[HN Gopher] Claude Code SDK
___________________________________________________________________
Claude Code SDK
Author : sync
Score : 198 points
Date : 2025-05-19 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.anthropic.com)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Claude has been left in the dust by Gemini with its million token
| session and ability to upload a zip file of my entire code base.
| barefootford wrote:
| and then get the honor of copy and pasting all of the changes
| afterward?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| "Make me a bash script which creates all the files using
| heredoc"
|
| Works for a reasonable chunk of files say 5 to 10 that aren't
| too big.
|
| No doubt they'll get to better file access.
|
| Anyhow I'm quite happy to do the copy and paste because
| Geminis coding and debugging capability is far better than
| Claude.
| danenania wrote:
| You can try my project Plandex[1] to use Gemini in a way
| that's comparable to Claude Code without copy-pasting. By
| default, it combines models from the major providers--
| Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
|
| The default planning/coding models are still Sonnet 3.7 for
| context size under 200k, but you can switch to Gemini with
| `\set-model gemini-preview`.
|
| 1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
| dimitri-vs wrote:
| Cursor with gemini-2.5 MAX and agentic mode.
|
| I really like the idea of Claude Code but its rare that I
| fully spec out a feature on my first request and I can't see
| how it can be used for frontend features that require a lot
| of browser-centric iteration/debugging to get right.
| termin3 wrote:
| I'm using this https://github.com/coffeegrind123/gemini-code
| to use Claude Code with Gemini and it's working perfectly
| mickeyp wrote:
| I'm building a browser based tool that runs on your computer,
| with full tool access of course, that works with all the major
| models and is far better and more ergonomic to use than code,
| codex, etc.
|
| If you (or anyone else reading this) wants to try out the
| upcoming beta give me a ping. (see profile.)
| Sajarin wrote:
| I wonder if anyone has done an analysis on the HN user
| sentiment on the varying AI models over time. I'd be curious to
| see what that looks like. Increasingly, I'm seeing more and
| more people talk positively about Gemini and Google (and having
| used Gemini recently, I align with that sentiment)
|
| I think Bard (lol) and Gemini got a late start and so lots of
| folks dismissed it but I feel like they've fully caught up.
| Definitely excited to see what Gemini 3 vs GPT-5 vs Claude 4
| looks like!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Gemini hit the top of a bunch of leaderboards recently so it
| probably prompted folks to try Gemini out and they found it
| useful.
| fallinditch wrote:
| I'm using Windsurf IDE so have all the main models available.
| Mainly doing Python, JS, HTML, CSS, some Go. I have found
| Claude 3.7 outperforms Gemini 2.5 and ChatGPT 4.1, 4o,
| Deepseek, etc, for my work in most cases.
|
| I suspect that I experience some performance throttling with
| Gemini 2.5 in my Windsurf setup because it's just not as good
| as anecdotal reports by others, and benchmarks.
|
| I also seem to run up against a kind of LLM laziness
| sometimes when they seemingly can't be bothered to answer a
| challenging prompt ... a consequence of load balancing in
| action perhaps.
| lcfcjs6 wrote:
| Windsurf is about to lose its ability to use other models
| since it got bought by OpenAI. Still very cool tool though!
| mbesto wrote:
| Who cares about sentiment when you can just look at a proxy
| for usage: https://openrouter.ai/rankings
|
| EDIT: Specifically:
| https://openrouter.ai/rankings/programming?view=week
| ChadMoran wrote:
| Context is only one part of it. I tried using Gemini and got
| sub par results. comment-laden code with not not following
| instructions.
| simonw wrote:
| How are you uploading zip files of code to Gemini?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| In AI Studio select file upload then select a zip file.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I've tried Gemini 2.5 Pro a couple of times and honestly don't
| like its output. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is much better at correctly
| understanding and executing my imprecise prompts.
|
| Gemini 2.5 Flash on the other hand has excellent. I've started
| using it to rewrite whole files after talking the changes
| through with Claude, because it's just so ridiculously fast
| (and dependable enough for applying already outlined changes).
| ramoz wrote:
| This is Claude Code.
|
| The two work really well with Gemini as a planner and Claude
| Code as an executor.
