6 Weeks of Claude Code

Summary

It is wild to think that it has been only a handful of weeks. Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful. I believe with Claude Code, we are at the “introduction of photography” period of programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t have the same appeal anymore when a single concept can just appear and you shape it into the thing you want with your code review and editing skills. If this feels like an intimidating line-of-thought then welcome to the mid-2020s, nothing is stable anymore and change is the only constant. Sorry. I didn’t make it so nearly all of culture’s changes are bad, and I think that LLMs are already doing social damage and will do much worse in the future - but this genie is fully out of the bottle and it is substantially going to change what we think of as programming. A Retrospective on the last 6 Weeks# This article builds on “On Coding with Claude” which I wrote after using Claude for a week. If you think that I am AI-pilled, you can get my nuanced take on LLMs at the start of that post. That said, this is transformative and I want to try give you some perspective from the last 6 weeks of activity in the Puzzmo engineering space to try and show you what I’ve been seeing. Maintenance is Significantly Cheaper# I have been on many projects with people which have taken weeks full-time to perform some sort of mundane task: “converting this JS codebase to TypeScript”, “Update to Swift X”, “Switch to a monorepo” they’re the kind of things which are delicate migrations which require a gazillion rebases. Here is a lis...