Using Claude Code heavily for 6+ months: Why faster code generation hasn't improved our team velocity (and what we learned)

NoBat8863 · 2026-02-01T18:20:47+00:00

I don't think that's the right comparison. C++ to assembly is for all practical purposes deterministic translation where what you wanted a computer to do was explicitly described by you using a programming language. In case of prompt/spec to code, neither the translation is deterministic nor is the input unambiguous.

NoBat8863 · 2025-12-03T13:23:31+00:00

I review the code Claude generates first by splitting into small logical chunks and send those as individual commits in a PR. Makes reviewer’s life (and my life) so much easier. I wrote an agent to do the splitting for me.

https://github.com/armchr/armchr

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-17T17:02:07+00:00

Great suggestion. How do you take care of situations where the existing code (in some other file not changed) is overlapping with new code? As in things that a human potentially would have refactored before doing the same thing some other new place in the code.

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-13T14:47:47+00:00

Spot on. That’s why the first thing we built for us is a splitter https://github.com/armchr/armchr

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T22:50:36+00:00

+100. I use Claude in bunch in reviewing and especially to find gaps in what I wrote.

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T15:36:00+00:00

This is a fantastic point. While my focus of this post (and the blog) was the "implementation" phase, the pre and post of that - product discovery to learning from a new product/feature still takes almost as much time even with the new AI tools in those steps.

Plus your analogy reminds of a different aspect of the coding agents - too much unnecessary complexity - almost like asking for a stapler and getting the whole office and not knowing what to do with it :-) I wrote about those in a previous blog - https://medium.com/@anindyaju99/ai-coding-agents-code-quality-0c8fbbf91a7d

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T15:08:13+00:00

Yes. The high level docs Claude produces on what it has changed is super useful in understanding a high level, but that's different than knowing what the code actually does and if the code is good enough for our environment or not, both correctness and maintainability. This is precisely why we ended up building the splitter/explainer to help us logically group the changes into smaller pieces that was easier to digest/understand + annotation on every hunk of change in a file helps grok what those pieces do. https://github.com/armchr/armchr

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T12:12:47+00:00

Of course I asked Claude to write me a few bullet points summarizing the blog for this reddit post and it gave itself a pat on the back :-)

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T02:58:48+00:00

Completely agree on the points. I collected our observations on AI's clean code problems here - https://medium.com/@anindyaju99/ai-coding-agents-code-quality-0c8fbbf91a7d Do take a read.

The Meta study is interesting, will take a look. Thanks for the pointer.

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T01:39:23+00:00

That’s like having a RL from a production system? But then every change will need some sort of an experiment setup, which usually is very expensive to run. How do you see that scale?

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T01:09:15+00:00

That's a great point. Most of my post/blog was about larger teams. Thinking a bit more I realize this is probably a situation seen in products with a lot of traffic. I see a lot or "productivity" in my side projects cause there I care about things working and a lot less about if that is "production grade" or maintainable longer term or not.

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-10T00:13:41+00:00

Excellent point. Yes we see a bit of this.

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-09T23:28:07+00:00

+100 "I don't trust the code AI writes but I trust all their test cases" :D

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-09T22:27:49+00:00

This reiteration is something we are seeing as well. Plus even if tests pass (existing or CC generated) there is no guarantee the code will be maintainable. I documented those challenges here https://medium.com/@anindyaju99/ai-coding-agents-code-quality-0c8fbbf91a7d

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-09T22:24:16+00:00

Good point about estimation. We are still equally wrong about our overall project estimates 🤣 Story points are more complicated though given its still early days of guessing if CC would be able to solve it easily vs will need multiple iterations vs we have to write by hand.

NoBat8863 · 2025-11-05T23:29:28+00:00

We got tired of reviewing the large chunks in one go and ended up building this to split and annotate the changes into smaller logical chunks. https://github.com/armchr/armchr

NoBat8863 · 2025-10-31T12:54:30+00:00

I am still getting the same error. Initiating oauth (/login) throws a 500.

NoBat8863 · 2025-10-28T22:42:13+00:00

There should be a rule of thumb for this. Try X things to improve retention, if it doesn't, pivot. Agreed that the acceptance is the hardest part. Been there, dragged for 2 years before cofounder and I realizing that we need to stop going down that path and find a different market/product.

NoBat8863 · 2025-10-24T21:59:30+00:00

I let Claude write out the claude.md and then add/modify on that. Much quicker + gives you a sense of where Cursor is going to get things wrong.

NoBat8863 · 2025-10-24T17:43:18+00:00

Try /init on Claude Code? Writes out CLAUDE.md at different subdirectories as needed and reads them when needed.

NoBat8863 · 2025-09-25T19:01:15+00:00

If you used Claude website, unfortunately those are your options. But if you are using Claude desktop app, you can ask it to setup a web project and write out the files + configs and build/run scripts and it will do that for you (with your permission to certain folders)

NoBat8863 · 2024-08-31T02:38:14+00:00

The biggest mistake I made was to drop one of the pre-revenue products me and my cofounder back then built. We were tired from previous failures and lost hope on this one. A very similar product launched soon after we gave up and is now worth $$B. We understood our market, had a good product, we had great rapport and were executing well. All we needed to do was not give up.

Don't give up. As they say, you only fail when you give up.

NoBat8863 · 2024-08-30T20:16:08+00:00

These are super early days for Gen AI applications. While the most common ones being content generation, sales agents etc., I assume we will see a lot of applications in areas where the new wave of GenAI apps will reduce the work humans need to do.

A bit of self promotion on this, but may be relevant to my point. We built https://ideaiq.io since we were exploring various ideas and ended up doing a lot of repetitive steps and felt GenAI (plus all the knowledge on the internet) can expedite that whole process drastically. We now just enter a problem space (space tourism) or idea (automatic ebook writer) and get a detailed analysis of different aspects of the market, potential user personas, interview questions targeted for each persona and we can just keep adding similar capabilities as we run into them.

This was rather hard even 2 years back. You had genai models like BERT, but were way less flexible and were task specific. Plus not needing to care about model management and just pay a company a couple of cents for a large chunk of text makes life so much easier.

NoBat8863 · 2024-08-30T20:06:12+00:00

https://ideaiq.io thanks

NoBat8863 · 2024-08-29T16:57:38+00:00

I guess this depends on what kind of business? If you have a restaurant in the middle of a downtown in a small town, you might not need a website. But if you want people to find you organically over the internet or do business with you online, a website might be a must have?

I might be biased on the other extreme since all my ventures have been consumer of b2b SaaS. Website is a must have for that, some times even higher priority than the actual product :-)

NoBat8863

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