| dgellow wrote:
| claude code still has the best UX IMHO. But I would love to
| have the million token context, for sure
| swyx wrote:
| more context from the claude code team:
| http://latent.space/p/claude-code
|
| you can skim the transcript but some personal highlights:
|
| - anthropic employees, with unlimited claude, average to $6/day
| of usage
|
| - headless claude code as a "linux" utility that you use
| everywhere in CI is pretty compelling
|
| - claude code as a user extensible platform
|
| - future roadmap of claude code: sandboxing, branching, planning
|
| - sonnet 3.7 as a persistent, agentic model
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I can easily spend $20+ using
| Claude Code for 2 hours. I've stopped using it because it was
| too expensive for my personal projects.
| d_watt wrote:
| Claude max plan has Claude code bundled into the price.
| $100/month isn't cheap, but the RoI is there for me
| personally.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Thanks, I was just commenting on "- anthropic employees,
| with unlimited claude, average to $6/day of usage".
| ttcbj wrote:
| Thanks, this is helpful. I tried Claude Code, and thought
| it had a lot of potential, but I was on track to spend at
| least $20/day.
|
| For a tool that radically increases productivity (say 2x),
| I think it could still make sense for a VC funded startup
| or an established company (even $100/day or $36k/year is
| still a lot less than hiring another developer). But for a
| side project or bootstrap effort, $36k/year obviously
| significantly increases cash expenses. $100/month does not,
| however.
|
| So, I'm going to go back and upgrade to Max and try it
| again. If that keeps my costs to $100/month, thats a really
| different value proposition.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you saying I can
| use Claude Code for a flat rate of $100/month? What are the
| limits? What if I use more than $100 worth of Code in a
| month? Their website doesn't seem to make it clear.
|
| Edit:
|
| Found the answer to my own questions
|
| > Send approximately 50-200 prompts with Claude Code every
| 5 hours[1]
|
| Damn. That's a really good deal
|
| [1]
| https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-
| cla...
| darkteflon wrote:
| Really tempted to go for this as well. Only wish I could
| access flat rate Claude through VS Code Cline (or an
| extension like it) as well - that would be the complete
| package. $100 / month + ~$$ / day in API credits is gonna
| get pricey.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| I briefly commented on how I approach cost control before, if
| useful.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737060
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Great advice, thanks.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| But that doesn't really explain things. You're making an
| active effort to reduce your costs. Anthropic engineers get
| unlimited API usage for free.
|
| I was listening to this podcast yesterday and I also did a
| double take when I heard the $6 per day number.
| philosophty wrote:
| "- anthropic employees, with unlimited claude, average to
| $6/day of usage"
|
| From the link:
|
| "Apparently, there are some engineers inside of Anthropic that
| have spent >$1,000 in one day!"
|
| The question is what is the P50, P75, and P95 spend per
| employee?
| thesurlydev wrote:
| Agree. That would be a great insight as well as what type of
| activities cause the explosion in spend.
| swyx wrote:
| they probably wouldnt share so i didnt ask
| big_toast wrote:
| I've really enjoyed the recent latent space podcasts. I don't
| think there is any person+/podcast (or perhaps other content)
| approaching your general output while maintaining the high SNR.
| I am continually amazed at the volume and value of public work
| you're producing over the last (half?) decade while still
| growing various businesses. I hope others can find similar
| productivity gradients. I know you roughly share what works for
| you but it is not so easy to reproduce.
|
| + simonw, gwern
| swyx wrote:
| thanks man, this was nice to read :) idk if it helps but my
| principles (tm) are here http://learninpublic.org/
|
| i do feel like SNR * quantity could be higher, but its still
| a challenge to even keep it where it is today. my work life
| balance/stress levels aren't the best and everyone expects
| everything from me.
| d_watt wrote:
| The way Claude Code is going is exactly what I want out of a
| agentic coding tool with this "unix toolish" philosophy. I've
| been using Claude code since the initial public preview release,
| and have seen the direction over time.
|
| The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a
| Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review
| and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in
| that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.
|
| If you are tooling your codebase for optimal AI usage (Rules,
| MCP, etc), you should target a technology that can bridge the gap
| to headless usage. The fact Claude Code can trivially be used as
| part of automation through the tools means it's now the default
| way I thinking about coding agents (Codex, the npm package, is
| the same).
|
| Disclaimer, I focus on helping companies tool their codebases for
| optimal agent usage, so I might have a bias here to easily
| configurable tools.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| > The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a
| Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to
| review and give feedback on.
|
| I see your point but in the other hand how depressing to be
| left only with the most soul crushing part of software entering
| - the Jira ticket.
