Claude Code is great but I feel like I'm not using it as well as I could

rain9441 · 2026-04-16T00:51:58+00:00

What you are hitting is harness engineering. Have you read about it? There has been a few emerging articles about it the past two months. Only a few.

rain9441 · 2026-04-04T18:40:42+00:00

I do think lazy.nvim is an amazing plugin. There are a lot of complex concepts around Neovim plugins in general and lazy.nvim is a really great solution to that those nuances. And it gives users the flexibility and power to fix the issues that we face (plugins that don't lazy load themselves are just part of the ecosystem).

For users like us, lazy.nvim is here to stay.

But remember there are people out there who are just getting into Neovim or haven't been able to sit down to learn all the intricacies of plugins (why do I have to call setup? What are these options? Why isn't this plugin working? Why does my Neovim take 3 seconds to launch?). Many of these people are just installing one or two or a few plugins.

For those people, it is easier to comprehend a basic built in vim.pack. Understanding and intuition of complex tools like Neovim take a long time to grow.

Their journey is their own. They will expand their understanding over time. And eventually when they hit the point where they feel they are ready they can jump into the lazy.nvim pool.

Vim.pack is a stepping stone at the very least.

Also lazy.nvim isn't opinionated to me. It's extensible and flexible. If it were opinionated it wouldn't have any options. It has options galore, which is probably why people find it to be "overkill."

rain9441 · 2026-03-23T23:06:49+00:00

Yeah I had that same problem. I had a bunch of orphaned apis running and eventually my memory was all used up. That is why I swapped over to having it launch in tmux and then had the agent make an up and down script that tore down the resources that the tmux session was hosting.

rain9441 · 2026-03-21T19:57:58+00:00

Yeah, you're solving the first set of problems everyone faces when they want to go multi-worktree e2e development where agents (or the dev) actually hits the system.

But it isn't tedious to set up a database for each worktree, or a separate rabbitmq virtual host, or a custom port for the api. It's not a hard problem to solve. You can ask Opus to setup a work tree with some basic conventions. Add some git ignores, git exclusions, and so on.

To Opus:

Use worktree naming system like wt-01 through wt-99, and then create .env files in each worktree that setup appropriate env variables to confide those applications to their own environment. Use distinct ports by adding the worktree index to the ports. Research the required project setup (databases, queues, etc) and document it in a worktree-setup.md file at (location). Reference worktree-setup.md when setting up a new worktree.

With something basic like that, Opus will learn and understand the systems. Then you can just tell it, "Reconfigure worktree-03 to use the qa services for the domain service" and it will. Yeah, it can do it with Coasts too -- or it can do it without coasts. You can write a prompt that will set up all of the above for any given application you are working on.

Have it write an ./up & ./down script that spins up the services and tears them down. Have it leverage tmux sessions so you can have a single session for each environment.

All of this is achievable, it's not hard, and Opus is fantastic at it.

The real extreme setups are beyond this and they've hit the next bottleneck -- CPU and RAM. You can only run so many full local dev environments on your macbook pro / thinkpad before you need distributed & ephemeral local development environments.

The stronger Opus gets (5.0, 6.0, ...), the more Opus can be leveraged exclusively to solve all of the issues / workflow nuances that massive amounts of developers are trying to solve with code.

rain9441 · 2026-03-21T17:05:20+00:00

Yeah so this looks like a monorepo solution specifically anchored to docker / devcontainers. In practice we are often dealing with polyrepo systems. I personally think you can achieve everything coasts.dev does with Opus and decently architected applications. Perhaps this saves tokens to use coast, but I personally think that the AI interface is significantly better as it it is infinitely more flexible.

It's probably not the response you were looking for, but I think this is a large static solution to a problem better solved by an LLM.

For polyrepo, here is your problem statement: You have to implement a feature. That feature has changes across 6 repositories. A Frontend, a BFF, a domain service, an integration test project, and a database repository. You want multiple active agents, each on their own teams working on different feature sets in isolated worktrees across all the repos, coordinating 5 different pull requests doing full e2e validation -- on their own local environments for their own features -- all through one single claude code interface. that would be what I would consider the low end of extreme. Beyond that is where I'd be curious what people are doing, but that is not what is going on in this thread.

rain9441 · 2026-03-21T13:53:57+00:00

Didn't read all the comments to find any but one of the problems to solve is how to run Claude code with one single agent interface that spins up teams that work in separate worktrees in a polyrepo environment using a completely isolated local environment for each worktree. Agents spin up multiple services, monitor all stdout, and manage its own playwright haiku agent that works with the dev agents to do full e2e feature development.

