Hi everyone! We all hear that Claude Code (and AI in general) is a game changer for software development and that it makes us 2/3/4/10 times more productive and blah blah, but somehow the only good things about AI I see are on Reddit, never in my own experience or the experience of my colleagues. I’m a .NET developer, and I get very little benefit from using AI in my work. I spent weeks trying to develop with CC, from “here I describe everything in words, just code it” to “do all the analysis, ask all the questions, I review everything, and then code,” and none of those approaches gave me even a 3x performance boost. I’m not even sure I got more than 10-20%. And it’s pretty much the same around me - my friends and colleagues either say literally the same thing or produce thousands of lines of very poor and buggy code. For instance, last week I reviewed a 75,000 LOC MR with poorly written code. I found multiple bugs, addressed them, they were “fixed” by AI, and when I checked, the result was even worse. One comment was “I fixed it in commit 999xxx,” and there was no such commit. This MR was from our top “AI” developer. And again: 75,000 lines of code for a feature that required much less. Yes, AI generated multiple validations, tests, tests for tests, even architecture tests (to check method naming lol), but in all this ocean of code one of the bugs was: It called an external service, requested all documents from its database, and filtered them on our side instead of passing the filtering query to the service itself. I also tried to “build” my own agentic flow with CC - using subagents, writing skills for our codebase, style, rules, and general workflow with issue decomposition, requirements analysis, etc. (and of course I tried Superpowers and other CC “frameworks” too). And I never achieved good results with it. By “good” I mean code quality roughly equal to what I would write myself, delivered faster than if I just did it manually without AI. For instance, I had a relatively complicated issue: I needed to change FE-BE communication from synchronous through an intermediate connection to asynchronous using background processing and events. It was a relatively new microservice, not a simple CRUD service, and on top of that it was my first time working with this microservice (I knew something about its structure but wasn’t proficient in it). I wrote a specification, and together with AI we analyzed the task, considered a few approaches, and decomposed it into multiple small subtasks. I reviewed every one of them, and then it started coding. There were 8 subtasks. After each one it created an MR, which I manually reviewed and commented on. Each subtask without business logic was developed pretty well - DTOs, interfaces, templates, and other trivial files were fine, so no issues there at all. But every task involving logic was awful. For the first complicated task I left 65 comments, for the second about 30, and for the last one about 120 comments plus multiple iterations of refactoring and improvements. So in the end I had 150 changed files, and it still didn’t work at all. It also took about 4 days from start to finish. I decided to investigate everything myself and, in 2 days, I learned the service code, wrote all the required changes, and… it was fewer than 60 changed files and everything worked fine. So I ended up with a very complicated development process using AI, it took longer, and the result was worse than if I had just done it myself without CC. And unfortunately this is not the only example where I (or people I know) failed with it. I’m not an AI hater. I use it - it can generate tests, write template-based code, and it works fine if the codebase is small and simple. But whenever I read Reddit I see people saying it completely changed their lives, and I genuinely have no clue what I’m doing wrong. If there are any enterprise developers here working on real complex products with real users (>1000 at least) who have successfully integrated AI into their processes, could you please share real examples of your workflows, the kinds of tasks you solve with it, and maybe give me some suggestions? Because in our company, over the last 6 months, we’ve had: more bugs (+25% according to my calculations last quarter) a worse codebase the same development speed as before Management dreams about 10x speed, but neither I nor the other devs see it. submitted by /u/ImDlear
Originally posted by u/ImDlear on r/ClaudeCode