Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

A little bit of the old ultrathink with the boys

At this point should we get our first knob/slider on a language model... THINK

..as if we're operating this machine as analog synth

If they did, they left out the best one: "m-m-m-m-monsterkill"

Surely Anthropic could do a better job implementing dynamic thinking token budgets.

Ultrakill is from Quake :)

Maybe I’m not getting this, but you can tab to autocomplete file paths.

You can use English or —add if you want to tell Claude to reference them.

>LLMs with broad contextual capabilities shouldn't need to be guided in this manor.

I mean finding your way around a manor can be hard, it's easier in an apartment.

14 checks through a string is entirely negligible relative to the amount of compute happening. Like a drop of water in the ocean.

Not having to specify files is a humongous feature for me. Having to remember which file code is in is half the work once you pass a certain codebase size.

Yeah, I tried CC out and quickly noticed it was spending $5+ for simple LLM capable tasks. I rarely break $1-2 a session using aider. Aider feels like more of a precision tool. I like having the ability to manually specify.

I do find Claude Code to be really good at exploration though - like checking out a repository I'm unfamiliar with and then asking questions about it.

Aider is a great tool. I do love it. But I find I have to do more with it to get the same output as Claude Code (no matter what LLM I used with Aider). Sure it may end up being cheaper per run, but not when my time is factored in. The flip side is I find Aider much easier to limit.

With Claude Code you can at least type "/code" at any point to see how much it's spent, and it will show you when you end a session (with Ctrl+C) too.

The output of /cost looks like this:

  > /cost 
    ⎿  Total cost: $0.1331
       Total duration (API): 1m 13.1s
       Total duration (wall): 1m 21.3s

After switching to Aider, I realized the other tools have been playing elaborate games to choose cheaper models and to limit files and messages in context, both of which increase their bills.

>I use Aider. It's awesome.

What do you use for the model? Claude? Gemini? o3?

The cost of the task scales with how long it takes, plus or minus.

Substitute “cost” with “time” in the above post and all of the same tips are still valuable.

I don’t do much agentic LLM coding but the speed (or lack thereof) was one of my least favorite parts. Using any tricks that narrow scope, prevent reprocessing files over and over again, or searching through the codebase are all helpful even if you don’t care about the dollar amount.

Hard agree. Whether it's 50 cents or 10 dollars per session, I'm using it to get work done for the sake of quickly completing work that aims to unblock many orders of magnitude more value. But in so far as cheaper correct sessions correlate with sessions where the problem solving was more efficient anyhow, they're fairly solid tips.

Exactly. I've been using the chat gpt desktop app not because of the model quality but because of the UX. It basically seamlessly integrates with my IDEs (intellij and vs code). Mostly I just do stuff like select a few lines, hit option+shift+1, and say something like "fix this". Nice short prompt and I get the answer relatively quickly. Option+shift+1 opens chat gpt with the open file already added to the context. It sees what lines are selected. And it also sees the output of any test runs on the consoles. So just me saying "fix this" now has a rich context that I don't need to micromanage.

Mostly I just use the 4o model instead of the newer better models because it is faster. It's good enough mostly and I prefer getting a good enough answer quickly than the perfect answer after a few minutes. Mostly what I ask is not rocket science so perfect is the enemy of good here. I rarely have to escalate to better models. The reasoning models are annoyingly slow. Especially when they go down the wrong track, which happens a lot.

And my cost is a predictable 20$/month. The downside is that the scope of what I can ask is more limited. I'd like it to be able to "see" my whole code base instead of just 1 file and for me to not have to micro manage what the model looks at. Claude can do that if you don't care about money. But if you do, you are basically micro managing context. That sounds like monkey work that somebody should automate. And it shouldn't require an Einstein sized artificial brain to do that.

There must be people that are experimenting with using locally running more limited AI models to do all the micromanaging that then escalate to remote models as needed. That's more or less what Apple pitched for Apple AI at some point. Sounds like a good path forward. I'd be curious to learn about coding tools that do something like that.

