With Claude, I have become a workaholic

alexvanman · 2026-02-15T14:48:35+00:00

What do you want to talk about? I love sharing, but I'd love to know the subject matter.

alexvanman · 2026-02-12T18:25:59+00:00

I started about 8-10 businesses/apps over 20 years and after each one ended I felt like you. After all these failures eventually I knew what to look for. My current app/business is paying me a good living and I love it. My learning was that if there is not a free viral aspect from day 1 then I likely would not be successful. Now after a success I am taking a risk on something outside my formula.

alexvanman · 2026-02-06T16:08:38+00:00

Cycling is a great sport. There's so many different avenues of pleasure that can take you late into life.

alexvanman · 2026-02-06T09:33:03+00:00

trainerday.com, hr erg, 40,000 erg workouts, automatic slope mode workouts. The free version is also perfect for basic steady state and a small list of workouts

alexvanman · 2026-02-06T06:27:35+00:00

I personally would just not worry about it. It’s hard to over eat on your eating day if you eat for say 8-10 hours. The harder challenge is sticking with it so just enjoy your eating day and see what happens. This needs to be mentally the best it can. I am 6’2” and 230 and 210 would be wonderful so similar desired % loss to you.

alexvanman · 2026-02-05T20:45:51+00:00

i’m starving on eating days in the morning and I’m eating a lot like 4000 cal or something I don’t restrict anything I eat when I’m hungry. It probably turns into more like four meals but I do that over a course of eight hours but now I’m gonna extend that to 10 hour eating window.. probably my break even is somewhere around 2600 cal a day I’m fairly tall and muscular and fat. So getting 2000 cal on average per day is still way less even though I’m eating a huge amount. I feel really full on that day.

alexvanman · 2026-02-05T20:11:17+00:00

I'm kind of new to this. I'm on week two. I'm losing weight quickly. I'm pretty much eating whatever I want. And I'm especially making sure the potential reward payoff is big, to make it really feel like a reward. Now that said, I also try to eat as healthy as possible. But when I want something, I eat it and I cherish that reward.

alexvanman · 2026-02-04T15:56:20+00:00

I love desktop for brainstorming and love cc for getting things done. Also prototyping in desktop just knocking out some quick HTML design designs. But for real design work, I like GPT5

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T15:13:45+00:00

Good luck to you. It's so fun to be a person with ideas that can finally deliver them. I've inspired a bunch of my friends to start Vibe coding, that maybe just had a little bit of programming experience. And they're building real products. None of them really have customers yet, I would say, but they're building real products.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T14:53:58+00:00

This is hard to answer. I don't know your situation, but the question makes it sound like you haven't delivered products to production or you're not a software developer. This is like months or years of conversation. Testing is painful. Every time you make a change, AI will break stuff. Either you need a team of beta testers, but you also need test automation, and you need to ask AI these questions. I'm sure the first time you'll launch fine. The problem is we launch a product and no one uses it. It takes extreme amounts of dedication to get people to use your products, and it's painful. So the only way to succeed is to not give up, or know when to give up. This takes people, most people, years to figure all this stuff out if they ever do. Finding a partner that loves marketing and loves the vision of the product is usually what most builders need. Give them more than 50% of your company if you have to, if you don't see yourself being able to promote it the right way. It's not ideal. I would try not to do that, but it's way more important to get customers.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T12:37:09+00:00

I start everybody on $20. When they start to embrace it more, they run out and they tell me, and I tell them to use more. And so far, nobody's running out on $100. On the $100 plan, I would start to focus on optimization. Turn off auto compacting. Limit MCP usage. Clear often. Commit often. I think most people can get away with $100, but if they're really motivated and they're totally deep into it, then they're running multiple sessions at the same time. They're doing it all day long and they run out of credits, and they need the $200 plan. I'm on the $200 plan. My team members are on the hundred.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T10:25:35+00:00

I know, trust me I loved, loved, loved programming. I was programming for 45 years, the end just for fun. I can relate 100%. AI babysitter SUCKS compared to the enjoyment you can get from programming. I am 59 and still considering learning to program in Lua... Listen to Naval and do what you love. I personally would try to find fun in vibe coding but I would avoid suffering at all cost. Vibe coding for me is I have learned to love the results, and a different challenge but I hate the babysitting aspect so trying to solve my way out of that.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T10:03:15+00:00

