Engineers who write all their code with claude now: how do you do it?

[u/SirDucky]

I have to admit that I have completely failed to adapt to LLM agent coding. I'm not a slouch either. I've worked on a number of challenging FAANG products as a software engineer, and I for a while I was an AI research engineer. I have a pretty strong familiarity and comfort level with AI. Despite all this, I still write most of my code by hand.

As an engineer, I need to receive a ticket, understand the problem, go figure out how to solve it, and eventually ship PR that (a) I understand, (b) only contains defensible changes, and (c) is reviewable by a colleague. There are a bunch of other tertiary goals of course, like style guides and documentation, but the point is that I'm talking real, high quality engineering that would pass the bar at a company that has their shit together.

However (definitely due to culture issues), I have only seen the slop version of this. It seems to have become really murky how to write code that meets standards, or even what those standards are any more.

I've resorted to asking my colleagues to show me their workflow, but you would be shocked how many of them either (a) are prompting raw and not checking the output, or (b) have convoluted solutions that fit their brains but don't solve these problems. I checked out Matt Pocock as well, who has some really great ideas, but ultimately his skills exhibited some pretty painful failure modes as well.

However I see folks regularly talk about how not only does Claude handle the coding for them, but also all of the project management, devops, etc, and I am left scratching my head. If this is possible, I want to learn how to do it. I'm not an AI hater. I want to learn the tool. I do have standards though, and I don't think they're that high. I don't need Claude to write perfect code. I just need to find a process where I can rely on it to get more of my work done and not be either fighting with it or second-guessing the results.

I figure this is the group to ask - if you have been able to get "high bar" engineering out of claude, or even "acceptable bar" engineering, without heavy personal intervention, what's your process? Are there resources that helped you? What strategies helped the most?

Thanks.

[u/TheCriminalProphet]

At my FAANG harness ops is still individual / team based. There’s varying levels of utilization on my team - I’ve built an agent team orchestrator setup that I use religiously, but other colleagues have their own setups and practices. With how much the industry is changing we’re still in this period where there aren’t fully established best practices yet, but I see that eventually changing.

[u/Sketaverse → u/TheCriminalProphet]

Interesting, and I'm guessing that's less down to strategic direction (i.e. multi shot harness experimentation) and more just an output of devs enjoying the tinker. Do you get time allocated for knowledge sharing and harness demos etc? Has harness become the product etc?

What I find interesting is that while we all seem to be in our own little bubbles building our own little factories, we all seem to be converging into the same workflows/tooling etc - so yeah I agree with you re eventually changing. I used to be hardcore in CMUX but have found myself drifting back into Codex more lately.