I am using Claude Code full-time for about 6 weeks* with the $20/month subscription. I am trying out building different products from ideas I have already had. It frees me a lot of time to talk about my founder journey.
I have not needed multiple agents or using CC over an SSH terminal to run overnight. The main reason is that LLMs are not correct many times. So I still need time to test. Like run the whole app, or check what broke in CI (GitHub Actions), etc. I do not go through code line by line anymore and I organize work with tickets (sometimes they are created with CC too).
Both https://github.com/pixlie/Pixlie and https://github.com/pixlie/SmartCrawler are vibe coded (barely any code that I wrote). With LLMs you can generated code 10x than writing manually. It means you can also get 10x the errors. So the manual checks take some time.
Our existing engineering practices are very helpful when generating code through LLMs and I do not have mental bandwidth to review a mountain of code. I am not sure if we scale out LLMs, it will help in building production quality software. I already see that sometimes CC makes really poor guesses. Imagine many such guesses in parallel, daily.
edit: typo - months/weeks
If there is barely any code in those repos that you wrote, how can you license them under the GPL? You don't hold the copyright for it.
This genuinely isn't an attack, I just don't think you can? The AI isn't granted copyright over what it produces.
I can only talk about the law in England & Wales, but:
For code generated by an LLM the human user would likely be considered the author if you provided sufficient creative input, direction, or modification.
The level of human involvement matters, simply prompting "write me a function" might not be enough, but providing detailed specifications, reviewing, and modifying the output would strengthen the claim.
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA), Section 9(3) staes, "In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken". This was written before LLM's existed, but recent academic literature has supported this position, https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/article/19/1/43/7485196?login...
However, a comparable situation was tested with Thaler v Comptroller-General, where courts emphasised that legal rights require meaningful human involvement, not just ownership of the AI system. - https://www.culawreview.org/journal/unlocking-the-canvas-a-l... and https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/uk-supreme-co...
I do acknowledge there is uncertainty, and this is highlighted here in "The Curious Case of Computer-Generated Works under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.", with "section 9(3): the section is either unnecessary or unjustifiably extends legal protection to a class of works which belong in the public domain" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4072004
Today, I think it's doubtful that a functional application can be entirely vibe coded without decent direction and modification, but I don't think that will always be the case.
My trick is - ask for a plan. Revise the plan. Then ask only to work on a single step of the plan making progress incremental then ask for tests for that step and keep hitch hiking in incremental steps.
Yes and this also helps to highlight which problems I should be solving and which problems Claude code can solve. Like tbh building efficient data structures is not Claude’s thing he seems happy to just hack together some nonsense that leads to spaghetti being shot into all corners of your repo. But by iteratively building up plans and todo lists i find Claude is able to resist the temptation to hack everything all at once to solve the immediate problem in front of his face.
Looking at ChatInterface.tsx/handleSendMessage in https://github.com/pixlie/Pixlie/commit/3c0bd23ff16c0fcdac80..., I'd have rejected this if it came up in a PR and would not consider this production quality software.
Rewriting it to something sane would be harder and more time consuming than just writing a decent implementation upfront.
you just rick rolled me!
Can someone explain to me like I'm from 2020 what these multiple agents are for? Is it something like starting five different Claude Code sessions in parallel to fix five different issues? Or are they collaborating in some capacity?
Five different issues. They don't (yet) collaborate. However, Claude Code does let the model farm out subtasks to "sub agents" which is basically just forking the chat history in order to manage context explosion. Claude often does this to find things in the codebase - it effectively instructs a sub-instance of itself to work out where something is, the sub-conversation terminates with an answer and the main context window only contains the answer. It can also do this in parallel.
So, it's kinda both. Terragon works on separate tasks in parallel, Claude Code farms out subtasks and sometimes also in parallel.
> Is it something like starting five different Claude Code sessions in parallel to fix five different issues?
yes
I tried Claude Code with my custom serverless BaaS https://saasufy.com/ - The results were excellent.
I've been struggling to convince users to use the provided Web Components instead of React but now with Claude Code, the frontend language/framework doesn't matter; it's increasingly irrelevant.