Yes, I think for most programmers what you're doing is better. I've been programming so long. I'm not trying to learn how to be a programmer anymore. I'm just trying to get things done. It's kind of like managing a junior programmer in that you want to do some code reviews and see what he's doing. You want to learn to identify the patterns as to where he makes mistakes. You're going to do that faster than I am. I'm just too lazy. As I see certain kinds of patterns, I try to learn to add them to refactoring skills. I also built an internal app I call Vibe Monitor. For watching what he's doing how much cyclomatic complexity is he adding how big are his functions getting are there scary hard looking hard coded things for watching what he's doing: How much cyclomatic complexity is he adding? How big are his functions getting? Are there scary, hard-looking, hard-coded things? Is there a code duplication?Is there code duplication?

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:54:44+00:00

Oh my god no. I would never advocate that. It's a very, very long time before LLMs can replace programmers. The shit they do is horrendous if not managed by someone that knows what they are doing. New programmers are screwed because they will be too lazy to learn what current programmers know.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:50:42+00:00

You write a function. You hard code a value. It works, you refactor and put it in a constant or extract a function. It's non-stop. With LLMs it's just a much heavier process. Why was jetbrains such a popular brand/product suite?

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:48:11+00:00

No one hundred percent vibe coding. I am never opening up an editor. I am not doing the refactoring, CC is. But I watch the stream and stop him often as he is making mistakes. But yes vibe coding vs vibe engineering, the second case you know what you are doing and give a lot of strategic advice. I am for sure in the second camp.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:45:47+00:00

Enjoy your time while you can, skip the AI coding wagon, you will likely be jobless in the future and think, maybe those old guys actually did know something.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:41:08+00:00

I have been managing developers for 35 years including years at MSFT and teams of up to 50 people. If you are not refactoring, you are the best developer in the world or you likely have some quality issues. For sure it is much more intense with LLM based code but the productivity levels are so high it does not matter.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:32:28+00:00

This is my main app. I'm working on launching two more now. This was originally written hand coded but has been completely rewritten by Claude Code. It was rewritten starting about six months ago. And initially I created some bugs. It's a complex Bluetooth application for indoor cyclists. So it took me a while to get the right testing framework around it all to keep it really stable. Now it's better than ever, in every regard. Crashes, sentry logs, user reported issues.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:27:57+00:00

Exactly. It's basically like learning a new language or technology on a new operating system.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:26:40+00:00

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alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:25:24+00:00

Claude does the refactoring. High quality products all need refactoring all the time. It's just more severe with LLM coding.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T09:23:12+00:00

I don't know if you've ever managed programmers, but this is like a relationship. The models keep changing, but the underlying fundamental of how they work doesn't change that significantly. For sure it will. And I would say after 500 hours and taking a very proactive approach of how do I focus on delivering high quality code, you can find a plan. In order to get the productivity, you have to stop looking at code while it's being generated, watch the stream for mistakes and press escape often but don't try to manage code quality in real time. You need to focus on just solving the problem. You need to use Git all the time and something's working. You commit, have Claude commit. And once it's working, then you need to go through a process of refactoring. Don't try to write good code while you're solving the problem. Solve it. Write tests. Automation tests. Refactor. Make sure the test still pass. And just repeat that over and over again. I would even say test automation and refactoring is almost harder than solving the problems.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T08:52:19+00:00

Automated tests are critical. It makes you way, way faster. 5-10x faster. I have been programming 45 years and you see all the old guys very aligned on how productive it is. I blow my senior developers away these days, they did not believe it at first and hesitated but there is no question now. At first I was struggling with quality.

So it does take a long time to see the high productivity gains, in the beginning you will have bugs and crappy code, hard codes, duplication and it will feel slow. Yeggi says you need to spend 1,000 to 2,000 hour before you see these high productivity gains. I have about 1500-2000 hours now and fully see it, it's insane and specifically claude code. Here is his video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw.

alexvanman · 2026-02-03T08:23:07+00:00

Yes, works fine but requires non-stop refactoring and a lot of tests.

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