from Hacker News

Claude Code is all you need

by sixhobbits on 8/11/25, 2:03 PM with 504 comments

• by epiccoleman on 8/11/25, 2:30 PM

  I love this article just for the spirit of fun and experimentation on display. Setting up a VPS where Claude is just asked to go nuts - to the point where you're building a little script to keep Claude humming away - is a really fun idea.

  This sort of thing is a great demonstration of why I remain excited about AI in spite of all the hype and anti-hype. It's just fun to mess with these tools, to let them get friction out of your way. It's a revival of the feelings I had when I first started coding: "wow, I really can do anything if I can just figure out how."

  Great article, thanks for sharing!

• by cultofmetatron on 8/11/25, 6:14 PM

  All this AI coding stuff is scaring the shit out of me. a few months ago my team were hiring for a new engineer. of the 9 candidates we ran technical interviews with, only two could work without the ai. The rest literally just vibe coded their way though the app. as soon as it was taken away, they couldn't even write a basic sql query in ecto (we're a phoenix app). when questioned about tradeoffs inherent in the ai generated implementation, all but one was completely in the dark.

• by js2 on 8/11/25, 3:43 PM

  > export IS_SANDBOX=1 && claude --dangerously-skip-permissions

  FYI, this can be shortened to:

    IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions
  

  You don't need the export in this case, nor does it need to be two separate commands joined by &&. (It's semantically different in that the variable is set only for the single `claude` invocation, not any commands which follow. That's often what you want though.)

  > I asked Claude to rename all the files and I could go do something else while it churned away, reading the files and figuring out the correct names.

  It's got infinite patience for performing tedious tasks manually and will gladly eat up all your tokens. When I see it doing something like this manually, I stop it and tell it to write a program to do the thing I want. e.g. I needed to change the shape of about 100 JSON files the other day and it wanted to go through them one-by-one. I stopped it after the third file, told it to write a script to import the old shape and write out the new shape, and 30 seconds later it was done. I also had it write me a script to... rename my stupidly named bank statements. :-)

• by tptacek on 8/11/25, 3:16 PM

  You run a coding agent with no permissions checks on a production server anywhere I'm involved in security and I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.

  Really, any coding agent our shop didn't write itself, though in those cases the smiting might be less theatrical than if you literally ran a yolo-mode agent on a prod server.

• by spyder on 8/12/25, 10:58 AM

  "Now I can just tell Claude to write an article (like the one you're currently reading) and give it some pointers regarding how I want it to look, and it can generate any custom HTML and CSS and JavaScript I want on the fly."

  Yea, I know that was the case when I clicked on the thumbnails and couldn't close the image and had to reload the whole page. Good thing that you could just ask AI to fix this, but the bad thing is that you assumed it would produce fully working code in one shot and didn't test it properly.

• by dabedee on 8/11/25, 2:37 PM

  This article feels like it was written as a dialectical exercise between an AI and a human. It would probably benefit from some more heavy human editing to make it more succinct and to give the overall article a structure. As it is, it's very difficult to follow along.

• by chaosprint on 8/11/25, 2:36 PM

  The title is a bit exaggerated. The depth of the projects covered in the article is clearly not representative of "all".

  In fact, I now prefer to use a purely chat window to plan the overall direction and let LLM provide a few different architectural ideas, rather than asking LLM to write a lot of code whose detail I have no idea about.

• by serf on 8/11/25, 9:54 PM

  Being on day 4 of being ignored entirely by CSRs from Anthropic after 5 months of paying for Max x20 has put a sufficiently bad taste in my mouth that it has killed all of my previous Claude Code cheer-leading efforts.

  Sure, go have fun with the new software -- but for godsake don't actually depend on a company that can't bother to reply to you. Even Amazon replies.

• by jrflowers on 8/11/25, 3:33 PM

  This is good stuff. While somebody could build a Trello clone or an image generator by typing “git clone “ followed by any number of existing projects, the code you’d get might’ve been written by a person, plus if you do that you’re not even spending any money, which just doesn’t seem right.

  The future is vibe coding but what some people don’t yet appreciate what that vibe is, which is a Pachinko machine permanently inserted between the user and the computer. It’s wild to think that anybody got anything done without the thrill of feeding quarters into the computer and seeing if the ball lands on “post on Reddit” or “delete database”

• by throwaway-11-1 on 8/11/25, 7:11 PM

  "ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad? I understand that more than anything engineers believe having to spend money on design is a total waste, but none of this is pleasing or balanced at all

• by _pdp_ on 8/11/25, 3:13 PM

  I've asked copilot (Claude Sonnet 4) to edit some specific parts of a project. It removed the lines that specifically have comments that say "do not remove" with long explanation why. Then it went ahead and modified the unit tests to ensure 100% coverage.

