?

It’s the first useful “agent” (LLM in a loop + tools) that I’ve tried.

IME it is hard to explain why it’s better than e.g. Aider or Cursor, but once you try it you’ll migrate your workflow pretty quickly.

[troupo]

It can get surprisingly dumb surprisingly fast.

Today I spent easily half an hour trying to make it solve a layout issue it itself introduced when porting a component.

It was a complex port it executed perfectly. And then it completely failed to even create a simple wrapper that fixed a flexbox issue.

BTW. Claude (Code and Cursor) is over-indexed on "let's randomly add and remove h-full/overflow-auto and pretend it works ad infinitum"

[bob1029]

I've found that CSS is among one of the more terrible things for an LLM to work on.

It's definitely on point with some strategic layout items, flexbox, etc., but when it comes to anything like colors, margins, padding, typeface, borders, etc., you might as well be throwing darts into the void.

[apwell23]

> And then it completely failed to even create a simple wrapper that fixed a flexbox issue.

yea this is the problem with vibe coding. its hard to understand and keep tabs on nitty gritty when stuff is being generated for you. No matter how much you 'review' it, it just doesn't stick in the same way if you were writing code. You are really screwed if you have debug something that llm throws its hands up on.

[padolsey]

How much transparency does Claude Code give you into what it's doing? I like IDE-integrated agents as they show diffs and allow focused prompting for specific areas of concern. And I get to control what's in context at any given time in a longer thread. I haven't tried Claude's thing in a while, but from what I gather it's more of a "prompt and pray" kind of agent.. ?

[_neil]

My experience is that you can be very targeted in your promoting with Claude code and it mostly gets good results. You can also ask it early on to create a branch and create logical commits as it works. This way, you can examine smaller code changes later in a PR (or git log).

Or if you want to work more manually, you could do the same but not allow full access to git commit. That way it will request access each time it’s ready to commit and you can take that time to review diffs.

[lojack]

Definitely not a prompt and pray type thing, though you can do that if you choose. It shows its work, in the newest version there's three modes (planning, executing, auto accepting edits). You can also hit Esc at any time to redirect as you see it going in the wrong direction.

[apwell23]

> IME it is hard to explain why it’s better than e.g. Aider or Cursor

i have cursor through work but i am tempted to shell out $100 because of this hype.

is it better than using claude models in cursor?

[cap11235]

You could always just try it out via a normal Anthropic API key. Probably would be around $3-10 for greenfield implementation of a non-trivial project. "/cost" to see as you go.