[simonw]

I'm effectively no longer typing code by hand: I decide what change I want to make and then prompt Claude Code to describe that change. Sometimes I'll have it figure out the fix too.

An example from earlier today: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/commit/fa6d147f5cff9ea9...

That commit added 33 lines and removed 13 - so I'm already at a 20-lines-a-day level just from that one commit (and I shipped a few more plus a release of llm-gemini: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/commits/a2bdec13e03ca8a...)

It took about 3.5 minutes. I started from this issue someone had filed against my repo:

Then I opened Claude Code and said:

  Run this command: uv run llm -m gemma-3-27b-it hi 

That ran the command and returned the error message. I then said:

  Yes, fix that - the gemma models do not support media resolution

Which was enough for it to figure out the fix and run the tests to confirm it hadn't broken anything.

I ran "git diff", thought about the change it had made for a moment, then committed and pushed it.

Here's the full Claude Code transcript: https://gistpreview.github.io/?62d090551ff26676dfbe54d8eebbc...

I verified the fix myself by running:

  uv run llm -m gemma-3-27b-it hi

I pasted the result into an issue comment to prove to myself (and anyone else who cares) that I had manually verified the fix: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini/issues/116#issuecomment...

Here's a more detailed version of the transcript including timestamps, showing my first prompt at 10:01:13am and the final response at 10:04:55am. https://tools.simonwillison.net/claude-code-timeline?url=htt...

I built that claude-code-timeline application this morning too, and that thing is 2284 lines of code: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/claude-code-tim... - but that was much more of a vibe-coded thing, I hardly reviewed the code that was written at all and shipped it as soon as it appeared to work correctly. Since it's a standalone HTML file there's not too much that can go wrong if it has bugs in it.

[WhyOhWhyQ]

Whenever I start reviewing code produced by Claude I find hundreds of ways to improve it.

I don't know if code quality really matters to most people or to the bottom line, but a good software engineer writes better code than Claude. It is a testament to library maintainers that Claude is able to code at all, in my opinion. One reason is that Claude uses API's in whacky ways. For instance by reading the SDL2 documentation I was able to find many ways that Claude writes SDL2 using archaic patterns from the SDL days.

I think there are a lot of hidden ways AI booster types benefit from basic software engineering practices that they actively promote damaging ideas about. Maybe it will only be 10 years from now that we learn that having good engineers is actually important.

[simonw]

> Whenever I start reviewing code produced by Claude I find hundreds of ways to improve it.

Same here. So I tell it what improvements I want to make and watch it make them.

I've gained enough experience at prompting it that it genuinely is faster for me to tell it the change I want to make than it is for me to make that change myself, 90% of the time.

[HDThoreaun]

Ok then you just make review comments and it fixes them. Still faster than writing code yourself

[WhyOhWhyQ]

You missed the point. The original post is about not reading code.

You actually missed the point in two ways, because my response had little or nothing to do with speed of producing code. I'm not sure why you felt the need to express that irrelevant objection.

[rnewme]

My approach used to be similar few months ago before I figured out a way to automate and paralleize part of this process. However the part I'm still curious about is how to get into consistent and sustainable 4 digit LOC daily (assuming up to 8h of work). I can have 10k PR today but debug it and refine it whole week and it'll still be weak code long term..