| d_watt wrote:
| I personally find figuring out what the product should be is
| the fun part. There still a need for architecting a plan, but
| the actual act of writing code isn't what gives me personal
| joy, it's the building of something new.
|
| I understand the craft of code itself is what some people
| love though!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Thing is, LLMs are _already_ better than people at the
| "architecting a plan" and "figuring out what the product
| should be" in details that go beyond high-level vibes. They
| do that even better than raw coding.
|
| In fact, that's the main reason I like developing quick
| prototypes and small projects with LLMs. I use them less to
| write code for me, and more to cut through the bullshit
| "research" phase of figuring out what code to write, which
| libraries to pick, what steps and auxiliary work I'm
| missing in my concept, etc.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Say what you will, but this would have the wonderful side
| effect of forcing people who write JIRA tickets to actually
| think through and clearly express what it is they want built.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| In that timeline, it wouldn't matter anymore since the
| people complaining about the poor JIRA tickets would be
| gone.
| losteric wrote:
| Yeah, that'll be the product-oriented engineers / engineer-
| oriented product folks.
|
| We will drop the narrow-minded deadweight that can only
| collect naive requirements, and the coding side that can
| only implement unambiguous tickets.
| cruano wrote:
| AKA Junior engineers
| pjmlp wrote:
| Anyone working on offshoring projects already knows how fun
| this happens to be.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Not sure about that golden end state. Mine would be being in a
| room surround by screens with AI agents coding, designing,
| testing, etc. I would be there in the center giving guidance,
| direction, applying taste, etc... All conversational, wouldn't
| need to touch the keyboard 99% of the time.
|
| That's what I want and look forward one day
| geertj wrote:
| I can easily see this happening in 2-3 years. Some chat apps
| already have outstanding voice mode, such as GPT-4o. It's
| just a matter of integrating that voice mode, and getting the
| understanding and generated code to be /slightly/ better than
| it is today.
| Roritharr wrote:
| Is this a me thing, or a millenial thing?
|
| I _hate_ using voice for anything. I hate getting voice
| messages, I hate creating them. I get cold sweats just
| thinking about having to direct 10 AI Agents via voice. Just
| give me a keyboard and a bunch of screens, thanks.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Voicemail universally sucks. However, when you're having a
| synchronous conversation with actual people, do you prefer
| to do everything via IM, or would you prefer a phone call?
| dmd wrote:
| IM, 100%. Otherwise only the loud people ever speak,
| whether or not they have anything useful to say.
| all2 wrote:
| Email. Async comms make sense 99% of the time at my job.
| Unless there's deep work to be done, or pie-in-the-sky
| idea fabricating. Or rubber-ducky sessions. But I won't
| do those with AI.
| tuckerman wrote:
| I almost never prefer a phone call, I'd rather go all the
| way to video/in-person or stick with text. I also prefer
| to push anything important that isn't extremely small out
| of instant messaging and to email.
|
| Brainstorming/whiteboarding, 1:1s or performance
| feedback, team socialization, working through something
| very difficult (e.g. pair debugging): in-person or video
|
| Incidents, asking for quick help/pointers, small quick
| questions, social groups, intra-team updates: IM
|
| Bigger design documents and their feedback, trickier
| questions or debugging that isn't urgent, sharing
| cool/interesting things, inter-team updates: Email
| ribelo wrote:
| > do you prefer to do everything via IM, or would you
| prefer a phone call?
|
| It's hard for me to believe that there are psychopaths
| among us who prefer call on the phone, slack huddle or
| even organize meetings instead of just calmly writing
| messages on IM over coffee.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| I don't know. I'm 40 but I do like pair programming so...
| stefanfisk wrote:
| I'm the same. I love that writing allows you to think while
| typing so that you can review and revise your thoughts
| before letting them out in the world.
|
| And don't get me started on video vs text for learning
| purely non-physical stuff like programming...
| codemac wrote:
| receiving audio = slow
|
| sending audio = fast
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| One advantage is speaking is generally faster than typing.
| Imagine instead of talking to a bunch of AI you're talking
| to a room full of coworkers about the architecture to
| develop.
| csto12 wrote:
| If that's the future, that means a massive reduction in
| software engineers no? What you are describing would require
| one technical product manager, not a team of software
| engineers.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Yes.
