Field Notes from Shipping Real Code with Claude

Summary

June 7, 2025 Field Notes From Shipping Real Code With Claude Vibe Coding Isn’t Just a Vibe Shimmering Substance - Jackson Pollock Think of this post as your field guide to a new way of building software. By the time you finish reading, you’ll understand not just the how but the why behind AI-assisted development that actually works. Here’s What You’re Going to Learn First, we’ll explore how to genuinely achieve that mythical 10x productivity boost—not through magic, but through deliberate practices that amplify AI’s strengths while compensating for its weaknesses. You’ll discover why some developers ship features in hours while others fight their AI tools for days. Next, I’ll walk you through the exact infrastructure we use at Julep to ship production code daily with Claude’s help. This isn’t theoretical—it’s battle-tested on a codebase serving real users with real money on the line. You’ll see our CLAUDE.md templates, our commit strategies, and the guardrails that keep us from shipping disasters. Most importantly, you’ll understand why writing your own tests remains absolutely sacred, even (especially) in the age of AI. This single principle will save you from the midnight debugging sessions that plague developers who hand over too much control to their AI assistants. We’ll explore the three distinct modes of AI-assisted development, each with its own rhythms and rules. Like a musician learning when to play forte versus pianissimo, you’ll develop an intuition for when to let AI lead versus when to take firm control. But here’s the real insight: Good development practices aren’t just nice-to-haves anymore—they’re the difference between AI that amplifies your capabilities and AI that amplifies your chaos. The research bears this out dramatically. Teams using rigorous practices deploy 46 times more frequently and are 440 times faster from commit to deployment. When you add AI to disciplined practices, these numbers don’t just add—they multiply. Why This Post Exists: F...