Original Reddit post

I decided it would be worth starting a thread where users of Claude and the general Agentic Coding community could share their thoughts on what actually works and what doesn’t. There’s currently a trend for YOLO vibe coding – it doesn’t matter what the machine throws out, accept it and be happy as long as it works. I’m old school. I first learned C++, dabbled with Turbo Pascal, tried my hand at Assembler and PHP, and for a few years now, I’ve been dabbling in Python few years and Go for over a year. The current trend is that AI is essential for coding and you can’t live without it, and in my opinion, there’s a lack of clarity on what works, what doesn’t, and where the limits are for forcing AI into writing applications. I used my PyCharm Pro + Claude plugin for it. I am not support buying or denying tools. I tried make review here for lost people. The first thing that seems obvious is that the simpler the program, the easier it is. Generating short applications under 100 lines of code with a Claude Pro subscription – wait, that’s more convenient than tapping out trivial programs. I decided to build a project mostly from scratch, something I’d been considering for a while, but it’s simply boring and won’t bring me any income, other than better work organization. Recognizing publicly available APIs works quite well. Using a short description, it’s possible to reverse engineer services like RPC. Retrieving data, saving to the database, and similar operations are straightforward. The second thing I noticed was the completeness of the vision. I had this project in mind, and I was able to visualize what the general route and application structure in Flask should be, so I was more focused on verifying whether Claude was following my reasoning. Some things also couldn’t be done sensibly differently, and it worked surprisingly well. Third: Expansion. This is where things slowly started to get tricky. I had a general idea of ​​what to expect. As a result, I first attempted to generate it, see how it worked, and then figure out how I felt about it. It worked for a while, but then the program became too long. The Python code exceeded 2,000 lines of code and began to hover around 3,000-4,000. The JavaScript code followed suit. The CSS styles reached around 1,000 lines of code. And this is where the real challenges began. Converting all this into tokens takes context. Careless typing and waiting for a response no longer works. Relatively simple functionalities suddenly became demanding (the general concept of the application is to retrieve external data into the plan, add custom elements to it that weren’t in the original, and add functionality that wasn’t originally there – generating documents based on the plan, adding and managing tasks). Response time rarely drops below a dozen or so minutes. Depending on the problem, an advanced developer can sometimes make changes faster than Claude (Sonet 4.5) can come up with them. The unrivaled savings are in the visual aspect – if it’s not too important and we expect something that will show up and work – it significantly accelerates front-end coding. The slowdown begins when we’re not running in Claude mode (5-hour windows before resetting, and weekly ones). With this plan, uninterrupted work quickly becomes impossible. The price (around $20) is obviously a factor, and let’s bear in mind that I’m writing about the cheapest Claude Code subscription, Pro, from a limited perspective (I’m assuming you have a small budget and want this type of tool). Creating simple applications works great, but getting into more complex projects – oh, that’s a painful experience. Sometimes it’s faster to code things yourself than to describe what you want. In the end, you either have to learn another programming language (“prompting”) or machine thinking. Modern computers are too weak. Running a sensible alternative locally doesn’t make much sense. Delays between what you write and what you expect average from 5 to 20 minutes, sometimes longer. For code to add a note, basic tools for editing a note or task, it’s sometimes faster to code it from scratch or connect a ready-made library. The resulting code—the quality varies. Some parts are flawless, sometimes I see endless JS functions with functions within functions with names that don’t really mean anything and require a lot of commenting so that anyone after Claude can expand or change them. I see that supporters will undoubtedly be people who have a general understanding of programming but are too slow. However, Claude won’t improve their skills; in fact, it will lead to regression. For now, Claude makes sense for simple tools that require laborious coding, such as creating a DOCX document generator based on a template (another document)—the code itself is simple, but it’s easy to make mistakes due to the specific syntax involved. It’s a task like knowing what it should look like, knowing what to use, but putting it together is very tedious and repetitive. Who isn’t it for? For those who want to program faster, not today, but in the future. Building skills with this tool is difficult. It shows code snippets but doesn’t provide much context. It’s like displaying passages of text and hoping you’ll understand the entire novel. submitted by /u/pepiks

Originally posted by u/pepiks on r/ClaudeCode