| usrnm wrote:
| > that means a massive reduction in software engineers
|
| That's exactly what everyone is hoping for. Well, everyone
| except software engineers, of course
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Or a massive increase in the amount of software that gets
| written.
|
| If the cost of writing software goes down, demand for it
| will presumably go up...
| jdmoreira wrote:
| The valuable skills will be creativity, taste, curation,
| prioritisation etc.
|
| All those skills can be applied to engineering as well.
| What makes Fabrice Bellard great? Its not just technical
| skill I think.
|
| I think some of the most successful people will be a subset
| of engineers but also Steve Jobs types and artists
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most companies don't care about developers of their
| level, rather they offshore to the lowest bid.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Basically the Star Trek model of computing.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| > The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a
| Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to
| review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead
| ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in
| CI.
|
| Isn't that effectively the promise of the most recently
| released OpenAI codex?
|
| From the reviews I've been able to find so far though, quality
| of output is ehh.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Thats the promise. The reality is that it's just a subpar
| version of Claude Code which doesn't support MCP.
| d_watt wrote:
| It totally is!
|
| I bias a bit to wanting the agent to be a pluggable component
| into a flow I own, rather than a platform in a box.
|
| It'll be interesting to see where the different value
| props/use cases of a Delvin/v0 vs a Codex Cloud vs Claude
| Code/Codex CLI vs Cursor land.
| sync wrote:
| Anthropic also announced something along those lines today as
| well, in beta: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-
| code/github-action...
| naiv wrote:
| played around with connecting
| https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master via mcp to
| create a prd which basically replaces the ticket grooming
| process and then executing it with claude code creating a
| branch named like the ticket and pushing after having created
| the unit tests and constant linting.
| k__ wrote:
| Can't you have that already?
|
| Put the Aider CLI into a GitHub action that's triggered by an
| issue creation and you're good to go.
| d_watt wrote:
| Aider is definitely in the same camp. Last time I checked,
| they weren't optimizing for the full "agent infinitely
| looping until completion" usecase, and didn't have MCP
| support.
|
| But it's 100% the same class of tool and the awesome part of
| the unixy model is hopefully agents can be substituted in for
| each other in your pipeline for whichever one is better for
| the usecase, just like models are interoperable.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| I tried aider today with a Gemini API key and billing
| account. It's not close to the experience I have with
| Claude Code on Saturday which was able to implement a full
| feature.
|
| The main difference is I interact with Claude Code only
| through conversation. Aider felt much more like I was
| talking to two different tools, the model and Aider. For
| example, constantly having to add files and parse the less
| than ideal console output compared to how Claude code
| handles user feedback.
| alvis wrote:
| The vision of submitting a feature request and receiving a
| ready-to-review PR is equally compelling and horrifying from
| the standpoint of strategy management.
|
| Like Anthropic and most big tech companies, they don't want to
| show off the best until they need to. They used to stockpile
| some cool features, and they have time to think about their
| strategy. But now I feel like they are in a rush to show off
| everything and I'm worried whether the management has time to
| think about the big picture.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The moment I am able to outsource work for Jira tickets to a
| level that AI actually delivers a reasonable pull request, many
| corporate managers will seriously wonder why keep the
| offshoring team around.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Offshoring team?
|
| No, _any_ team.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That will be the next step.
| belter wrote:
| Including the management team?
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Okay, okay, you got me :D
| mistrial9 wrote:
| golden age consultant paycheck
| dakiol wrote:
| No. The "golden" end state of coding agents is free and open
| source coding agents running on my machine (or in whatever
| machine I want). Can you imagine paying for every command you
| run in your terminal? For every `ls`, `ps`, `kill`? No sense,
| right? Well, same for LLMs.
|
| I'm not saying "ban propietary LLMs", I'm saying: hackers (the
| ones that used to read sites like this) should have as their
| main tools free and open source ones.
| woah wrote:
| If I was making an AI code assistant, the last thing I would do
| is to lock it in to a particular foundation model provider.
|
| The only possible way for this to be a successful offering is if
| we have just now reached a plateau of model effectiveness and all
| foundation models will now trend towards having almost identical
| performance and capabilities, with integrators choosing based on
| small niceties, like having a familiar SDK.
| ChadMoran wrote:
| Other than the command/arguments there isn't much locking you
| in. It's just input/output. Swap it out for something else or
| simply wrap it. There's not much going on here.
