Many Claude Code power users don’t really use IDEs anymore, so the only purpose of them working from their laptop instead of a phone is because that is the normal way to do it.
Here is a real use case: you are are responsible for some alerting channel. You have datadog/ cloud logging/ github all connected. You see a bunch of alerts come through while you are out and about and you prompt CC to investigate - Claude triages and says “all of the sudden you are getting time outs from this bank API your company partners with, this started an hour ago. It’s happening on ~15% of requests”. So you ping the guy at your company who does vendor relationships and go back to your weekend.
This is a non hypothetical example. Obviously it would be better if your job had a real on call rotation and more robust alerting and you wouldn’t be getting slack alerts on the weekend… but I take the approach this job affords me a lot of nice flexibility so it’s ok
You don't have an on-call rotation but do have people dedicated to vendor relationships, and that guy works on the weekend? I'm not sure how you completely avoid getting alerts on the weekend for third-party payment processor issues, which can happen anytime, if you actually want to transact business on the weekend.
I don't know what exactly GP works on, but 'bank' covers a lot of ground and some things happen on weekends. 'Open Banking' APIs, and some payment rails for example.
> Many Claude Code power users don’t really use IDEs anymore
This is something we of the HN bubble take for granted. Most of us know how to type quickly and use editors and use macros and program scripting languages and compose regexes.
The vast majority of programmers do not know those things. As such, AI speeds them up tremendously.
From my experience it _seems_ to be the opposite, no?
HN skews heavily toward the SF signature vc-hype tech-driven-dev style, always chasing the new thing, sometimes to the detriment of everything else.
Even if this style of development was a clear improvement over the classic "typing things with hands" style, the rest of the world would take a while to catch on.
Yeah good luck being employed in 3 years once this bubble popped when all you do is type some natural language into a phone screen. People being proud of not using an IDE anymore is such a foreign concept to me, who enjoys coding and got into the profession because of the love of that.
The “debugging” for these type of issues is looking at some logs and http responses and being like “ah if we get this error it means they restarted their firewall again and took us off the whitelist. Email that guy Joe at the bank and hope he responds”. It’s not rocket science or the majority of my job… but someone’s needs to do it. We automate all the stuff we can.
I run a lot of data science-type analyses that can take up to hours at a time to run, so Claude is « monitoring » tasks most of the time. I have it on remote-control so I get notified when a task is done or need clarification, but most importantly whenever I have a new idea, I can just ask Claude to queue it up. Most of the time my hardware is the bottleneck, not the subscription quotas.
> take up to hours at a time to run, so Claude is « monitoring » tasks most of the tim
How is Claude monitoring them for hours? Claude runs out of context and extremely long sessions are prohibitively expensive even according to Anthropic (after they dispense with the marketing bullshit of long running tasks)?
It launches these tasks in the background. It became really good at it a couple of months ago, now it sets monitors on timer (not something I instructed, so I assumed it’s part of the system prompt for this kind of tasks) and then just wait for the next prompt, for the background process to be done, or for a monitor to trigger a checkup.
A single session running for multiple hours is prohibitively expensive, as per Anthropic. Regardless of whether it just waits for a prompt or does something.
Is the high expense coming from cache misses? If their workload does need to wait for a long time before it can continue, I wonder would starting new sessions and having to re-read the contexts and results anyway be any cheaper.
Prohibitively expensive is all relative. Pre-Fable, I was getting fine on the 5x plan for 1-2 concurrent long-running tasks plus interactive work (I do a lot of coding for work, but it is not my full work day). I don’t think a cache miss every hour on Opus hurts that much, even at 500-600k context. It would be nice if they got /clear working on remote-control.
I used to have some hooks for local notification, but lately I find that claude is pretty good at notifying through the app with remote control (but definitely not perfect)
There are so many neat use cases like this one that I'm skeptical of the AI-is-a-dot-com-bubble naysayers. Not to mention that, unlike in 2000, technical-adjacent people can now get a reasonable approximation of their ideas running quickly.
I've used it for the following when I've had tokens to burn:
- Fuzzing with the goal for it to apply domain-specific and source-informed knowledge to choose specific fuzzing approaches.
