I recently joined a new company that is AI-first for coding. Here people seem to write little to none code and spend all their time chatting with Claude to hand over all the coding. In my previous company I was not a heavy user of AI for coding. I was just using it for some debugging, understanding some code and exploring complex code solutions. I felt some benefit for it but always remained a bit skeptical of the true productivity boost from using it. Surely I never feel ok to delegate the full implementation of a task to AI. But now all my new colleagues praises AI as this magical tool giving them such a productivity boost. The classical “I did X in 3 days while before it would have taken 3 months”. So I’m trying to get into it, but it isn’t really clicking for me. First, the need to give the context to Claude and keep on reiterating until Claude seems to have understand all the bits feels so inefficient and frustrating. I mean, most of the time the context is already in my head and I can just start coding, but with Claude it seems like I need to explain to a 5yo (I appreciate it’s sometimes useful to discuss the plan with someone to clarify unclear points, but that’s not always the case). Second, even after you are satisfied with the context and Claude seems to get it, the code is never 100% correct and can become complex very fast. Reviewing all Claude’s code is slow (in my experience is slower and harder to read & review code than write it) and for large changes/implementations this can even be unfeasible. I mean, some of my colleagues can’t even explain the code they pushed, just the idea, the “vibe”, let alone fixing it. So most of the time you just have to trust Claude and this feels such a leap of faith. This is even worse where you’re exploring something new, when you can’t judge if Claude is bullshitting you. Moreover, I’m a Data Scientist and sometimes the concept/idea/approach matters more than the code itself. Working with Claude feels like a yes-man with not memory: after some iteration the plan or the code start feeling a Frankenstein of little direction changes. All in all, my workflow feels very clunky, my productivity suffers from it and I’m mentally exhausted by all the babysitting. So, I’d like to hear from people who claim this huge productivity boost what they do with their Claude that feels so productive and how this changed their workflow for the better. Please try to be as specific as possible because a general “try plan mode” feels little useful. submitted by /u/mcurlier
Originally posted by u/mcurlier on r/ClaudeCode