this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 23 hours ago

Claude code can make something that works, but it's kinda over engineered and really struggles to make an elegant solution that maximises code reuse - it's the opposite of DRY.

I'm doing a personal project at the moment and used it for a few days, made good progress but it got to the point where it was just a spaghetti mess of jumbled code, and I deleted it and went back to implementing each component one at a time and then wiring them together manually.

My current workflow is basically never let them work on more than one file at a time, and build the app one component at a time, starting at the ground level and then working in, so for example:

Create base classes that things will extend, Then create an example data model class, iterate on that architecture A LOT until it's really elegant.

Then Ive been getting it to write me a generator - not the actual code for models,

Then (level 3) we start with be UI.layer, so now we make a UI kit the app will use and reuse for different components

Then we make a UI component that will be used in a screen. I'm using flutter as an example so It would be a stateless component

We now write tests for the component

Now we do a screen, and I import each of the components.

It's still very manual, but it's getting better. You are still going to need a human cider, I think forever, but there are two big problems that aren't being addressed because people are just putting their head in the sand and saying nah can't do it, or the clown op in the post who thinks they can do it.

  1. Because dogs be clownin, the public perception of programming as a career will be devalued "I'll just make it myself!" Or like my rich engineer uncle said to me when I was doing websites professionally - a 13 year old can just make a website, why would I pay you so much to do it. THAT FUCKING SUCKS. But a similar attitude has existed from people "I'll just hire Indians". This is bullshit, but perception is important and it's going to require you to justify yourself for a lot more work.

  2. And this is the flip side good news. These skills you have developed - it's is going to be SO MUCH FUCKING HARDER TO LEARN THEM. When you can just say "hey generate me an app that manages customers and follow ups" and something gets spat out, you aren't going to investigate the grind required to work out basic shit. People will simply not get to the same level they are now.

That logic about how to scaffold and architect an app in a sensible way - USING AI TOOLS - is actually the new skillset. You need to know how to build the app, and then how to efficiently and effectively use the new tools to actually construct it. Then you need to be able to do code review for each change.