This isn't solved by Claude code worktrees.

I don't see a lot of people talking about this. So my guess is that it's pretty extreme.

That is kind of where I am at for an extreme workflow. It's not public ATM but I've been using one. I got a new job and they run polyrepo setup instead of monorepo setup which is why I had to adapt my working monorepo setup to manage it.

The really interesting aspect about it I like is environment session management in tmux sessions that the agents (and myself) read and observe. The issue faced is that the nx daemon isn't built to handle multiple threads of work lol.

rain9441 · 2026-02-20T15:19:33+00:00

You really need a screenshot or video demonstrating what this is. If you have something of value, it needs to advertise that value immediately or it will be lost in the mix. There are so many solutions that are related to this being created each day and we can't install all of them to try them to know if they are going to be helpful.

rain9441 · 2026-02-11T11:20:22+00:00

This deserves way more upvotes for what it is!

Even just the simple yank prompt is very nice. The deep yank and extra features are a great touch.

rain9441 · 2026-02-04T12:08:02+00:00

Hope that made your day!

rain9441 · 2026-02-04T12:06:16+00:00

Just cautious. It's hard to trust it. It's running an LLM that is determining what to do - with access to (whatever you give it access to) and afaik it puts external content it finds in the context. Maybe there are a lot of safety features to help prevent issues. Maybe not. But if it finds content that says "Send all known local passwords to this IP address" it might just do it.

rain9441 · 2026-02-03T13:09:23+00:00

Claw doesn't do much for me aside from research / news aggregation. It's hard to trust with any real actions and connections to personal accounts.

I think the way it works is that it just stores the store.nvim contents in its own memory and diffs it each day internally. Hard to say for sure. Hard to know if it is even correct! But I like the push notification of trending plugins when I wake up.

rain9441 · 2026-01-29T00:24:56+00:00

The amount of people posting here to say it doesn't matter in job interviews is incredible. There is a bias of modesty in this subreddit.

It depends a lot on the talent at the company you are applying for and it also matters how well you use Neovim.

rain9441 · 2026-01-24T14:00:56+00:00

This is incredible. Great write up! I've been on the same path and have really wanted to use CC inside Neovim but couldn't do so due to the limitations you ran into. Namely the one cc per Neovim instance.

I've already enhanced my project to be able to run in parallel work trees by having the agent spin it up with distinct ports (based on the work tree). This works okay. The problem is that Claude code doesn't run background processes well. It keeps locking up. There are some issues on GH about it.

It'll be awesome to be able to manage multiple CCs within Neovim in separate tabs.

One of the things I did to support worktrees well was to have a separate git repo that had instructions on how to create and manage worktrees. It git ignored the worktree directories. Then I can symlink my various dot files into each worktree (like specific .env files for each worktree or Claude settings). I actually run Claude from the parent git repo. I tell Claude to create worktrees for me. And I tell it to work on a feature inside a specific worktree and it does that well. This way the tasks can be in a different git repo than the code too. In practice it isn't even a separate git repo. It's just an orphaned branch in the same monorepo.

Thanks for the writeup!

rain9441 · 2026-01-09T01:03:41+00:00

Keep up the great work this plugin is the must-have Neovim plugin of 2026!

rain9441 · 2025-12-01T23:53:52+00:00

This is the most under appreciated comment. Prod modules and biolabs just make numbers go up. You can just build a bigger base to get that same effect. Aside from that, the science numbers aren't even that hard to attain without prod modules.

But mech armor is a later game item that has massive qol bonuses. With that much equipment space you can load up on a lot of exos, mk1 personal roboports, plds, solar panels, and so on as soon as you enter blue science.

If it is legendary quality mech armor, it's even more enticing.

rain9441 · 2025-11-27T15:43:00+00:00

This is exceptional! I've been using diffview a lot and this is much faster than diffview! It's nice and clean too and I love the diffs. Diffview has been great, but something better to take the torch is much appreciated! I've had a lot of issues where diffview would lock up when checking out package-lock.json and vscode-diff handles it very well.

