[HN Gopher] Notes on rolling out Cursor and Claude Code
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Notes on rolling out Cursor and Claude Code
Author : jermaustin1
Score : 120 points
Date : 2025-05-08 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ghiculescu.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ghiculescu.substack.com)
| jbellis wrote:
| Good to see experiences from people rolling out AI code
| assistance at scale. For me the part that resonates the most is
| the ambition unlock. Using Brokk to build Brokk (a new kind of
| code assistant focused on supervising AI rather than
| autocompletes, https://brokk.ai/) I'm seriously considering
| writing my own type inference engine for dynamic languages which
| would have been unthinkable even a year ago. (But for now, Brokk
| is using Joern with a side helping of tree-sitter.)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "Making it easy to run tests with a single command. We used to do
| development & run tests via docker over ssh. It was a good idea
| at the time. But fixing a few things so that we could run tests
| locally meant we could ask the agent to run (and fix!) tests
| after writing code."
|
| Good devops practices make AI coding easier!
| tptacek wrote:
| This is one of the most exciting things about coding agents:
| they make a lot of tooling that was so tedious to use it was
| impractical now ultra relevant. I wrote a short post about this
| a few weeks ago, the idea that things like "Semgrep" are now
| super valuable where they were kind of marginal before agents.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| And also the payoff for "minor" improvements to be bigger.
|
| We've started more aggressively linting our code because a)
| it makes the ai better and b) we made the ai do the tedious
| work of fixing our existing lint violations.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| It can automate a lot of the tediousness for static typing,
| too
| skydhash wrote:
| > _Good devops practices make AI coding easier!_
|
| Good devops practices make coding easier!
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > The most common thing that makes agentic code ugly is the
| overuse of comments.
|
| I've seen this complaint a lot, and I honestly don't get it. I
| have a feeling it helps LLMs write better code. And removing
| comments can be done in the reading pass, somewhat forcing you to
| go through the code line by line and "accept" the code that way.
| In the grand scheme of things, if this were the only downside to
| using LLM-based coding agents, I think we've come a long way.
| manojlds wrote:
| Yeah that's what I do, remove the comments as I read through.
| ellieh wrote:
| You can literally just ask it to not write too many comments,
| describe the kind of comments you want, and give a couple of
| examples. Save that in rules or whatever. And it's solved for
| the future :)
| dockercompost wrote:
| I tell them to write self-documenting code and to only leave
| comments when its essential for understanding, and that's
| worked out pretty well
| meander_water wrote:
| I've noticed Gemini 2.5 pro does this a lot in Cursor. I'm not
| sure if it's because it doesn't work well with the system
| prompt or tools, but it's very annoying. There are comments for
| nearly every line and it's like it's thinking out loud in
| comments with lots of TODOS and placeholders.
| what wrote:
| They tend to add really bad comments though. I was looking at
| an LLM generated codebase recently and the comments are along
| the lines of "use our newly created Foo model", which is pretty
| useless.
| aerhardt wrote:
| > So far the biggest limiting factor is remembering to use it.
| Even people I consider power users (based on their Claude token
| usage) agree with the sentiment that sometimes you just forget to
| ask Claude to do a task for you, and end up doing it manually.
| Sometimes you only notice that Claude could have done it, once
| you are finished. This happens to me an embarrassing amount.
|
| Yea, this happens to me too. Does it say something about the
| tool?
|
| It's not like we are talking about luddites who refuse to adopt
| the technology, but rather a group who is very open to use it.
| And yet sometimes, we "forget".
|
| I very rarely regret forgetting. I feel a combination of (a) it's
| good practice, I don't want my skills to wither and (b) I don't
| think the AI would've been _that_ much faster, considering the
| cost of thinking the prompt and that I was probably in flow.
| emeraldd wrote:
| If you're forgetting to use the tool, is the tool really
| providing benefit in that case? I mean, if a tool truly made
| something easier or faster that was onerous to accomplish, you
| should be much less likely to forget there's a better way ...
| jaapbadlands wrote:
| There's a balance to be calculated each time you're presented
| with the option. It's difficult to predict how much iteration
| the agent is going to require, how frustrating it might end
| up being, all the while you lose grip on the code being your
| own and your head-model of it, vs just going in and doing it
| and knowing exactly what's going on and simply asking it
| questions if any unknowns arise. Sometimes it's easier to
| just not even make the decision, so you disregard firing up
| the agent in a blink.
| skydhash wrote:
| Yep! Most tools are there to handle the painful aspects of
| your tasks. It's not like you are consciously thinking about
| them, but just the fact on doing them without the tool will
| get a groan out of you.
|
| A lot of current AI tools are toys. Fun to play around, but
| as soon as you have some real world tasks, you just do it
| your usual way that get the job done.