In terms of cost, I don't actually think it's unreasonable to spend a few hundred dollars per month on this stuff. But I question the added value over the 20$ I'm spending. I don't think the improvement is 20x better. more like 1.5x. And I don't like the unpredictability of this and having to think about how expensive a question is going to be.

I think a lot of the short term improvement is going to be a mix of UX and predictable cost. Currently the tools are still very clunky and a bit dumb. The competition is going to be about predictable speed, cost and quality. There's a lot of room for improvement here.

If this is true, why isn't our compensation scaling with the increases in productivity?

Important to remind people this is only true if you have a profitable product, otherwise you’re spending money you haven’t earned.

If you do it a bit, it just becomes habit / no extra time or cognitive load.

Correlation or causation aside, the same people I see complain about cost, complain about quality.

It might indicate more tightly controlled sessions may also produce better results.

Or maybe it's just people that tend to complain about one thing, complain about another.

Some tools take more effort to hold properly than others. I'm not saying there's not a lot of room for improvement - or that the ux couldn't hold the users hand more to force things like this in some "assisted mode" but at the end of the day, it's a thin, useful wrapper around an llm, and llms require effort to use effectively.

I definitely get value out of it- more than any other tool like it that I've tried.

Think about what you would do in an unfamiliar project with no context and the ticket

"please fix the authorization bug in /api/users/:id".

You'd start by grepping the code base and trying to understand it.

Compare that to, "fix the permission in src/controllers/users.ts in the function `getById`. We need to check the user in the JWT is the same user that is being requested"

I have been quite skeptical of using AI tools and my experiences using them have been frustrating for developing software but power tools usually come with a learning curve while "good product" with clean simplified interface often results in reduced capability.

VIM, Emacs and Excel are obvious power tools which may require you to think but often produce unrivalled productivity for power users

So I don't think the verdict that the product has a bad UI is fair. Natural language interfaces is such a step up from old school APIs with countless flags and parameters

Mh. Like, I'm deeply impressed what these AI assistants can do by now. But, the list in the parent comment there is very similar to my mental check-list of pair-programming / pair-admin'ing with less experienced people.

I guess "context length" in AIs is what I intuitively tracked with people already. It can be a struggle to connect the Zabbix alert, the ticket and the situation on the system already, even if you don't track down all the zabbix code and scripts. And then we throw in Ansible configuring the thing, and then the business requriements by more, or less controlled dev-teams. And then you realize dev is controlled by impossible sales-terms.

These are scope -- or I guess context -- expansions that cause people to struggle.

It's fundamentally hard. If you have an easy solution, you can go make a easy few billion dollars.

I pretty much one shot a scraper from an old Joomla site with 200+ articles to a new WP site, including all users and assets, and converting all the PDFs to articles. It cost me like $3 in tokens.

I am not implying in any sense a value judgement on cost. I'm stating my emotions at the realization of the cost and how that affects my ability to use the available tools in my own education.

It would be no different than me saying "it sucks university is so expensive, I wish I could afford to go to an expensive college but I don't have a scholarship" and someone then answers: why should it be cheap.

So, allow me the space to express my feelings and propose alternatives, of which scholarships are one example and creative programs are another. Another one I didn't mention would be the same route as universities force now: I could take out a loan. And I could consider it an investment loan with the idea it will pay back either in employment prospects or through the development of an application that earns me money. Other alternatives would be finding employment at a company willing to invest that $100/day through me, the limit of that alternative being working at an actual foundational model company for presumably unlimited usage.

And of course, I could focus my personal education on squeezing the most value for the least cost. But I believe the balance point between slightly useful and completely transformative usages levels is probably at a higher cost level than I can reasonably afford as an independent.

> It just has to be cheaper than you

There's an ocean of B2B SaaS services that would save customers money compared to building poor imitations in-house. Despite the Joel Test (almost 25 years old! craxy...) asking whether you buy your developers the best tools that money can buy, because they're almost invariably cheaper than developer salaries, the fact remains that most companies treat salaries as a fixed cost and everything else threatens the limited budget they have.

Anybody who has ever tried to sell developer tooling knows, you're competing with free/open-source solutions, and it aint a fair fight.

