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I love this article just for the spirit of fun and experimentation on display. Setting up a VPS where Claude is just asked to go nuts - to the point where you're building a little script to keep Claude humming away - is a really fun idea.
This sort of thing is a great demonstration of why I remain excited about AI in spite of all the hype and anti-hype. It's just fun to mess with these tools, to let them get friction out of your way. It's a revival of the feelings I had when I first started coding: "wow, I really can do anything if I can just figure out how."
Great article, thanks for sharing!
> “wow, I really can do _anything_ if I can just figure out how
Except this time it’s “if I can just figure out how and pay for the Claude API usage”.
This is one of the sadder things about AI usage getting more standard that I haven’t seen discussed much—-the barrier to entry is now monetary rather than just knowledge-based, which will make it _much_ harder for young people with no money to pick up.
Yes, they can still write code the manual way, but if the norm is to use AI I suspect that beginner’s guides, tutorials, etc. will become less common.
For me, I can’t get into using AI tools like Claude Code. As far as I go is chat style where I’m mostly in control. I enjoy the actual process of crafting code myself. For similar reasons, I could never be a manager.
Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I’ll probably just find a new career
> It's just fun to mess with these tools
I think this is the main sentiment I can't wrap my head around. Using Claude Code or Cursor has been entirely a mind-numbingly tedious experience to me (even when it's been useful.) It's often faster, but 80% of the time is spent just sitting there waiting for it to finish working, and I'm not proud of the result because I didn't do anything except come up with the idea and figure out how to describe it well. It just ends up feeling like the coding equivalent of...like...copying down answers to cheat on a test. Not in the sense that it feels gross and wrong and immoral, but in the sense that it's unsatisfying and unfulfilling and I don't feel any pride in the work I've done.
For things where I just want something that does something I need as quickly as possible, sure, I wasn't going to care either way, but personal projects are where I find myself least wanting to vibe code anything. It feels like hiring someone else to do my hobbies for me.
On one hand, I agree with you that there is some fun in experimenting with silly stuff. On the other hand...
> Claude was trying to promote the startup on Hackernews without my sign off. [...] Then I posted its stuff to Hacker News and Reddit.
...I have the feeling that this kind of fun experiments is just setting up an automated firehose of shit to spray places where fellow humans congregate. And I have the feeling that it has stopped being fun a while ago for the fellow humans being sprayed.
This is the kind of thing people should be doing with AI. Weird and interesting stuff that has a "Let's find out!" Attitude.
Often there's as much to be learned from why it doesn't work.
I see the AI hype to be limited to a few domains.
People choosing to spend lots of money on things speculatively hoping to get a slice of whatever is cooking, even if they don't really know if it's a pie or not.
Forward looking imagining of what would change if these things get massively better.
Hyperbolic media coverage of the above two.
There are companies taking about adding AI for no other reason than they feel like that's what they should be doing, I think that counts as a weak driver of hype, but only because cumulatively, lots of companies are doing it. If anything I would consider this an outcome of hype.
Of these the only one that really affects me is AI being shoehorned into places it shouldn't
The media coverage stokes fires for and against, but I think it only changes the tone of annoyance I have to endure. They would do the same on another topic in the absence of AI. It used to be crypto,
I'm ok with people spending money that is not mine on high risk, high potential reward. It's not for me to judge how they calculate the potential risk or potential reward. It's their opinion, let them have it.
The weird thing I find is the complaints about AI hype dominating. I have read so many pieces where the main thrust of their argument is about the dominance of fringe viewpoints that I very rarely encounter. Frequently they take the stance that anyone imagining how the world might change from any particular form of AI as a claim that that form is inevitable and usually imminent. I don't see people making those claims.
I see people talking about what they tried, what they can do, and what they can't do. Everything they can't do is then held up by others as if it were a trophy and proof of some catestrophic weakness.
Just try stuff, have fun, if that doesn't interest you, go do something else. Tell us about what you are doing. You don't need to tell us that you aren't doing this particular thing, and why. If you find something interesting tell us about that, maybe we will too.
every vibe coded thing I've built is trash, but it's amazingly fun to do.
I've tried to explain it to other devs that it's like dumping out a 10000 piece jigsaw puzzle and trying to put it together again.
it's just fun.
Not sure if I'd want Claude doing whatever on a production vps/node, but I like the idea of a way to use Claude Code on the go/wherever you are. I'm going to setup KASM workspaces on my free OCI server and see how it works there.
Maintaining scheduled playing with what's changed/new/different is mandatory with the tools one already uses, let alone any new ones.
