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One way hand coding is productive is it gives you detailed intimate knowledge of the code. We’ve all seen someone that really knows a system hear about a bug and say “Aha!” and take 5 minutes to pump out a fix.

A well setup Claude Code, with good guardrails and feedback, could possibly do this (we’ve seen examples of it for sure). But it also might loop idiotically not finding the issue.

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Can you link to any examples of Claude quickly debugging a codebase it didn't write using a nontechnical description of a bug from a real user?

All the time i do it. I will often provide claude with read only credentials to the db or api access to the logs and it will nail the problem almost every time

I closed six bugs last week doing precisely this. They were minor issues but impressive nonetheless.

Some codebase are a logical mess and have bad names as well. Sometimes Claude is wrong because the semantics of our legacy codebase doesn’t makes sense. Sometimes it find problems at the wrong places because of that.