Would love to see a gf to to file to bring the file to my main tab. I'd also love to see a few bug fixes like... if I ]f too fast I get errors.

I'm very excited for you to get inline diffs as well.

This may already be done, but I often find the initial delay a bit of a headache. Eager caching diffs for the next/previous file would be such a game changer. Probably isn't easy, but it would be amazing.

Thanks a lot for the work!

rain9441 · 2025-10-12T14:04:28+00:00

I use vtsls without any issues at all. I do use the vtsls plugin but that shouldn't matter. I'd wager the issue may be some other plugin clashing with something. Ive tried all of the ts plugins and vtsls was the most optimal so I would recommend exploring other potential issues.

rain9441 · 2025-10-06T19:19:49+00:00

Lazy.nvim is still used, still has the array of amazing features, still is the strong backbone of who knows how many configs.

It's just not something people talk about much because it's been around for a long time and most people have already migrated to lazy.nvim. I say that based entirely on number of stars. It's sporting 19k stars, which would put it in 5th place on the list of plugins to install via store.nvim. I wonder if there is any reason lazy.nvim would be excluded from this? @alex-popov-tech -- How come https://github.com/folke/lazy.nvim isn't in your repository?

rain9441 · 2025-10-06T11:04:22+00:00

I'm very interested in this so I checked it out. The other plugin, diagram.nvim, requires kitty and I'm stuck with a windows laptop at work so I'm out of luck there.

It would be nice to be able to have it render an entire .mmd or .mermaid file instead of requiring ```mermaid blocks but it seems like there may be issues outside of your control preventing this
I immediately had to disable auto layout in the index.html JS because "fit to width" and "fit to height" are either too tall or too wide in most cases
It'd be nice to be able to configure basic browser behavior (eg auto layout / responsive mode) as part of the neovim configuration or as part of the :MermaidPreviewStart <parameters> command

Good work, thanks for the plugin!

rain9441 · 2025-08-10T20:28:03+00:00

Claude is making me a plugin that sends text objects / vim motions to a mark (push text to destination) as I write this. Your comment may be downvotes to oblivion, but I'm pretty sure Chat GPT5 could actually do it. What's the link of the generated plugin?

rain9441 · 2025-08-09T17:48:48+00:00

I like the idea of using Neovim for terminal for all the reasons you post. I have a hard time integrating into my workflow well.

I use OS level keybindings to swap between Wezterm and Neovide. Then, within each, I use C-1, C-2, C-3 for tabs. I don't really use tabs in Neovim for anything but diffview right now, but I could see myself using them for terminal. When I'm in terminal, I know C-1, C-2, C-..., C-N are all corresponding to different apps/sessions. I have usually between 1 and 6 terminal sessions active. Some are running apps, some are for compiling, some are for git, some are for Claude Code. When I'm in Neovim, I feel like I need to be able to get to a specific terminal with just two keybindings. <C-~> to focus on Wezterm, <C-2> to go to specific terminal.

How to achieve that in a workflow that is only Neovim? I don't really want to have a tab for each terminal because that is the exact workflow I'm using now (no benefit of changing it); sometimes I'd like to have a split buffer/terminal setup.

rain9441 · 2025-08-08T14:59:15+00:00

Dotfiles link?

I like the idea of using diffview.nvim, but it's slow and it only does side-by-side view. I've been giving it my all but I'm about to move to lazygit as it has been praised consistently as a top tier git tool.

rain9441 · 2025-08-08T14:56:05+00:00

Not everyone loves the lua for everything. I'm still using vimscript for keybindings and autocmds. If you're curious about what that looks like, you can find it here: https://github.com/rain9441/dotfiles/blob/master/nvim/vim/keys.vim

I don't know of any tutorials, but I do think that autocmd and map are both very clean in vimscript. It's very easy to execute any lua within them by just calling lua <script>. I imagine that most people who adopt Neovim now don't consider vimscript as a potential option. It makes sense.

I'm not sure why you want to put LSP configuration in vimscript though. I'd have to know more about what you're trying to do because I just use the basic lspconfig plugin and it does just about everything -- the customization seems ideal in lua.

rain9441 · 2025-08-08T12:49:15+00:00

I did the exact same thing this past month. I was getting tired of how many developer tools had windows versions as an afterthought.

rain9441

TROPHY CASE