All this AI coding stuff is scaring the shit out of me. a few months ago my team were hiring for a new engineer. of the 9 candidates we ran technical interviews with, only two could work without the ai. The rest literally just vibe coded their way though the app. as soon as it was taken away, they couldn't even write a basic sql query in ecto (we're a phoenix app). when questioned about tradeoffs inherent in the ai generated implementation, all but one was completely in the dark.
> couldn't even write a basic sql query
Not the point at all, but I have found it quite common among younger professional engineers to not know SQL at all. A combination of specialization (e.g. only work on microservices that do not directly touch a database) and NoSQL has made the skill of SQL more obscure than I would have thought possible as recently as 5 years ago.
> export IS_SANDBOX=1 && claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
FYI, this can be shortened to:
IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
> I asked Claude to rename all the files and I could go do something else while it churned away, reading the files and figuring out the correct names.
It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks manually and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it doing something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to write a program to do the thing I want. e.g. I needed to change the shape of about 100 JSON files the other day and it wanted to go through them one-by-one. I stopped it after the third file, told it to write a script to import the old shape and write out the new shape, and 30 seconds later it was done. I also had it write me a script to... rename my stupidly named bank statements. :-)
You run a coding agent with no permissions checks on a production server anywhere I'm involved in security and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.
Really, any coding agent our shop didn't write itself, though in those cases the smiting might be less theatrical than if you literally ran a yolo-mode agent on a prod server.
"Now I can just tell Claude to write an article (like the one you're currently reading) and give it some pointers regarding how I want it to look, and it can generate any custom HTML and CSS and JavaScript I want on the fly."
Yea, I know that was the case when I clicked on the thumbnails and couldn't close the image and had to reload the whole page. Good thing that you could just ask AI to fix this, but the bad thing is that you assumed it would produce fully working code in one shot and didn't test it properly.
This article feels like it was written as a dialectical exercise between an AI and a human. It would probably benefit from some more heavy human editing to make it more succinct and to give the overall article a structure. As it is, it's very difficult to follow along.
The title is a bit exaggerated. The depth of the projects covered in the article is clearly not representative of "all".
In fact, I now prefer to use a purely chat window to plan the overall direction and let LLM provide a few different architectural ideas, rather than asking LLM to write a lot of code whose detail I have no idea about.
Being on day 4 of being ignored entirely by CSRs from Anthropic after 5 months of paying for Max x20 has put a sufficiently bad taste in my mouth that it has killed all of my previous Claude Code cheer-leading efforts.
Sure, go have fun with the new software -- but for godsake don't actually depend on a company that can't bother to reply to you. Even Amazon replies.
This is good stuff. While somebody could build a Trello clone or an image generator by typing “git clone “ followed by any number of existing projects, the code you’d get might’ve been written by a person, plus if you do that you’re not even spending any money, which just doesn’t seem right.
The future is vibe coding but what some people don’t yet appreciate what that vibe is, which is a Pachinko machine permanently inserted between the user and the computer. It’s wild to think that anybody got anything done without the thrill of feeding quarters into the computer and seeing if the ball lands on “post on Reddit” or “delete database”
"ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad? I understand that more than anything engineers believe having to spend money on design is a total waste, but none of this is pleasing or balanced at all
I've asked copilot (Claude Sonnet 4) to edit some specific parts of a project. It removed the lines that specifically have comments that say "do not remove" with long explanation why. Then it went ahead and modified the unit tests to ensure 100% coverage.
Using coding agent is great btw, but at least learn how to double check their work cuz they are also quite terrible.
Waiting for the follow up article "Claude Code considered harmful"
Feels like the word "all" is pulling a lot of weight in that sentence, it's not cheap and you're forever reliant on a company to keep providing the service (which has already changed recently I think, seem to remember something about harsher rate limiting being put in place). "All you need" typically implies that you don't need much (eg "The terminal is all you need"), and Claude Code isn't that.
Otherwise good article, I'm still not sure vibe coding is for me and at the price, it's hard to justify trying to out, but things like this do make me a little more tempted to give it a shot. I doubt it'd ever replace writing code by hand for me, but could be fun for prototyping I suppose
I read the section "Hitting a snag: the model builders are also the police now".
It absolutely boggles my mind how anybody thinks that this is Ok?
Unless you are in North Korea, of course.
Is Claude Code better than the Gemini CLI? I've been using the Gemini CLI with Gemini 2.5 Pro and haven't been impressed. Maybe these LLMs aren't as good with Rust codebases? I'm guessing there are a lot more people looking to use these tools with JS and Python.
I use Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all together.
I throw their results at each other, get them to debug and review each others work.
Often a get all three to write the code for a given need and then ask all three to review all three answers to find the best solution.
If I’m building something sophisticated there might be 50 cycles of three way code review until they are all agreed that there no critical problems.