  Using coding agent is great btw, but at least learn how to double check their work cuz they are also quite terrible.

• by felineflock on 8/11/25, 3:56 PM

  Waiting for the follow up article "Claude Code considered harmful"

• by bodge5000 on 8/11/25, 10:17 PM

  Feels like the word "all" is pulling a lot of weight in that sentence, it's not cheap and you're forever reliant on a company to keep providing the service (which has already changed recently I think, seem to remember something about harsher rate limiting being put in place). "All you need" typically implies that you don't need much (eg "The terminal is all you need"), and Claude Code isn't that.

  Otherwise good article, I'm still not sure vibe coding is for me and at the price, it's hard to justify trying to out, but things like this do make me a little more tempted to give it a shot. I doubt it'd ever replace writing code by hand for me, but could be fun for prototyping I suppose

• by g42gregory on 8/11/25, 5:46 PM

  I read the section "Hitting a snag: the model builders are also the police now".

  It absolutely boggles my mind how anybody thinks that this is Ok?

  Unless you are in North Korea, of course.

• by mdasen on 8/11/25, 3:17 PM

  Is Claude Code better than the Gemini CLI? I've been using the Gemini CLI with Gemini 2.5 Pro and haven't been impressed. Maybe these LLMs aren't as good with Rust codebases? I'm guessing there are a lot more people looking to use these tools with JS and Python.

• by andrewstuart on 8/11/25, 4:27 PM

  I use Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all together.

  I throw their results at each other, get them to debug and review each others work.

  Often a get all three to write the code for a given need and then ask all three to review all three answers to find the best solution.

  If I’m building something sophisticated there might be 50 cycles of three way code review until they are all agreed that there no critical problems.

  There’s no way I could do without all three at the same time it’s essential.

• by alecco on 8/11/25, 7:46 PM

  > I had some issues getting it to understand that it wasn't meant to terminate, so I instead told it to write a basic bash script that calls claude with the -p flag and "please continue" whenever it detects its not running.

  This is why we can't have nice things. Anthropic is placing more restrictive limits and now you risk being locked out for hours if you need to use it a bit more than usual (e.g. you have an impending deadline or presentation).

  I wish Anthropic just banned these abusive accounts instead of placing draconian (and fuzzy) limits. The other day there was an idiot YouTube streamer actively looking to hit limits with as many concurrent Claude Code sessions as he could, doing nonsense projects.

• by 1gn15 on 8/11/25, 3:58 PM

  Why isn't anyone talking about the HackerNews Comment Ranker plugin? [1] That's amazing. I had this idea too -- to rank HN comments by their relevance to the actual article, and filter out comments that obviously didn't read it.

  Repo: https://github.com/sixhobbits/hn-comment-ranker

  I need to modify this to work with local models, though. But this does illustrate the article's point -- we both had an idea, but only one person actually went ahead and did it, because they're more familiar with agentic coding than me.

  [1] Oh. I think I understand why. /lh

• by t0md4n on 8/11/25, 3:34 PM

  I'd personally rather use gpt-5. The sub price is cheap and offers more overall value than an Anthropic sub or paying per token. The chatgpt app on iPhone and Mac are native and nicer than Anthropic's and offer more features. Codex is close enough to Claude Code and also now native. For me it's nicer to use the "same" model across each use case like text, images, code etc. this way I better understand the limitations and quirks of the model rather than the constant context switching to different models to get maybe slightly better perf. To each their own though depending on your personal use case.

• by rglover on 8/11/25, 4:52 PM

  How does Claude Code compare to just using a Sonnet/Opus model with Cline? Imagine the results have to be fairly similar?

• by dazzaji on 8/12/25, 4:18 AM

  This is a fun project to be sure. I just wish the author would not refer to the experiment as an "autonomous startup builder" unless they mean it humorously. Having poked around the GitHub repo and read through the materials, it seems like more of an AI coding assistant running in a loop that built and deployed a broken web application with no users, no business model, and no understanding of what problem it was trying to solve. There were quasi-autonomous processes and there were things that were built, but nothing I'd call a startup.

