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.
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'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].
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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)
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.
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.
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.
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 said vendor here but it’s more like banks we work with. So there’s someone responsible for the technical side of banking relationships.
But yeah it’s kinda a zone where most weekends there’s no problems so it’s not a huge priority… until it is
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.
If you got into the industry due to enjoying the typing of code the future is looking pretty bleak.
I dunno.
I've been watching "How it's made" on Hulu to fall asleep at night.
I’m constantly surprised by how many things are made with human hands, despite the ability to automate.
[dead]
An enormous amount of on-call debugging is just natural language reading of logs.
[dead]
I've used it for the following when I've had tokens to burn:
[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/SkillOptI 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.
That makes sense - thanks. Do you use hooks for this?
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)
> 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.
They help folks on fixed rate plans consistently hit their usage limits which provides them the feeling of getting their money's worth.
Pretty much doing everything that takes more time doing manually on computers
Letting it control a browser and searching for a pair of pants of a given size and length and color and style.
Yes, surprisingly, this is something Google cannot do yet.
Few cases I have found very useful myself
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.
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 like using /remote-control to keep vibe dev running smoothly against my usage limits and deadlines
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?
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.
Oh yeah sounds great working in your free time and while traveling to buy groceries to feed yourself so you can continue working.
That time is otherwise worthless, so yes?
I don't value my travel time at all, but it used to be wasted on travelling.
Do you do software development? Is there any work left at the end of the day? Have it do that stuff.
I always have to correct its hallucinations during the day. Why would I ever let it run unsupervised overnight?
Running tests and optimize?
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.
>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)
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
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.
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.
(I wish I was joking)
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.
ask AI to help
Same here