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  • Hacker News
  • Crazy how fast Claude Code is evolving, every week there’s something new to learn, and it just keeps getting better.
    by thoughtsyntax
  • Nothing crazy about it, judging by how much CPU and memory it uses. Now, if it managed to grow features without bringing my M4 Mac with 64GB of ram to a crawl... that's be magic.
    by prodigycorp
  • > The Takeaway: Skills are the right abstraction. They formalize the “scripting”-based agent model, which is more robust and flexible than the rigid, API-like model that MCP represents.

    Just to not confuse, MCP is like an api but the underlying api can execute an Skill. So, its not MCP vs Skill as a contest. It's just the broad concept of a "flexible" skill vs "parameter" based Api. And again parameter based APIs can also be flexible depending on how we write it except that it lacks SKILL.md in case of Skills which guides llm to be more generic than a pure API.

    By the way, if you are a Mac user, you can execute Skills locally via OpenSkills[1] that I have created using apple contianers.

    1. OpenSkills -https://github.com/BandarLabs/open-skills

    by mkagenius
  • Man, I just want to point out how different programming has become in 2 years.

    We are literally having to play mind games with our tooling now to convince and coax it into doing certain things. I swear we are not far off from having to call in sick to work because your LLM "is going through a lot right now and just needs a mental health break".

    by ryandvm
  • I think the final straw for me was when I saw people saying they were getting better results by writing some parts of the prompts in all caps.

    I just don't wanna deal with any of this.

    by rkomorn
  • As fascinating as these tools can be - are we (the industry) once again finding something other than our “customer” to focus our brains on (see Paul Graham’s “Top idea in your mind” essay)?
    by johnrob
  • What do you mean by "customer"? Because I'm also using these tools to understand the customer better.
    by mewpmewp2
  • It seems so ... LLM-based coding tools are mostly about speed and cost of development - corporate accounting metrics, but what customers care about is mostly product features (& lack of bugs).

    There is no customer advantage to developing cheap and fast if the delivered product isn't well conceived from a current and future customer-needs perspective, and a quickly shipped product full of bugs isn't going to help anyone.

    I think the same goes for AI in general - CEOs are salivating over adopting "AI" (which people like Altman and Amodei are telling them will be human level tomorrow, or yesterday in the case of Amodei), and using it to reduce employee head count, but the technology is nowhere near the human level needed to actually benefit customers. An "AI" (i.e. LLM) customer service agent/chatbot is just going to piss off customers.

    by HarHarVeryFunny
  • > If you’re not already using a CLI-based agent like Claude Code or Codex CLI, you probably should be.

    Are the CLI-based agents better (much better?) than the Cursor app? Why?

    I like how easy it is to get Cursor to focus a particular piece of code. I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this ____."

    I haven't really tried a CLI agent; sending snippets of code by CLI sounds really annoying. "Fix login.ts lines 148-160, it's broken like this ___"

    by dfabulich
  • I use Claude and Codex in VS Code and they work really well.

    > I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this

    This flow works well.

    by nl
  • Direct use of Codex + GPT5 or Claude Code CLI gives a better result, compared to using the same models in Cursor. I've compared both. Cursor applies some of their augmentation, which reduces the output size, probably to save on tokens.
    by shanecp
  • Claude is just better at coding than cursor.

    Really, the interface isn't a meaningful part of it. I also like cmd-L, but claude just does better at writing code.

    ...also, it's nice that Anthropic is just focusing on making cool stuff (like skills), while the folk from cursor are... I dunno. Whatever it is they're doing with cursor 2.0 :shrug:

    by noodletheworld
  • Yes and you can select multiple files to give it focus. It can run anything in your PATH too. Eg it's pretty good at using `gh` and so on
    by dansult
  • They all have optional ide integration, e.g Claude knows the active vscode tab and highlighted lines.
    by wonnage
  • Claude is able to detect the lines of code selected in vscode anyway
    by rajamaka
  • Better? Hard to say. Different? Yes. Worth evaluating? Absolutely. Using it for 30 minutes will answer your question better than any reply here. I think you'll answer your own question quickly.