• by wedn3sday on 8/11/25, 4:42 PM

  I dont know about yall, but personally I love to see an AI running with "--dangerously-skip-permissions" in an infinite loop. Every day we get closer to the cyberpunk future we deserve.

• by umvi on 8/11/25, 10:21 PM

  Too bad Claude Code doesn't have a fixed cost plan for teams. The API is super expensive (I can easily spend $6-10 in a single sitting in tokens)

• by interpol_p on 8/12/25, 12:55 AM

  I've been diving into Claude Code after reading articles constantly praising its abilities. But I think perhaps it's better suited to web development

  Using it for iOS development is interesting. It does produce working output (sometimes!) but it's very hit-or-miss. Recently I gave it a couple hours to build a CarPlay prototype of one of my apps. It was completely unable to refactor the codebase to correctly support CarPlay (even though I passed the entire CarPlay documentation into it). I gave it three attempts at it. Then I intervened and added support for CarPlay manually, following that I added a lot of skeleton code for it to flesh out. Claude was then able to build a prototype

  However, over the next few days as I tried to maintain the code I ended up rewriting 60% of it because it was not maintainable or correct. (By "not correct" I mean it had logic errors and was updating the display multiple times with incorrect information before replacing it with correct information, causing the data displayed to randomly refresh)

  I also tried getting it to add some new screens to a game I develop. I wanted it to add some of the purchase flows into the app (boring code that I hate writing). It managed to do it with compile errors, and was unable to fix its own build output despite having the tools to do so. Instead of fixing the build errors it caused, Claude Code decided it would manually verify that only its own changes were correct by running `swiftc` on only files that it touched. Which was nonsense

  All that said, there was a benefit in that Claude Code writing all this code and getting something up on the screen motivated me to finally pick up the work and do some of these tasks. I had been putting them off for months and just having the work "get started" no matter how bad, was a good kick start

• by codeulike on 8/12/25, 9:44 AM

  How does privacy work with Claude Code in the real world? Its arbitrarily sending files from current folder/subfolders to anthropics cloud, right? Does Claude have a good privacy policy? E.g. do they promise not to retain what gets sent?

  Because I think 'sending everything to the ai' would be a bit of an obstacle for most company environments

• by cloudking on 8/11/25, 6:45 PM

  Claude Code has very reliable tool calls, that's why I'm using it.

  Tried Cursor, Windsurf and always ran into tool failures, edit failures etc.

• by prmph on 8/11/25, 9:24 PM

  > Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine.

  Wow, the danger is not so much from Claude Code itself, but that it might download a package that will do nasty things on your machine when executed.

• by e-brake on 8/12/25, 11:06 AM

  Nothing new but you can configure Claude Code to use GPT5 as its LLM model: https://docs.litellm.ai/docs/tutorials/claude_responses_api

• by cyral on 8/12/25, 3:13 AM

  I haven't tried Claude Code yet, but I extensively use Cursor and find it can do similar work (which makes sense). I think it's good you led with the length prompt/spec, which will maybe help the "AI can't do ____" crowd grasp that it really is a skill issue when they can't get any good results from LLMs. (Unfortunately it cannot help the "well, this isn't actually useful or making an impact" group)

  Regarding some of the comments here: I found the article style fine, and I even like the "follow my journey" style writing as it helps the reader understand the process you went though. That kind of engineering and debugging workflow is something I enjoy about this industry.

• by doppelgunner on 8/11/25, 2:07 PM

  Is Claude Code really that good? I'm currently using Cursor and I let it pick the LLM model to use.

• by jofer on 8/11/25, 3:00 PM

  I appreciate this writeup. I live in the terminal and work primarily in vim, so I always appreciate folks talking about tooling from that perspective. Little of the article is that, but it's still interesting to see the workflow outlined here, and it gives me a few ideas to try more of.

  However, I disagree that LLMs are anywhere near as good as what's described here for most things I've worked with.

  So far, I'm pretty impressed with Cursor as a toy. It's not a usable tool for me, though. I haven't used Claude a ton, though I've seen co-workers use it quite a bit. Maybe I'm just not embracing the full "vibe coding" thing enough and not allowing AI agents to fully run wild.

  I will concede that Claude and Cursor have gotten quite good at frontend web development generation. I don't doubt that there are a lot of tasks where they make sense.

  However, I still have yet to see a _single_ example of any of these tools working for my domain. Every single case, even when the folks who are trumpeting the tools internally run the prompting/etc, results in catastrophic failure.

