Couldn’t read the entire comments but, my experience has been overwhelmingly positive so far.
I think what helps me be effective is a combination of factors: I work only in a modern, well-documented and well-architected Java codebase with over 80% test coverage.
I only use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 on High Effort.
I always, ALWAYS treat my “new job” as writing a detailed ticket for whatever it is I need to do.
I give the model access to a DB replica of my prod DB that I create manually.
I do NOT waste time with custom agents, Claude.md files or any of that stuff.
When I put ALL of the above together, the results ARE THE PROMISED LAND: I simply haven’t written a single line of code manually in the last 3 months.
I find this pretty interesting. I am curious though: Did you dislike coding? You sound genuinely excited to not be doing it anymore.
For me I have been a coder since a very young age and I am nearing the end of my career now. I still love writing code to problem solve just as much as the first day I learnt to code. The thought of something taking that task away from me doesn't fill me with glee.
A parallel for me is if I enjoyed puzzle pages and those brought me with joy and satisfaction employing my grey matter to solve, I just wouldn't find it interesting to have an agent complete the forms to me, with me simply guiding the agent to clues.
Replying once again for future reference to make my position clear: I firmly believe that one MUST experience programming on its own first. No LLMs, no crutches. One MUST feel the abstractions melting away and things clicking in the brain first.
The design becoming obvious. Being able to remove that extra if statement after clarifying requirements with a customer face to face.
A design pattern fitting a scenario like a glove, etc, etc.
You need REAL experience that only comes with time and effort. Years or decades, different businesses, different companies, etc.
But once you have crossed that chasm and that rite of passage, using LLMs becomes a true multiplier and my experience quite fun.
Using them blindly or without experience is a very different thing I can imagine.
I like problem solving and building useful things for our customers. Coding for me was always more of a “means to an end” than pure craft on its own. Obviously some standard, good and clean code pops up when you’re working in things to be extended or maintained by others, but, truth be told, ego battling in code reviews gets boring very fast and additionally, no matter how much I like experimenting with things, if I have an hypothesis, I can now validate it in 2 days instead of 1 week, which means I can validate double the hypothesis.
I am extremely excited about that! Coding in itself as the act of manually typing things? Absolutely not
C'mon let's be real here, there's either "testing AI skills" versus "using AI agents like you would on the daily".
The signal got from leetcode is already dubious to assert profeciency and it's mostly used as a filter for "Are you willing to cram useless knowledge and write code under pressure to get the job?" just like system design is. You won't be doing any system design for "scale" anywhere in any big tech because you have architects for that nor do you need to "know" anything, it's mostly gatekeeping but the truth is, LLMs democratized both leetcode and system design anyway. Anyone with the right prompting skills can now get to an output that's good for 99% of the cases and the other 1% are reserved for architecs/staff engineers to "design" for you.
The crux of the matter is, companies do not want to shift how they approach interviews for the new era because we have collectively believed that the current process is good enough as-is. Again, I'd argue this is questionable given how sometimes these services break with every new product launch or "under load" (where YO SYSTEM DESIGN SKILLZ AT).
I really love Anthropic's models, but, every single product/feature I've used other than the Claude Code CLI has been terrible... The CLI just "sticked" for me and I've never needed (or arguably looked in depth) any other features. This for my professional dayjob.
For personal use, where I have a Pro subscription and adventure into exploring all the other features/products they have... I mean, the experience outside of Claude Code and the terminal has been... bad.
> every single product/feature I've used other than the Claude Code CLI has been terrible
yeah they're shipping too fast and everything is buggy as shit
- fork conversation button doesn't even work anymore in vscode extension
- sometimes when I reconnect to my remote SSH in VSCode, previously loaded chats become inaccessible. The chats are still there in the .jsonl files but for some reason the CC extension becomes incapable of reading them.
I tend to agree here. Today, I tried to get the claude chat to give me a list of Jira tickets from one board (link provided) and then upload it to notion with some additional context. It glitched out after trying the prompt over again 4x. I eventually gave up and went back to the terminal.
