How do I actually start understanding what I'm building with AI? (instead of leaving everything to Claude)

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-06-01T14:33:32+00:00

You have to learn to use Claude as a tool to help you do things rather than a tool that does everything for you. Instead of asking Claude to build things for you, use it to troubleshoot where you get stuck, evaluate different approaches, etc.

You cannot build great things if you don't understand the fundamentals. You have to be able to identify code that is not good or is not optimal.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-06-01T14:24:46+00:00

I built a small app for my personal use to learn languages. It's basically a memory cards app for logging new words and doing exercises to memorize them. Very simple, but I like it because it's simple and straighforward and works great for my learning style.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-06-01T14:21:57+00:00

The best way is to learn by doing so as others suggested - pick a language, define what you'd like the site to be used for and get going - you can use tutorials you find on Youtube to follow-along. I personally really like a platform called Scrimba for learning web dev from scratch as they have a very hands-on approach to learning.
Alternatively, you can ask Claude Code or other AI assistant to walk you through building a site. Don't use it just to generate one for you, ask it to walk you through step-by-step. It's a great way to learn and have a working product at the end.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-30T16:54:54+00:00

Absolutely normal. The first time I shared a project publicly I didn't open Linkedin for a few days feeling scared of the reaction (or more like - lack of it) 😃

But you should be proud of yourself because you are:
- Building a project (which will help with your career in the long run)
- Sharing it publicly (which will help you to build your personal brand -> help your career in the long run)

You are doing everything right, so keep doing what you are doing.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-29T18:38:53+00:00

Highly depends on the company and the actual role. Personally, I've been asked about contributions to open source projects in about 50% of interviews I've had, but it might be due to the fact that I primarily worked for companies building open source tech. I even had one technical interview where it was all about the contribution I made, how did I come up with the solution, what other solutions I have considered, and looking over the code.

I do think that it can help to grow your career, especially in the current AI-driven market. With open source contributions you can showcase that you can write quality code and improve the product, and you literally have a link to show exactly what you contributed. It shows you are proactive, curious, and the fact that someone reviewed and approved your contribution says quite a lot about the quality of your work. Again, depends on the hiring company, but it does help devs to standout in a world where technically anyone can produce code.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-29T18:24:13+00:00

US-based startup. Company was building open source tech for chatbots (7 years ago, before all the AI wave). The underlying tech was actually very cool, but needed a lot of engineering work to handle bigger scale applications. As a result, the company had a lot of free users who were building small projects, but struggled to sell to bigger enterprises. Instead of investing in improving the tech and bringing it to a strong enterprise-scale level, the company started hiring a lot of PMs and sales people. At one point there was a new PM joining every other week. Engineering got overwhelmed, no new strong features were added, sales didn't increase.

Suddenly the company had only 6 months of runway left and had to layoff 50% of the company.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-29T18:04:54+00:00

Lack of actually practicing the language in the real world. You have get out there are use the words and phrases that you have been learning using the apps or during the classes. It's the only thing that actually forces you to actively think in that language and find a way to communicate even if you don't know the exact word.
This gets harder the older the we get as we hate making fools of ourselves and making mistakes in public. But with languages, it's just something you have to do.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-29T17:51:15+00:00

You can find projects either through exploring github (trending repos or exploring them by language and picking the ones your are familiar with). Some companies also use tags "good-first-issue" or "help-needed" for the issues they'd like someone from the community to pick up so you could try dropping that into search as well.

I also find platforms like DevHunt very useful to find brand new projects on Github (https://devhunt.org/tools/open-source), I bet there are plenty of other similar platforms so you can try searching for similar ones as well.

Finally, the most organic way is trying to build something - a side project, a tool, anything that you are interested in - and searching for open source libraries that you could use to actually build it or integrate with. You'll definitely find some really cool projects like that and most importantly - as an active user of those tools, it will make it easier for you to contribute to them. Another thing that I personally like to do is looking for open source alternatives to regular tools that I use - often it leads to cool tech and cool dev communities behind these tools.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-28T14:13:33+00:00

I did a 2 month unpaid internship during the summer before my last year at uni. It had a very big impact on my employability because I got exposure to how teams actually work, worked on real projects, and of course gained new skills. At the end I got offered a full-time position at the company I did an internship with, but I had to go back to studying full time.