- More generally, any optimization problem that benefits from domain-specific or source informed knowledge.
- Running Microsoft's SkillOpt [0].
It's less about 24/7. It's more about it can't work when your laptop is in your bag and in transit and there is something that you have set up and want to run.
1/ Using GUI software. My agents are using headful Google Chrome and Figma. It helps a lot to have separate environment, which is not interfering my main machine.
2/ Running long processes (1h+), so I can leave main machine closed.
3/ Running intensive processes. I use Gemma, Whisper and Qwen, which could burn main machine CPU and resources.
The other day I used Claude Cowork to create a checklist for me so that I can safely re-install my laptop... It went through all ssh configuration, apps, downloads, documents etc... Once I had the checklist, I asked it to do the backup itself, along with instructions to re-install/setup everything once I had the laptop re-installed. This was something I was procrastinating for too long already...
Generating leads for new work, if you are a freelance. Automatically answering customer support emails, if you own a SaaS. Monitoring competitors' socials, websites, etc for new features you have to compete with. Monitoring updates on software you depend on for breaking change / deprecation announcements.
Running Claude code 24/7 on a code base on that “second Mac” so you can always continue after a usage limit reset, from your main device or from your phone?
I changed all smart speakers to retrofitted old radios with an amp and a pi. The hot word detection runs on the pi itself but whisper and LLM/task orchestrations goes over my local server with a 4080.
I think the main use case for AI bros is to setup a goofy looking dashboard, name it Jarvis to cosplay being Tony stark, and display stats for all the generated videos they're posting to social media.
Running tests that the agent created for its own hallucinations? Optimize using another hallucinating agent?
Which tests and optimizations do you propose to run after a night of supervised work when one of main things that all agents keep doing is "load all records from db , and filter them in memory"? It's now become so bad, I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this. And that's just one of the problems.
we don't have master AI that can create a great product out of a mediocre prompt.
but we do have sufficient AI to make a great product out of a great prompt.
garbage in -> garbage out hasn't gone anywhere.
so: much like to anyone that blindly complains that their compiler hates them : if you actually want help, provide information. If you just want to complain that the compiler is mean, scream at the sky.
plenty of people have figured out how to get this to work; more than enough to confirm that a straight <gambling-machine>/<hallucinatory-psychopath>/<random-number-generator> analogy is too simplistic to explain what we're working with.
Demagoguery. Your "great product" (where is it? show me these great products) will have wildly ineficient code and things like "read the entire DB into memory" regardless of the prompt.
> plenty of people have figured out how to get this to work
Plenty of people claim they have figured it out. In reality these people are full of shit and assume that if LLMs can produce working software, it's great working software. And also assume that LoC is a measure of quality.
>It's now become so bad, I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this.
You see, there's your problem right there. You're vibe coding, which by definition literally means you're unwilling to look at the generated code. That's not what successful ai assisted software developers are doing. YOU HAVE TO READ THE CODE. Refusing to do that means you're not a serious programmer, you're outsourcing your thought and design and implementation, trying to get something for nothing by taking the easy way out, and you're going to get terrible results no matter what prompts you "engineer". There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (yet).
And while we're at it, to elaborate on what serf said: people mindlessly parroting terms like "stochastic parrot" to criticize llms without having read the actual paper that coined the term and understanding what it really claimed and how other papers responded to it means you're just a human stochastic parrot no better than what you're criticizing -- at least the llm has read all those papers and understands what "stochastic parrot" actually means in context. Ask it, it will be glad to explain!
Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell.
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (FAccT 2021)
> You see, there's your problem right there. You're vibe coding, which by definition literally means you're unwilling to look at the generated code. That's not what successful ai assisted software developers are doing. YOU HAVE TO READ THE CODE.
I guess you vibe-read what I wrote. Let me write it again for you: "I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?"
No, I read what you wrote, and you wrote "vibecoded", and the definition of vibe coding is not reading what you generated, then always hitting "Accept All". And it has a space in it. I'll quote the definition below, so you don't have to look it up yourself, and we can both be on the same page.