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| You never forgot your reusable grocery bag, umbrella, or sun
| glasses? You've never reassembled something and found a few
| "extra" screws?
| varispeed wrote:
| Some tasks are faster than cognitive load to create a prompt
| and then wait for execution.
|
| Also if you like doing certain tasks, then it is like eating an
| ice cream vs telling someone to eat an ice cream.
| PetahNZ wrote:
| And the waiting is somewhat frustrating, what am I supposed
| to do while I wait? I could just sit and watch, or context
| switch to another task then forget the details on what I was
| originally doing.
| what wrote:
| I think you're supposed to spin up another to do a
| different task. Then you'll be occupied checking up on all
| of them, checking their output and prodding them along. At
| least that's what Anthropic said you should do with Claude
| Code.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| If I wanted to be an EM, I'd apply for that job.
| mikedelfino wrote:
| The thing is others will eat ice cream faster so very soon
| there'll be no ice cream for me.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I really really hate this idea that you should have AI do
| anything it can do, and that there's no value in doing it
| manually.
| dgunay wrote:
| Many CLI tools that I love using now took some deliberate
| practice to establish a habit of using them.
| hallh wrote:
| Having linting/prettifying and fast test runs in Cursor is
| absolutely necessary. On a new-ish React Typescript project, all
| the frontier models insist on using outdated React patterns which
| consistently need to be corrected after every generation.
|
| Now I only wish for an Product Manager model that can render the
| code and provide feedback on the UI issues. Using Cursor and
| Gemini, we were able to get a impressively polished UI, but it
| needed a lot of guidance.
|
| > I haven't yet come across an agent that can write beautiful
| code.
|
| Yes, the AI don't mind hundreds of lines of if statements, as
| long as it works it's happy. It's another thing that needs
| several rounds of feedback and adjustments to make it human-
| friendly. I guess you could argue that human-friendly code is
| soon a thing of the past, so maybe there's no point fixing that
| part.
|
| I think improving the feedback loops and reducing the frequency
| of "obvious" issues would do a lot to increase the one-shot
| quality and raise the productivity gains even further.
| kubav027 wrote:
| Unless you are prototyping human-friendly code is a must. It is
| easy to write huge amounts of low quality code without AI. Hard
| part is long term maintenance. I have not seen any AI tool
| helping with that.
| christophilus wrote:
| As someone who really dislikes using Cursor, what does the HN
| hivemind think of alternatives? Is there a good CLI like Claude
| Code but for Gemini / other models? Is there a good Neovim plugin
| that gets the contextual agent mode right?
| M4v3R wrote:
| Have you tried Aider? They're making a CLI coding agent for
| quite some time and have gained quite a bit of traction.
|
| [0] https://aider.chat/
| gen220 wrote:
| Seconding aider, which was recommended to me months ago on
| HN. They don't integrate with vim directly per-se, but I'm a
| heavy vim user and I like the workflow of `aider --vim`,
| `ctrl-z`, `vim`.
|
| They also have a mode (--watch-files) that allows you to talk
| to a running aider instance from inside vim, but I haven't
| used it much yet.
| polskibus wrote:
| Jetbrains tools have MCP plugin and can work with Claude.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Sweet spot for me was cursor for autocomplete/editing and
| manually using Claude for more deep dive questions.
|
| I cant go back to a regular IDE after being able to tab my way
| through most boilerplate changes, but anytime I have Cursor do
| something relatively complex it generates a bunch of stuff I
| don't want. If I use Claude chat the barrier of manually
| auditing anything that gets copied over stays in place.
|
| I also have pretty low faith in a fully useful version of
| Cursor anytime soon.
| danenania wrote:
| > Is there a good CLI like Claude Code but for Gemini / other
| models
|
| I built an open source CLI coding agent that is essentially
| this[1]. It combines Claude/Gemini/OpenAI models in a single
| agent, using the best/most cost effective model for different
| steps in the workflow and different context sizes. The models
| are configurable so you can try out different combinations.
|
| It uses OpenRouter for the API layer to simplify use of APIs
| from multiple providers, though I'm also working on direct
| integration of model provider API keys.
|
| It doesn't have a Neovim plugin, but I'd imagine it would be
| one of the easier IDEs to integrate with given that it's also
| terminal-based. I will look into it--also would be happy to
| accept a PR if someone wants to take a crack at it.
|
| 1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
| scudsworth wrote:
| >Our head of product is a reformed lawyer who taught himself to
| code while working here. He's shipped 150 PRs in the last 12
| months.
|
| >The product manager he sits next to has shipped 130 PRs in the
| last 12 months.
|
| this is actually horrifying, lol. i haven't even considered
| product guys going ham on the codebase
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Honestly, it's been pretty great at my tiny startup. The
| designer has a list of tweaks he wants that I could do pretty
| quickly... once I'm done with my current thing in a day or two.
| Or he can just throw claude at it. We've got CI, we've got
| visual diff testing, and I'll review his simple `margin-left:
| 12px;`->`margin-left: 16px;`.
|
| But we're unlocking:
|
| A) more dev capacity by having non-devs do simple tasks
|
| B) a much tighter feedback loop between "designer wants a
| thing" and "thing exists in product"
|
| C) more time for devs like me to focus on deeper, more involved
| work
| snoman wrote:
| Ostensibly the PRs are getting reviewed so it's, maybe, not
| that bad but I had a similar reaction: I can slap together
| something with some wood, hammer, nails and call it a chair.