    I've been coding seriously for about 15 years. No single tool has changed how I code more than claude code and I'm including non-"AI" tooling/services. This sounds like I'm shilling but I am not affiliated. It's played a large part in injecting my passion back into building stuff.

    by stressback
  • Yeah I started with Cursor, went hybrid, and then in the last month or so I've totally swapped over.

    Part of it is the snappy more minimal UX but also just pure efficacy seems consistently better. Claude does its best work in CC. I'm sure the same is true of Codex.

    by sshh12
  • Kinda sad if 3000 words is now considered "too long to read through rather use as reference" but some interesting points, I'd be keen to see an even longer version with actual examples instead of placeholder ones.
    by sixhobbits
  • 100%. I was excited when i read that disclaimer and found myself disappointed by the limited content. That said, i did get a couple tidbits out of it.
    by geoffmanning
  • Yeah I'm fairy pessimistic about how much folks will read
    by sshh12
  • > /clear + /catchup (Simple Restart): My default reboot. I /clear the state, then run a custom /catchup command to make Claude read all changed files in my git branch.

    I've found myself doing similar workarounds. I'm guessing anthropic will just make the /compact command do this instead soon enough.

    by mritchie712
  • I've found the latency of /compact makes it unusable. Perhaps this is just the result of my waiting until I have 0% context remaining.

    Fun fact, a large chunk of context is reserved for compaction. When you are shown that you have "0% context remaining," it's actually like 30% remaining that's reserved for compaction.

    And yet, for some reason I feel like 50% of the time, compaction fails because it runs out of context or hits (non-rate) API limits.

    by cannonpalms
  • "Claude Code isn’t just an interactive CLI; it’s also a powerful SDK for building entirely new agents—..."

    Em dash and "it's not X, it's Y" in one sentence. Tired of reading posts written by AI. Feels disrespectful to your readers

    by WickyNilliams
  • > Tired of reading posts written by AI.

    Didn’t realize you were forced to read this?

    > Feels disrespectful to your readers

    I didn’t feel disrespected—I felt so respected I read the whole thing.

    by paulcole
  • The internet is dead. Long live the internet.
    by yard2010
  • I have the same instinctive response to reading AI generated stuff, but I'm coming to a more moderate position where I'm trying to judge the content on the content itself. For example, in a post like this, it doesn't bother me at all because it's still an extremely useful reference, and the author clearly read through, organized, and edited the output. This is a good example of usage of AI in my opinion.

    The people who just copy paste output from ai and ship it as a blog post however, deserve significant condemnation for that.

    by freedomben
  • Don't sleep on using Claude Code to improve your Claude Code config. Switch to plan mode and try the following prompt:

    read the document at https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-i-use-every-claude-code-feature and tell me how to improve my Claude code setup

    by michaelbuckbee

  •     At this point these tools are all pretty good. I also feel like folks often also over index on the output style or UI. Like to me the “you’re absolutely right!” sycophancy isn’t a notable bug; it’s a signal that you’re too in-the-loop. Generally my goal is to “shoot and forget”—to delegate, set the context, and let it work. Judging the tool by the final PR and not how it gets there.
    I use LLM tools daily and my experience is that this just does not work on an application of any meaningful size or complexity.

    You're going to immediately be overwhelmed with code, comments, markdown files, and all manner of extra text that may or may not solve your problem. The chore then becomes PR reviews of tons of iffy code, and if you merge too much of it, after too long your codebase will be a bloated mess that even the craftiest prompts won't untangle.

    It's best to use to brainstorm and implement very targeted prompts, set and forget is crazy.

    by spicyusername
  • Completely agree. The quoted strategy only works for small hobbyist codebases.
    by isubkhankulov
  • I really like this take on MCP: https://blog.sshh.io/i/177742847/mcp-model-context-protocol

    > Instead of a bloated API, an MCP should be a simple, secure gateway that provides a few powerful, high-level tools [...] In this model, MCP’s job isn’t to abstract reality for the agent; its job is to manage the auth, networking, and security boundaries and then get out of the way.

    by simonw