alt Hacker NewsAs an unapologetic generalist[1] this has also been my experience. Many tools that would have been "eh maybe if I get bored over Thanksgiving holiday" have become "hold on, gimme fifteen minutes".
Tiny, isolated, but awesomely useful CLI scriptlets, for me, seem to be the sweet spot. Little shining rays spreading out from the veins of my own familiarity.
The downside, the Achilles Heel of LLMs, so far as I can tell, is using the system to assist in maintaining large, sprawling, and largely pointless legacy codebases. Somewhere you have to keep many many many stupid things alive. I swear I can almost sense Claude's frustration with some of this shit. Then you get frustrated, and then Claude wants to agree with you so it acts even more frustrated, and the gyre thus widens. You're just cussing at everything with a machine. Which can be fun - Claude is often surprisingly funny - but not productive.
[1] I know absolutely nothing about positively everything, but have the attention span of a squirrel.
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I've found Claude Code absolutely amazing for the sorts of 100-500 line data cleaning/analysis/visualization tasks that used to take me a couple hours to knock out. They're often self contained (boss wants a graphic for a slide or some numbers), and I tell it which packages I would prefer it to use.
On the other hand, I've been using it to make small changes to a ~4000 line codebase, and it takes a lot of wrangling to keep changes in scope.
Today I'm translating a 5,000 line VB6 codebase to C#, and I've been spending the day chopping up the job, passing it to Claude, and manually validating it.