Yes. This is my experience as well. The software quality is generally horrible. It surely has improved a lot over the last couple of months, but it is still pretty horrible.
It is quite normal for me to have to force-close Claude Desktop.
Error
Invalid input: 1 validation error for PlanRequest current_km Input should be greater than 0 [type=greater_than, input_value=0.0, input_type=float] For further information visit https://errors.pydantic.dev/2.5/v/greater_than
Even if it broke after some sort of vibe coding session, the fact that we’re now pushing these tools to their limits are what’s allowing Anthropic and Boris getting a lot of useful insights to improve the models and experience further! So yeah, buckle up, bumps expected
Over the holiday period, I have vibecoded a simple running/fitness app that I wish I had, but never found!
The app is geared towards running, offering comprehensive plans for different distances and durations, with the ability to log runs/save plans, export to PDF and focused on simplicity.
It uses a progressive distance building approach to allow runners to safely reach their goals.
As an extra, it offers some dedicated strength training for running as well as healthy/hearty meals focused on lean protein, veggies and all the cliches :)
I know there's nothing new or unique about an app like this, but, I like that I have one single place where I can generate a running plan, have some nice meal ideas for when I lack inspiration, as well as some strength training added in the mix!
If this resonates and it's helpful, there's an option to buy me a coffee which will help cover all the vibecoding/hosting costs :)
I hope it's as useful for someone as it has been for me (currently following a plan generated with it for a trail run in a few months' time!).
GLM-4.7 in opencode is the only opensource one that comes close in my experience and probably they did use some Claude data as I see the occasional You’re absolutely right in there
I got their z.ai plan to test alongside my Claude subscription; it feels about on par with something between sonnet 4.0 and sonnet 4.5. It's definitely a few steps below current day Claude, but it's very capable.
dumbness usually comes from lack of information, humans are the same way - the difference between other llms is that if opus has information it has a ridiculously high accuracy on tasks.
z.ai (Zhipu AI) is a chinese run entity, so presumably China's National Intelligence Law put in place in 2018, which requires data exfiltration back to the government, would apply to the use of this. I wouldn't feel comfortable using any service that has that fundamental requirement.
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Y Combinator are US run entities, so presumably the CLOUD Act and FISA require data exfiltration back to the government when asked, on top of the all the "Room 641A"s where the NSA directly taps into the ISP interconnects, would apply to the use of them. I wouldn't feel comfortable using any service that has that fundamental requirement.
I wouldn't use any provider: z.ai, Claude, OpenAI, ... if I was concerned about the government obtaining my prompts. If you're doing something where this is a legitimate concern (as opposed to my open source stuff), you should get a local LLM or put a lot of effort into anonymizing yourself and your prompts.
I agree completely, I meant in terms of opensource ones only.
Opus 4.5 is the current SOTA and using it in Claude Code is an absolute amazing experience.
But, paying 0 to test GLM-4.7 with opencode, feels like an amazing deal! I don’t use it for work though. But to keep “gaining experience” with these agents and tools, it’s by far the best option out there from all I’ve tried.
Claude spits that very regularly at the end of the answer, when it's clearly out of it's depth, and wants to steer discussion away from that blind-spot.
Perhaps being more intentional about adding a use case to your original prompts would make sense if you see that failure mode frequently? (Practicing treating LLM failures as prompting errors tends to give the best results, even if you feel the LLM "should" have worked with the original prompt).
I only use Claude Code with Opus 4.6 on High Effort.
I always, ALWAYS treat my “new job” as writing a detailed ticket for whatever it is I need to do.
I give the model access to a DB replica of my prod DB that I create manually.
I do NOT waste time with custom agents, Claude.md files or any of that stuff.
When I put ALL of the above together, the results ARE THE PROMISED LAND: I simply haven’t written a single line of code manually in the last 3 months.