  The ones people trumpet internally are cases where folks can't be bothered to learn the libraries they're working with.

  The real issue is that people who aren't deeply familiar with the domain don't notice the problems with the changes LLMs make. They _seem_ reasonable. Essentially by definition.

  Despite this, we are being nearly forced to use AI tooling on critical production scientific computing code. I have been told I should never be editing code directly and been told I must use AI tooling by various higher level execs and managers. Doing so is 10x to 100x slower than making changes directly. I don't have boilerplate. I do care about knowing what things do because I need to communicate that to customers and predict how changes to parameters will affect output.

  I keep hearing things described as an "overactive intern", but I've never seen an intern this bad, and I've seen a _lot_ of interns. Interns don't make 1000 line changes that wreck core parts of the codebase despite being told to leave that part alone. Interns are willing to validate the underlying mathematical approximations to the physics and are capable of accurately reasoning about how different approximations will affect the output. Interns understand what the result of the pipeline will be used for and can communicate that in simple terms or more complex terms to customers. (You'd think this is what LLMs would be good at, but holy crap do they hallucinate when working with scientific terminology and jargon.)

  Interns have PhDs (or in some cases, are still in grad school, but close to completion). They just don't have much software engineering experience yet. Maybe that's the ideal customer base for some of these LLM/AI code generation strategies, but those tools seem especially bad in the scientific computing domain.

  My bottleneck isn't how fast I can type. My bottleneck is explaining to a customer how our data processing will affect their analysis.

  (To our CEO) - Stop forcing us to use the wrong tools for our jobs.

  (To the rest of the world) - Maybe I'm wrong and just being a luddite, but I haven't seem results that live up to the hype yet, especially within the scientific computing world.

• by hungryhobbit on 8/11/25, 2:41 PM

  >1) Have faith (always run it with 'dangerously skip permissions', even on important resources like your production server and your main dev machine.

  I thought the article was a satire after I read this ... but it wasn't!

• by ramesh31 on 8/11/25, 2:35 PM

  Particularly with the VSCode extension. I was a loyal Cline user until recently because of how good the editor experience was, but the ability for Claude to go off and run for 10+ minutes effectively autonomously, and show me the diffs in realtime is a gamechanger. The token usage has also gotten much more efficient in the last few months. With proper IDE support now I don't see any reason at all to use anything else, especially not the "credit" based middle-man providers (Windsurf/Cursor et. al).

• by SuperSandro2000 on 8/11/25, 8:58 PM

  Fuck claude! They DDoS'ed my infra until I completely banned them!

• by devmor on 8/11/25, 2:53 PM

  This article seems fun, and it's interesting, but I was waiting for the point and it never came.

  The author didn't do anything actually useful or impactful, they played around with a toy and mimicked a portion of what it's like to spin up pet projects as a developer.

  But hey, it could be that this says something after all. The first big public usages of AI were toys and vastly performed as a sideshow attraction for amused netizens. Maybe we haven't come very far at all, in comparison to the resources spent. It seems like all of the truly impressive and useful applications of this technology are still in specialized private sector work.

• by lvl155 on 8/11/25, 3:04 PM

  If Anthropic is smart they would open it up to other models now to make it default for everyone. Otherwise you are banking on Sonnet remaining the best coding model.

• by aantix on 8/11/25, 4:12 PM

  Has anyone run with `dangerously skip permissions` and had something catastrophic happen?

  Are there internal guardrails within Claude Code to prevent such incidents?

  rm -rf, drop database, etc?

• by vibecoding-grft on 8/11/25, 5:20 PM

  I've found Claude's CLI to be the best of what I've tried. I've moved away from cursor and found myself in a much better programming headspace wherein I can "toggle" this AI-enabled mode. It has to be a more mindful approach to when/how I use AI in my day-to-day work instead of it being a temptation to "AI" some of the work away in the Cursor IDE.

• by not_a_bot_4sho on 8/11/25, 3:09 PM

  Perhaps I'm a bit of a cynic but I'm no longer impressed by the AI slop websites and demo apps, like those showcased in the article.

• by anotherpaul on 8/12/25, 6:29 AM

  I feel like Claude code is great but how is it so much different from the agent of GitHub copilot? They both can use the same model (Claude 4) and the agent behaves very similar. For 10 bucks I think GitHub copilot is very reasonably priced as well. But ofc usage limits are maybe where they differ a lot. Am I missing out?