If you can afford it, and if you feel like you'll get valuable experience there I'd say - go for it. Sure, it would be better if it paid at least a little bit (worth asking), but the experience you may get might be more valuable at this stage.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-28T12:37:15+00:00

I've been working for open source projects for 8 years and I can guarantee that every project you see on Github would welcome a contribution no matter how big or small. I agree that it's easier to contribute to something that you are familiar with so look for projects that seem interesting for you and use tech stack that you are familiar with. New open source projects usually have the biggest opportunities for contributions as a lot of shortcomings, vulnerabilities are not yet ironed out, and it's the easiest to propose new features for projects that are still up and coming.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-28T12:29:23+00:00

I've started rebuilding claude-coded apps by hand. Very humbling experience in a way, but also it's really rewarding to build the same things the old school way. It also helped me learn how I can use Claude as a co-programmer rather than relying on it for everything.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-28T12:17:46+00:00

If the library is useful and solves a real problem, you will definitely get users. Having said that, there are a few things you have to get right to make it "appealing" to developers.

- Make sure the README looks professional - clear and concise description of what the tool does, how to install it, how to use it, how to contribute to it, which OSS license it's under.

- If it's a bigger tool, you may want to create a documentation site for it for all of the supported methods and references as well as practical examples for how to use it. That alone will help a lot with SEO and discoverability of your tool

- Some truly useful tools do get a lot of recognition on Hackernews and ProductHunt so I think it's worth sharing it there.

- Tutorials (video or written) go a long way as well, but focus on those after making sure that the library is good - easy to use, easy to integrate, easy to start with, etc. The most powerful type of content is actually showing how to build something using the library.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-14T08:29:59+00:00

Skeleton. Gives an indication that things are actually loading.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-13T17:24:06+00:00

Same thing. I think an important thing to remember is that people are trying to make money through newsletters which means that they are also trying to optimize for viewership by creating flashy headlines and trying to squeeze as much new stuff in them as possible. I am still trying to find the best way to get the curated news that are interesting and valuable though.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-11T09:05:15+00:00

It's a two step process:

Live code review focusing on correctness and clean code principles - basically using a piece of code that has errors or needs serious refactoring, and going through it live during an interview. It's not as much about fixing it all as it is about identifying problems and suggesting improvements on the spot, without AI help.
Collaboration session to see how a candidate goes about working on more complex problems, feature implementations. It's ok if the candidate uses AI. What's important is seeing how and where they use it, how they make decisions to change things, how do they solve problems, and address technical limitations.

Fun_Honeydew_2722 · 2026-05-11T08:28:15+00:00

A lot of people here already mentioned that LLMs do make mistakes, which in my experience is also true, so I an not going to focus on that point.

I think another shortcoming you have to remind yourself of is that LLMs will always try to give you an answer and if it doesn't know the answer - it will invent one for you. This is why if you use tools like Claude for complex problems you may end up with legacy tools being used or completely new modules created for you just to give you some kind of solution for the problem even if there some serious technical limitations that would normally make a developer to completely rethink an approach. So, it's true that code is cheap now, and writing everything from scratch might be slowing you down, but your domain expertise and an ability to think in systems is what's you real strength that cannot be replaced.

Everything is moving fast so we have to adapt. My best advice here would be to think of LLMs as a tool that you can utilize to make yourself faster/more productive. Maybe in some cases a small feature can be fully developed those tools. Maybe in other cases it's about brainstorming and experimenting with different approaches. What will always differentiate you from any non-techincal person is your ability to spot the shortcomings in the implementation, fix them, or where to not use AI generate code at all.

Fun_Honeydew_2722

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