> It just has to be cheaper than you.

Not when you need an SWE in order for it to work successfully.

I agree with this in the general sense but of course I would like to minimize the thrash.

I have become obsessive about doing git commits in the way I used to obsess over Ctrl-S before the days of source control. As soon as I get to a point I am happy, I get the LLM to do a check-point check in so I can minimize the cost of doing a full directory revert.

But from a time and cost perspective, I could be doing much better. I've internalized the idea that when the LLM goes off the rails it was my fault. I should have prompted it better. So I am now consider: how do I get better faster? And the answer is I do it as much as I can to learn.

I don't just want to whine about the process. I want to use that frustration to help me improve, while avoiding going bankrupt.

i think this is particularly claude 3.7 behavior - at least in my experience, it's ... eager. overeager. smarter than 3."6" but still, it has little chill. gemini is better; o3 better yet. I'm mostly off claude as a daily driver coding assistant, but it had a really long run - longest so far.

I haven't used Aider yet, but I see it show up on HN frequently recently (the last couple of days specifically).

I am hesitant because I am paying for Cursor now and I get a lot of model usage included within that monthly cost. I'm cheap, perhaps to a fault even when I could afford it, and I hate the idea of spending twice when spending once is usually enough. So while Aider is potentially cheaper than Claude Code, it is still more than what I am already paying.

I would appreciate any comments on people who have made the switch from Cursor to Aider. Are you paying more/less? If you are paying more, do you feel the added value is worth the additional cost? If you are paying less, do you feel you are getting less, the same or even more?

Intriguing perspective! Could you elaborate on this with another paragraph or two?

> We humans undervisualize until we see concrete results.

That’s exactly what they were saying.

If you like this plan, you can do this from the command line:

`aider --model gemini --architect --editor-model claude-3.7` and aider will take care of all the fiddly bits including git commits for you.

right now `aider --model o3 --architect` has the highest rating on the Aider leaderboards, but it costs wayyy more than just --model gemini.

Damn that's interesting. How much of the code do you provide? I'm guessing when modularity is high you can give specific files.

Sorry yes. I should have clarified that.

$200 per PR is significantly cheaper development than businesses are paying.

3.5 was amazing for code, and topped benchmarks for months. It'll take a while for other models to take over that mental space.

what happened to the "$5 is just a cup o' coffee" argument? Are we heading towards the everything-for-$100 land?

On a serious note, there is no clear evidence that any of the LLM-based code assistants will contribute to saving developer time. Depends on the phase of the project you are in and on a multitude of factors.

So sad that people are happy to spend 100$ pd on a tool like this, and we're so unlikely (in general) to pay $5 to an author of an article/blog posts that possibly saved you the same amount of time.

(I'm not judging a specific person here, this is more of a broad commentary regarding our relationship/sense of responsibility/entitlement/lack of empathy when it comes to supporting other people's work when it helps us)

No, it doesn't. If you are still looking for product market fit, it is just cost.

After 2 years of GPT4 release, we can safely say that LLMs don't make finding PMF that much easier nor improve general quality/UX of products, as we still see a general enshittification trend.

If this spending was really game-changing, ChatGPT frontend/apps wouldn't be so bad after so long.

Just a few days ago Cursor saved a lot of developer time by encouraging all the customers to quit using a product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012

Developer time "saved" indeed ;-)

Multiple terminal sessions. Well written prompts and CLAUDE.md files.

I like to start by describing the problem and having it do research into what it should do, writing to a markdown file, then get it to implement the changes. You can keep tabs on a few different tasks at a time and you don't need to approve Yolo mode for writes, to keep the cost down and the model going wild.

In the same way how you manage a group of brilliant interns.

I've only user aider (which I like quite a bit more than cursor) but I'm curious how it compares to plandex and goose.

https://aider.chat/

Claude

> Why do you think you need semantic indexing?

Unfortunately I can only give an anecdotal answer here, but I get better results from Cursor than the alternatives. The semantic index is the main difference, so I assume that's what's giving it the edge.