There’s no way I could do without all three at the same time it’s essential.
> I had some issues getting it to understand that it wasn't meant to terminate, so I instead told it to write a basic bash script that calls claude with the -p flag and "please continue" whenever it detects its not running.
This is why we can't have nice things. Anthropic is placing more restrictive limits and now you risk being locked out for hours if you need to use it a bit more than usual (e.g. you have an impending deadline or presentation).
I wish Anthropic just banned these abusive accounts instead of placing draconian (and fuzzy) limits. The other day there was an idiot YouTube streamer actively looking to hit limits with as many concurrent Claude Code sessions as he could, doing nonsense projects.
Why isn't anyone talking about the HackerNews Comment Ranker plugin? [1] That's amazing. I had this idea too -- to rank HN comments by their relevance to the actual article, and filter out comments that obviously didn't read it.
Repo: https://github.com/sixhobbits/hn-comment-ranker
I need to modify this to work with local models, though. But this does illustrate the article's point -- we both had an idea, but only one person actually went ahead and did it, because they're more familiar with agentic coding than me.
[1] Oh. I think I understand why. /lh
I'd personally rather use gpt-5. The sub price is cheap and offers more overall value than an Anthropic sub or paying per token. The chatgpt app on iPhone and Mac are native and nicer than Anthropic's and offer more features. Codex is close enough to Claude Code and also now native. For me it's nicer to use the "same" model across each use case like text, images, code etc. this way I better understand the limitations and quirks of the model rather than the constant context switching to different models to get maybe slightly better perf. To each their own though depending on your personal use case.
How does Claude Code compare to just using a Sonnet/Opus model with Cline? Imagine the results have to be fairly similar?
This is a fun project to be sure. I just wish the author would not refer to the experiment as an "autonomous startup builder" unless they mean it humorously. Having poked around the GitHub repo and read through the materials, it seems like more of an AI coding assistant running in a loop that built and deployed a broken web application with no users, no business model, and no understanding of what problem it was trying to solve. There were quasi-autonomous processes and there were things that were built, but nothing I'd call a startup.
I dont know about yall, but personally I love to see an AI running with "--dangerously-skip-permissions" in an infinite loop. Every day we get closer to the cyberpunk future we deserve.
Too bad Claude Code doesn't have a fixed cost plan for teams. The API is super expensive (I can easily spend $6-10 in a single sitting in tokens)
I've been diving into Claude Code after reading articles constantly praising its abilities. But I think perhaps it's better suited to web development
Using it for iOS development is interesting. It does produce working output (sometimes!) but it's very hit-or-miss. Recently I gave it a couple hours to build a CarPlay prototype of one of my apps. It was completely unable to refactor the codebase to correctly support CarPlay (even though I passed the entire CarPlay documentation into it). I gave it three attempts at it. Then I intervened and added support for CarPlay manually, following that I added a lot of skeleton code for it to flesh out. Claude was then able to build a prototype
However, over the next few days as I tried to maintain the code I ended up rewriting 60% of it because it was not maintainable or correct. (By "not correct" I mean it had logic errors and was updating the display multiple times with incorrect information before replacing it with correct information, causing the data displayed to randomly refresh)
I also tried getting it to add some new screens to a game I develop. I wanted it to add some of the purchase flows into the app (boring code that I hate writing). It managed to do it with compile errors, and was unable to fix its own build output despite having the tools to do so. Instead of fixing the build errors it caused, Claude Code decided it would manually verify that only its own changes were correct by running `swiftc` on only files that it touched. Which was nonsense
All that said, there was a benefit in that Claude Code writing all this code and getting something up on the screen motivated me to finally pick up the work and do some of these tasks. I had been putting them off for months and just having the work "get started" no matter how bad, was a good kick start
How does privacy work with Claude Code in the real world? Its arbitrarily sending files from current folder/subfolders to anthropics cloud, right? Does Claude have a good privacy policy? E.g. do they promise not to retain what gets sent?
Because I think 'sending everything to the ai' would be a bit of an obstacle for most company environments
Claude Code has very reliable tool calls, that's why I'm using it.
Tried Cursor, Windsurf and always ran into tool failures, edit failures etc.
> Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine.
Wow, the danger is not so much from Claude Code itself, but that it might download a package that will do nasty things on your machine when executed.
Nothing new but you can configure Claude Code to use GPT5 as its LLM model: https://docs.litellm.ai/docs/tutorials/claude_responses_api
I haven't tried Claude Code yet, but I extensively use Cursor and find it can do similar work (which makes sense). I think it's good you led with the length prompt/spec, which will maybe help the "AI can't do ____" crowd grasp that it really is a skill issue when they can't get any good results from LLMs. (Unfortunately it cannot help the "well, this isn't actually useful or making an impact" group)
Regarding some of the comments here: I found the article style fine, and I even like the "follow my journey" style writing as it helps the reader understand the process you went though. That kind of engineering and debugging workflow is something I enjoy about this industry.