• by javier_e06 on 8/12/25, 2:28 PM

  AI is a box, beware of how our brains mold inside of it.

  https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/a-i-is-homogenizing-our-t...

• by einpoklum on 8/13/25, 12:47 PM

  > Within a few days I'd upgraded to the $100/month MAX plan

  This is something a third of your total gross income - if we take a median over the people of the world.

• by varispeed on 8/11/25, 8:32 PM

  This looks like absolute nightmare. I cannot work in console like this.

• by alberth on 8/11/25, 3:00 PM

  OT: my 14-year old nephew would like to use Claude Code. How do they signup for an account given they don’t have a cellphone?

  (Sure, I could let them use my credentials but that isn’t really legit/fair use.)

• by meistertigran on 8/12/25, 6:36 PM

  I have been doing something very simillar!

  Instead of giving it a VPS, I just made a tool that allows synchronization of localStorage data.

  I now just upload the HTML it generates and have an app instantly.

• by rcvassallo83 on 8/11/25, 10:57 PM

  Let's vibe some crud?

  Sir, do you realize that crud is such a solved problem that popular MVC frameworks from over a decade ago generate it for you from templates? No wasteful LLM prompting required.

• by darqis on 8/11/25, 8:15 PM

  I think there's been enough free ad posts for this

• by nickradford on 8/11/25, 6:09 PM

  I'm curious what the prompt is you used for the poster background generation. I really like the soft illustrated feel for the images I got back

• by howToTestFE on 8/11/25, 10:39 PM

  I wonder what it will be like in 5-10 years time to look back at this sort of time, as we start to figure out the next way to code...

• by buyx on 8/12/25, 5:24 AM

  $100 a month for a South African is not a trivial amount. Definitely putting his money where his mouth is.

• by visarga on 8/11/25, 4:09 PM

  And loads of money to pay for tokens, because every month I am out of tokens after a week or two.

• by amelius on 8/11/25, 11:03 PM

  Note: use the Esc key to close images after you opened them (back button does not work).

• by mdrzn on 8/12/25, 11:13 AM

  This how I run CC, directly on my server, with root, but no permission skip.

• by esafak on 8/11/25, 3:22 PM

  We really need an agent benchmark to explore their ability-efficiency frontier.

• by siva7 on 8/11/25, 3:06 PM

  > I watched the autonomous startup builder a bit more.

  I think i'm done with this community in the age of vibe coding. The line between satire, venture capitalism, business idea guys and sane tech enthusiasts is getting too blurry.

• by dangoodmanUT on 8/12/25, 2:49 PM

  I personally like Cursor ssh, because I get the editor too

• by ramoz on 8/11/25, 6:33 PM

  I've learned that I also need Gemini 2.5 and long context.

• by sgt101 on 8/11/25, 4:48 PM

  I'm sorry but people who let an agent run on prod deserve what they get. Basically even saying you would do that should disqualify you from working in IT in the way saying "I like to drink when I'm working" should disqualify you from airtraffic control.

• by wolvesechoes on 8/12/25, 9:07 AM

  I don't even need Claude Code.

• by jmull on 8/12/25, 12:47 AM

  Why do you even need Claude Code?

  A frustration of using tools is that they never entirely act exactly the way you want... instead of it working the way you want, you have to work they way it wants (and before that, you have to figure out what that is).

  ...We're stuck with this, because it's just not feasible to build custom software for each person, that works exactly the way they want.

  ...Or is it?

  I'm intrigued by the possibility that coding models do in fact make it feasible to have software customized exactly to what I want.

  Of course, that includes the coding agent, so no need for Claude Code.

• by Pomelolo on 8/14/25, 11:36 AM

  This reads like an ad.

• by zb3 on 8/11/25, 3:07 PM

  Umm, not really, you also need spare money to burn..

• by ontigola on 8/12/25, 5:53 AM

  "Thanks for the article. I found it interesting, though the 'vibe coding' method isn't something I can apply in my own IT environment, mainly due to its complexity and technology stack. The piece makes a strong case for why LLMs are so good at coding. It's clear they excel with the technologies and patterns most common in their training data—the same ones their own developers likely use. While their performance drops off with less familiar tech, it's undeniable that for certain types of tasks, they are very effective."

• by burntpineapple on 8/11/25, 2:31 PM

  if I don't see aider in the first sentence, I send it back

• by almosthere on 8/11/25, 4:19 PM

  I have noticed that using LLMs does not increase tech debt, it infact erases it, and can do so codebase wide in half an hour.