| ramoz wrote:
| "Lock i-"
|
| At this point Claude Code is a software differentiator in the
| agent coding space.
|
| I am building things related to AI code assistants - we were
| hacking ways to integrate Claude Code - it was the first thing
| we wanted to build around.
|
| It's too early to care about lock in.
|
| Need the best, will only build around the best.
| baalimago wrote:
| Hasn't this been invented already in multiple shapes and forms..?
| I wrote my own version clai[1] over a year ago which does exactly
| this, only that it has tools support + is multi vendor.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai
| simonw wrote:
| Looks quite similar to my https://llm.datasette.io tool as
| well.
|
| Honestly though, CLI tools for accessing LLMs (including piping
| content in and out of them) is such a clearly good idea I'm
| glad to see more tools implementing the pattern.
| dcre wrote:
| It's very surprising that it has taken this long to see a
| first-party CLI like this.
| bionhoward wrote:
| > You may not access or use, or help another person to access or
| use, our Services in the following ways: > 2. To develop any
| products or services that compete with our Services, including to
| develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning
| algorithms or models or resell the Services.
|
| Can somebody please tell me what software product or service
| doesn't compete with general intelligence?
|
| Imagine selling intelligence with a legal term that, under strict
| interpretation, says you're not allowed to use it for anything.
|
| Is it so vague it's unenforceable?
|
| How do we own the output if we can't use it to compete with a
| general intelligence?
|
| Is it just a "lol nerd no one cares about the legal terms" thing?
| If no one cares then why would they have a blanket prohibition on
| using the service ?
|
| We're supposed to accept liability to lose a lawsuit just to
| accept their slop? So many questions
| ChadMoran wrote:
| This is what happens when you let lawyers say what they want.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I'll try when they start supporting claude via copilot. Can't use
| at work anything else.
| anotherpaulg wrote:
| Aider has had support for Python and shell scripting [0] for a
| long time. I made a screencast [1] recently that included ad-hoc
| bash scripting aider as part of the effort to add support for 130
| new programming languages. It may give a flavor for how powerful
| this approach can be.
|
| [0] https://aider.chat/docs/scripting.html
|
| [1] https://aider.chat/docs/recordings/tree-sitter-language-
| pack...
| k__ wrote:
| Aider could really profit from a polished GitHub Actions
| workflow.
|
| Add a file to your repo and you can talk to any model via
| issues.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| How close can you get Aider to Claude Code? Ie i liked the
| Claude Code UX, but i don't use it because i prefer Gemini 2.5
| Pro.
|
| I don't really want it committing and stuff, i mostly like the
| UX of Claude Code. Thoughts?
| hztar wrote:
| Freaking love Aider. MCPs are supported soon as well. Testing a
| development branch. Then you can actually develop end to end
| using PR, tickets etc using models you trust.
| cube2222 wrote:
| This is great! Especially the GitHub Actions issue/PR
| integration[0] that's paired with this is exactly what I've been
| wanting!
|
| [0]: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-
| action...
| hosainnet wrote:
| The new GitHub action is exactly what I have been looking for
| https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/github-action...
| but there doesn't seem to be a way to use it with the Claude
| Code's Max plan?
|
| As it only accepts an API key as far as I can tell.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Claude Code could already be used in non-interactive mode, and by
| extension it could be integrated into other apps in the same
| manner as any other UNIX command line utility.
|
| This SDK currently supports only command line usage. Isn't that
| just what we already had?
|
| I don't understand what's actually new here. What am I missing?
| Vanclief wrote:
| Claude Code is my favorite way to use LLMs for coding.
|
| However I feel what we really need is to have an open source
| version of it where you can pass any model and also you can
| compare different models answers.
|
| (Aider and other alternatives really doesn't feel as good to use
| as Claude Code)
|
| I know this is not what anthropic would want to do as it removes
| their moat, but as a consumer I just want the best model and not
| be tied to an ecosystem. (Which I imagine is the largest fear of
| LLM model providers)
| ayargz wrote:
| OpenAI codex is probably the closest to what you're talking
| about, its open source and you can use models from any
| provider. It's not as good as claude code right now but I bet
| it wont take long for them to catch up.
|
| https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main
| pram wrote:
| You can use Claude Code as an MCP server so you can kinda do
| this already.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| I've cancelled my subscription. Sorry guys...
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(page generated 2025-05-19 23:00 UTC)