The new frontend language is Claude Code. What is behind is irrelevant so long as it works well and efficiently (minimalist). Which is precisely what my platform is good at. The backend platform is irrelevant as well, so long as it works efficiently and is serverless.
This is the ideal situation I've been waiting for. My opinionated platform is no longer opinionated because soon anyone will be able to use it without understanding it. It might commodify the BaaS sector which is good news if you're competing on efficiency and functionality as opposed to relying on API lockin and network effects.
This article reads like an ad for the author’s product.
This article is an ad for the author's product.
Good. Advertising is valuable and important. It's how people learn about new products and services. Articles like this are part of why I come to HN. And I wanted something like Terragon for ages. It's an obvious idea, clearly where the industry needs to go, and if it's well implemented then I'd be happy to use it. OpenAI has been trying the same thing with Codex.
Of course, the question is price. It's "free during beta".
It definitely is.
But, hey; it worked on me. I'm going to try it, since I've been looking for exactly this.
Am I the only person who hasn't found the time, money, permission from work, resources, etc to be able to produce software like this? I'm still at my corporate 9-5 where they're still making the decision on whether we're allowed to use copilot yet.
They gave us copilot and honestly for me it's been a bit of a double-edged sword. I often use it with Claude 4 as model. What I noticed is that the tool is able and eager to make large sweeping modifications to the code base where I would be apprehensive and look for an easier way.
For example: changing the type signatures of all functions in a module to pass along some extra state, a huge amount of work. I ended up reverting the changes and replacing the functionality with thread local storage (well, dynamically scoped variables).
So, definitely not a panacea, but still well worth the money.
No, lots of people are in that situation. Either due to IP or cost concerns. $200/month/developer is a non-trivial expensive for most companies, given that they aren't easily able to monitor developer productivity, and as people keep observing it's not clear that the $200/month price point is sustainable given how easy it is to ramp up usage what would cost $2000/month on the API.
I do stuff after work to keep up to date. Like scrolling hacker news and as my gf says “shitposting on LinkedIn”. But also I’ve been building some apps with Claude code. It’s fun actually. But I also do other stuff like gym and cycling and Russian language learning.
The local models I've tried can't write software of the kind and quality I require for work. When I'm programming recreationally I'm not really interested in automating it, since I do it for pleasure.
I have yet to meet someone in meatspace who is competent and isn't of the opinion that LLM SaaS are fine for querying out a bit of bash or Python here and there, but not much else. Sometimes people or corporations on the Internet are like 'wow, our entire repo is vibbed, so cool' and when I go look it's as if a bootcamped intern wrote it unsupervised but with a lot more Markdown I'm not going to look at, or a toy or a simple tool gluing some libraries.
I am in a situation where everyone uses it but is ashamed to admit it. I often spot people secretly glancing at GH copilot chat or Chat GPT.
Whats the benefit of this over the Claude code github action? https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code-action
It's already great at spinning up 5+ agents working on different PRs, triggered by just @mentioning claude on any github issue.
Noise? Iterating in PRs - if humans are involved.
That said, Terragon here (which is akin to Codex and Jules) are often "too autonomous" for my taste. Human in the loop is made more difficult -- commenting may not be enough: I can't edit the code from those because the workspace is so ephemeral and/or remote.
I guess this uses your subscription, when the GH action doesn't. That alone is a significant benefit, as I've turned the action off due to cost.
I think GH action can also now use your subscription https://x.com/alexalbert__/status/1943332121814405412
Aw man, they say it's available but then the instructions refer to "getting the API key from the console". I'll play around with the installation command again, thank you!
EDIT: The command does it now, thanks! I tried if a few weeks ago and it didn't, so this is great.
This is the dream, but we are not yet there. For any reasonable complex code base, CC needs guidance, like avoiding duplicate code/use library function. Write more tests. Sometimes there is a much more elegant solution for a problem. Claude will find it, but you need to hint and ask.
If people use Claude without a critical eye, our code bases will grow immensely.
With most of the async Claude code systems I’ve tried you’d do iterations like this as part of code review.
And fwiw I use cc with a complex code base and an async workflow like the author describes daily.