It's right there on the label. If you didn't mean "vibe coded" then don't vibe write "vibecoded", and instead read what you wrote, then look up the meaning and spelling of the terms you are using, and do not neglect to correct yourself because it's not what you meant.
I have to correct typos like that all the time when I write them by hand. But making typos and having to correct them and having to look up the meaning and spelling of words does not make me complain about all human generated code and text just because it requires me to proofread what I wrote.
Reading what you wrote or what ai generated and looking up terms is all part of the process, because people and llms make mistakes. Vibe coding is not giving a shit about that, thinking it doesn't apply to you, and hitting "Accept All" without reading the code, by definition.
And if you can't accept that, then don't write or generate code or text, and don't complain about how you have to read what you and llms generate and correct it, and understand what words mean.
>I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this
Why would you "literally vibecode" a linter and use it to review other llm generated code without reading the linter's code itself? That is "literally" vibe coding eating its own tail.
I take your emphatic use of the word "literally" to mean that you are "literally" using the well know definition of vibe coding as it was coined by Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI, which is "iterally" (and I quote):
>I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore.
Am I misunderstanding you, or are you vibe writing the wrong term without reviewing the meaning of your own words?
Here is the full literal quote so there is no room for confusion or claims of missing context:
>Andrej Karpathy @karpathy:
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
That is the "literal" widely understood and well defined meaning of what you wrote, but misspelled "vibecoding", according to the well known AI expert from OpenAI who originally defined and championed the term. Its meaning has not suddenly changed.
Only a vibe coder would vibe code a linter to vibe lint vibe coded code for them, without looking at ANY of that code themselves, by just hitting "Accept All" always. Because vibe coders by definition don't want to bother reading what they generated, don't care what it means, and still expect it to come out perfect.
Don't be a vibe coder, or a vibe writer, or a human stochastic parrot: read what you write and know the definitions of the words you use.
And if you're not a vibe coder, then don't claim to "vibecode": that's "not engineering" just "magical and wishful thinking", as you like to say.
>"I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?"
And the answer to your question is: because you are using git, so you can look at the diffs before merging and deploying into production. You are using git and looking at the diffs, aren't you? Have you heard of PRs and code reviews? Or is that too much to ask of a "vibecoder"?
Here's what I literally started with: "I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?"
Which means what? Oh. It says literally what it says.
Here's how I continued: "Which tests and optimizations do you propose to run after a night of supervised work when one of main things that all agents keep doing is 'load all records from db , and filter them in memory'?"
What does this mean? Oh, it means the literal meaning of the sentence. It also probably strongly implies that I actually look at the code produced by these things, as otherwise I wouldn't know things like "oh, the agent loads the whole db into memory and filters it into memory, we have to correct that".
You literally completely ignored all that and got irritated by just this sentence: "It's now become so bad, I had to literally vibecode a separate linter for this".
Because, see, I had to write a tool with the use of AI and run it against existing code, and correct it until it worked to my satisfaction so that I don't have to spend a lot of my time correcting a repeating error, so I automated the finding and the correction of a repearting error using a linter. And instead of writing that entire sentence I used the word "vibe-coded".
So no you've wasted a lot of breath arguing... what exactly is it that you arguing? Your inability to read what other people write? Functional illiteracy?
Your no understanding != my no meaning. You obviously don't understand the definition of vibe coding I posted right above. You can lead a horse to water... But hey, you're the one who proudly claims to be a vibe coder, I didn't call you that. I just showed you the definition of what it means, what you are calling yourself. And you wonder why your vibe code doesn't work.
If this is your problem, I hate to say it, but it’s a skill issue on your side. I didnt even start developing software until LLMs even though I know all the primitives quite well and have a strong grasp of architecture. ADHD, perfection, and focus got in the way. I’m writing a pretty complex application and I don’t have the problems you’re running into. I regularly have my code reviewed by professional devs to ensure I’m not just vibecoding into slop. I’m not. I also read my code regularly and do a lot of exercises and courses to keep learning as well.
So I dunno what to say, except it’s possible to write really solid code with LLMs.
Please help: I wánt to need this!