| Should I be manufacturing furniture?
| asadm wrote:
| that's actually great! win-win for everybody. Although not fun
| reviewing those early PRs.
| dgunay wrote:
| Code review makes this a lot less scary. Honestly it seems like
| mostly a win. A while ago at my day job, a moderately technical
| manager on another team attempted to contribute a relatively
| simple feature to my team's codebase. It took many rounds of
| review feedback for his PR to converge on something close to
| our general design guidelines. I imagine it would have been way
| less frustrating and time consuming for him if he could have
| just told an AI agent what to do and then have it respond to
| review feedback for him.
| ollien wrote:
| > The product manager he sits next to has shipped 130 PRs in the
| last 12 months. When we look for easy wins and small tasks for
| new starters, it's harder now, because he's always got an agent
| chewing through those in the background.
|
| I'd be curious to hear more about this, whether from the author
| or from someone who does something similar. When the author says
| "background", does that literally mean JIRA tickets are being
| assigned to the agent, and it's spitting back full PRs? Is this
| setup practical?
| swyx wrote:
| > You can see this in practice when you use Claude Code, which is
| pay-per-token. Our heaviest users are using $50/month of tokens.
| That's a lot of tokens. I asked our CFO and he said he'd be happy
| to spend $100/dev/month on agents. To get 20% more productive
| that's a bargain.
|
| fwiw we interviewd the Claude Code team
| (https://www.latent.space/p/claude-code) and they said that even
| within Anthropic (where Claude is free, we got into this a bit),
| the usage is $6/day so about $200/month. not bad! especially
| because it goes down when you under-use.
| chw9e wrote:
| > I haven't yet come across an agent that can write beautiful
| code.
|
| o3 in codex is pretty close sometimes. I prefer to use it for
| planning/review but it far exceeds my expectations (and sometimes
| my own abilities) quite regularly.
| DGAP wrote:
| Even if you don't think AI will replace the job of software
| developer completely, there's no way compensation is going to
| stay at the current level when anyone can ship code.
| teekert wrote:
| I have a confession. I don't really get what Claude Code is...
| It's not a model, it's not an editor with AI integrated... So
| what is it? It bugs me on the website, I click on it, read, still
| don't get it.
|
| I have a Claude console account, if you can call it that? It
| always takes me 3 times to get the correct email address because
| it does not work with passkeys or anything that lets me store
| credentials. I just added the api key to OpenWebUI. It's nice and
| cheaper than a subscription for me even though I use it all day.
|
| But I'm still confused. I just now clicked on "build with
| Claude", it takes me to that page where I put in the wrong email
| address 3 times. And then you can buy credits.
| bognition wrote:
| Have you installed the Claude cli tool?
|
| Think of it as an LLM that automagically pulls in context from
| your working directory and can directly make changes to files.
|
| So rather than pasting code and a prompt into ChatGPT and then
| copy and pasting the results back into your editor, you tell
| Claude what you want and it does it for you.
|
| It's a convenient, powerful, and expensive wrapper
| rossant wrote:
| I'm still having a hard time with coding agents. They are useful
| but also somehow immature hence dangerous. The other day I asked
| copilot with GPT4o to add docstrings to my functions in a long
| Python file. It did a good job on the first half. But when I
| looked carefully, I realized the second half of my file was gone.
| Just like that. Half of my file had been silently deleted,
| replaced by a single terrifying comment along the lines of
| "continue similarly with the rest of the file". I use Git of
| course so I could recover my deleted code. But I feel I still
| can't fully trust an AI assistant that will silently delete
| hundreds of lines of my codebase just because it is too lazy or
| something.
| asadm wrote:
| these models have hard time modifying LARGE files and then
| returning them back to you. That's inefficient too.
|
| What you want is to ask for list of changes and then apply
| them. That's what aider, codex, etc. all do.
|
| I made a tool to apply human-readable changes back to files,
| which you might find useful: https://github.com/asadm/vibemode
|
| aider has this feature too.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Your first mistake was using Copilot. Your second mistake was
| using GPT 4o
| mdrachuk wrote:
| > You can see this in practice when you use Claude Code, which is
| pay-per-token. Our heaviest users are using $50/month of tokens.
| That's a lot of tokens.
|
| How is your usage so low! Every time i do anything with claude
| code i spend couple of bucks, for a day of coding it's about $20.
| Is there a way to save on tokens on a mid-sized Python project or
| people are just using it less?
| gen220 wrote:
| It's because by default it'll try to solve most problems
| agentically / by "thinking", even if your prompt is fairly
| prescriptive.
|
| I use aider.chat with Claude 3.5 haiku / 3.7 sonnet, cram the
| context window, and my typical day is under $5.
|
| One thing that can help for lengthy conversations is caching
| your prompts (which aider supports, but I'm sure Claude Code
| does, too?)
|
| Obviously, Anthropic has an incentive to get people to use more
| tokens (i.e. by encouraging you to use tokens on "thinking").
| It's one reason to prefer a vendor-neutral solution like aider.
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