> If people use Claude without a critical eye, our code bases will grow immensely.
Sounds like the baseline for programming in teams. People are more likely to write their own helpers or install dependencies than knowing what's already available in the repository.
It's a lot of work, but it's a different type of work.
Are all these Claude Code articles adverts for people building wrappers around Claude Code? I'm starting to get quite sceptical about how good it actually is
Claude code is very good, no idea about the wrapper and don’t really care. The “hidden” adverts do get on my nerves though
I disagree. It's pricy and does crap code unless precisely instructed. Maybe because I was prompting in non-english langauge
Oh I wouldn’t try anything other than English with Claude. For the quality, it depends on many things, the context given, the quality of the code given as context, style, etc.
I easily double my output with very little effect on quality. It does require constant supervision though, I don’t see AI producing professional quality code by any other mean than human supervision, for a looooong time.
Don't do that. Quality of all models tanks in non-English unfortunately. It's fine for chat and translation tasks but their cognitive capacities does reduce a lot.
One of the next features I'm expecting wrappers to add on top is auto-translation. In many work contexts it makes more sense to translate what the user said to English, process that and translate the answer back than ask the model to speak the language natively.
If I may, LLMs have no cognitive capacities. Their corpora in English are simply bigger.
When I work side-by-side with Claude to fix bugs or ask it to fix problems. It constantly makes mistakes, like the other day it got the concept of batchItemFailures on an sqs queue completely wrong.
How are people just firing them off to build stuff with any confidence?
https://ghuntley.com/stdlib/ applies to claude as well.
AI won't magically know your codebase unless it is pretty vanilla - but then you teach it. If it makes a mistake, teach it by adding a rule.
You have to confine the output space or else you quickly get whatever.
One might argue it should know others codebases though. The fact it wouldn’t know function signatures for AWS SDK isn’t hugely promising and reflects my own experiences using LLMs
This sounds fantastic. I found myself nodding along the entire time as the author's experience matched mine. I'm really surprised it isn't more popular here on HN; I can only think that most people haven't really used Claude Max yet.
Claudia helps regarding managment and session mental switching.
I added a web server ontop, so I can use Claudia from my phone now: https://github.com/getAsterisk/claudia/pull/216
How much does it seem like this will be affected by the recent headline saying that Max rate-limits are getting shadow-tightened?
It's pretty clear to me that every member Big Token is converging on practically identical models and they're now just competing on compute efficiency based on their particular capital situation. So in the short-term products like Terragon might be nerfed. But in a year or two (2027!) it's hard to imagine OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral, and so on not all having terminal modes with automatic background agent creation and separate Git branching. At that point it's a race to the bottom for consumer prices.
How are people using Claude to use this much API? I use it to write the occasional bit and the free one seems enough - I've only once been told to come back tomorrow.
write any project with a lot of math and memory shuffling and the structure will generally start eating lots of tokens.
write any project that has a lot of interactive 'dialogues', or exacting and detailed comments, eats a lot of tokens.
My record for tapping out the Claude Max API quickly was sprint-coding a poker solver and accompanying web front end w/ Opus. The backend had a lot of gpgpu stuff going on , and the front end was extremely verbose w/ a wordy ui/ux.
So you write the whole thing using Claude? Any walkthroughs/YouTube things to show how to do this? Not sure I want to, but I'm curious
Pro was not sufficient when i started to: Use git worktrees, type every command in plain english in CC.
For example “commit and push”
How good is it at writing commit messages out of interest?
Not great by default, it just lists the files that were added or modified and "signs" itself at the bottom. I see no value in its commit messages compared to just scrolling down and seeing the actual diff.
You can make it somewhat better by adding instructions in CLAUDE.md, but I did notice those instructions getting ignored from time to time unless you "remind it".
See for yourself: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%F0%9F%A4%96+Gene...
I have a line in my claude file that says “**Never** list files in git commit messages.’ due to Claude’s propensity to do that. So funny.
They continue conversations in huge contexts which quickly slurps up their credits and instead of changing their workflow and adapting, they shovel more cash into it so it burns brighter.