Is Claude Code really that good? I'm currently using Cursor and I let it pick the LLM model to use.
I appreciate this writeup. I live in the terminal and work primarily in vim, so I always appreciate folks talking about tooling from that perspective. Little of the article is that, but it's still interesting to see the workflow outlined here, and it gives me a few ideas to try more of.
However, I disagree that LLMs are anywhere near as good as what's described here for most things I've worked with.
So far, I'm pretty impressed with Cursor as a toy. It's not a usable tool for me, though. I haven't used Claude a ton, though I've seen co-workers use it quite a bit. Maybe I'm just not embracing the full "vibe coding" thing enough and not allowing AI agents to fully run wild.
I will concede that Claude and Cursor have gotten quite good at frontend web development generation. I don't doubt that there are a lot of tasks where they make sense.
However, I still have yet to see a _single_ example of any of these tools working for my domain. Every single case, even when the folks who are trumpeting the tools internally run the prompting/etc, results in catastrophic failure.
The ones people trumpet internally are cases where folks can't be bothered to learn the libraries they're working with.
The real issue is that people who aren't deeply familiar with the domain don't notice the problems with the changes LLMs make. They _seem_ reasonable. Essentially by definition.
Despite this, we are being nearly forced to use AI tooling on critical production scientific computing code. I have been told I should never be editing code directly and been told I must use AI tooling by various higher level execs and managers. Doing so is 10x to 100x slower than making changes directly. I don't have boilerplate. I do care about knowing what things do because I need to communicate that to customers and predict how changes to parameters will affect output.
I keep hearing things described as an "overactive intern", but I've never seen an intern this bad, and I've seen a _lot_ of interns. Interns don't make 1000 line changes that wreck core parts of the codebase despite being told to leave that part alone. Interns are willing to validate the underlying mathematical approximations to the physics and are capable of accurately reasoning about how different approximations will affect the output. Interns understand what the result of the pipeline will be used for and can communicate that in simple terms or more complex terms to customers. (You'd think this is what LLMs would be good at, but holy crap do they hallucinate when working with scientific terminology and jargon.)
Interns have PhDs (or in some cases, are still in grad school, but close to completion). They just don't have much software engineering experience yet. Maybe that's the ideal customer base for some of these LLM/AI code generation strategies, but those tools seem especially bad in the scientific computing domain.
My bottleneck isn't how fast I can type. My bottleneck is explaining to a customer how our data processing will affect their analysis.
(To our CEO) - Stop forcing us to use the wrong tools for our jobs.
(To the rest of the world) - Maybe I'm wrong and just being a luddite, but I haven't seem results that live up to the hype yet, especially within the scientific computing world.
>1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine.
I thought the article was a satire after I read this ... but it wasn't!
Particularly with the VSCode extension. I was a loyal Cline user until recently because of how good the editor experience was, but the ability for Claude to go off and run for 10+ minutes effectively autonomously, and show me the diffs in realtime is a gamechanger. The token usage has also gotten much more efficient in the last few months. With proper IDE support now I don't see any reason at all to use anything else, especially not the "credit" based middle-man providers (Windsurf/Cursor et. al).
Fuck claude! They DDoS'ed my infra until I completely banned them!
This article seems fun, and it's interesting, but I was waiting for the point and it never came.
The author didn't do anything actually useful or impactful, they played around with a toy and mimicked a portion of what it's like to spin up pet projects as a developer.
But hey, it could be that this says something after all. The first big public usages of AI were toys and vastly performed as a sideshow attraction for amused netizens. Maybe we haven't come very far at all, in comparison to the resources spent. It seems like all of the truly impressive and useful applications of this technology are still in specialized private sector work.
If Anthropic is smart they would open it up to other models now to make it default for everyone. Otherwise you are banking on Sonnet remaining the best coding model.
Has anyone run with `dangerously skip permissions` and had something catastrophic happen?
Are there internal guardrails within Claude Code to prevent such incidents?
rm -rf, drop database, etc?
I've found Claude's CLI to be the best of what I've tried. I've moved away from cursor and found myself in a much better programming headspace wherein I can "toggle" this AI-enabled mode. It has to be a more mindful approach to when/how I use AI in my day-to-day work instead of it being a temptation to "AI" some of the work away in the Cursor IDE.
Perhaps I'm a bit of a cynic but I'm no longer impressed by the AI slop websites and demo apps, like those showcased in the article.