[ipnon]

Claude Code makes me feel like I'm dispatching a legit engineer to go get something done. But they come back in a minute instead of a week. Most of the time the solution gets the job done. Sometimes it introduces too much complexity, sometimes it's totally wrong, but it gets the job done. Cursor meanwhile just feels like shortening the (copy editor/paste chat/copy chat/paste editor) loop.

For $200/month you can get equivalent value to a team of engineers. Plan accordingly! The stack is no longer safe for employment. You need to move up to manager or move down to metal.

[ducksinhats]

> You need to move up to manager or move down to metal.

Why couldn't Claude do a managers job?

[ipnon]

It’s a good question. I think a better benchmark than the current options is “go make $X dollars this quarter.” Right now the models fail this miserably. Claude can’t even run a vending machine inside Anthropic HQ. So there is still some kind of strategic activity that comes naturally to humans that LLMs struggle with. I know the big conundrum is “scaling solves this in the next N years” but my bet is that N > ~20 in this case.

[aprilthird2021]

What's an example of something you've had Claude Code do that would take a software engineer a week to do? Just curious.

I see people mention converting old legacy code from an old language to something more modern. I've also seen people mention greenfield projects.

Anything other than this? I'm trying to bring this productivity to my work but so far haven't been able to replace a week of work in a few minutes yet

[mtkd]

Last week stripped out all CSS from a fairly substantial project and replaced with Tailwind equivs, it got all but a few cases right

That was gemini-cli, I could see some mistakes on trial run so created a GEMINI.md with system prompt and project description (about 50 lines) which clarified some tricky source layout situations

Second run it was fine, ran for about an hour or so -- I had attempted to do it manually a while back but it started to look like it would take a week or two

[aprilthird2021]

Thanks for the insight. I have seen similar uses at work, where people do a bit of an enhanced codemod to migrate code from using one deprecated thing (library, function, syntax) to another. And while a codemod has to be more exactly programmed. AI gives you the ability to cover spots in the code that may not 1 to 1 fit with what the pattern you had in mind.

EDIT: I haven't used Tailwind much but would something like this do what you're saying, or not really? https://www.loopple.com/tools/css-to-tailwind-converter

[mtkd]

For the trivial cases that's fine (just using LLM does same)

But this particular project is not like a standard site and the CSS is in small fragments across 100s files and uses constants for some things like color values in places too

In that Loopple example you can see the conversion uses the Tailwind arbitrary value notation, the -[], so background-color:#afa8af gets converted to bg-[#afa8af], but I wanted nearest pure tailwind class bg-zinc-400, the agent seems to work out color distance fine so does all that in one-shot too

[aprilthird2021]

That's good to know it is better at translating the code from using one style to another! It is one of the gold use cases for AI agent coding at the moment. I've seen that at work as well.