Claude Code doesn’t work that well if you’re not an experienced programmer. I mean, it works okay, but it has no taste, so it just produces syntactically correct stuff that is only randomly useful by default. It takes active steering to get good code out of it.
Also, I’m rarely trying to solve algorithmic problems, I’m trying to build production software, which is mostly about managing abstractions and plumbing different systems together to produce something useful to customers. All the hard algorithm work happens somewhere else by someone else because, while it’s essential, it adds very little marginal value for our customers. If algorithms to do something don’t exist, the solution is often to just wait for someone to figure it out, then build a feature on top of them. When I do get to work on algorithms, it’s usually solving complex concurrent execution problems, which Claude is okay at helping with but not great on its own. Luckily, I mostly design smartly to rely on systems that manage these details for me so I don’t need to work them out all the time.
Claude Code doesn’t work that well if you’re not an experienced programmer. I mean, it works okay, but it has no taste, so it just produces syntactically correct stuff that is only randomly useful by default. It takes active steering to get good code out of it.
Also, I’m rarely trying to solve algorithmic problems, I’m trying to build production software, which is mostly about managing abstractions and plumbing different systems together to produce something useful to customers. All the hard algorithm work happens somewhere else by someone else because, while it’s essential, it adds very little marginal value for our customers. If algorithms to do something don’t exist, the solution is often to just wait for someone to figure it out, then build a feature on top of them. When I do get to work on algorithms, it’s usually solving complex concurrent execution problems, which Claude is okay at helping with but not great on its own. Luckily, I mostly design smartly to rely on systems that manage these details for me so I don’t need to work them out all the time.