alt Hacker NewsClaude Code is rare product that is both beneficial and economically addictive, where its use increases demand for itself, at least in the supply / demand range for code we are accustomed to. It makes making software so much easier that Claude coding custom software becomes a solution to all sorts of past annoyances. Maintaining the software is easy enough thanks to Claude code.
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> Claude Code is rare product that is both beneficial and economically addictive,
I'm in the film and engineering spaces, and I can honestly say the same about image and video models.
There is so much fun in all of these tools, and the productivity gains are insane.
I shoot film, but I never would have been able to do anything like this before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDdsKJl92H4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U
Today, I saw AI OR DIE with this banger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbmoVdirxw
Gossip Goblin is doing incredible work as usual. Dude is a savant and would have killed it in Hollywood if he'd had a chance before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rzl7nUdEs4
Corridor Crew is leaning in and building new tools:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3Dfw969itU
There's just so much incredible stuff being made by really brilliant people that never would have had the chance before. And these tools are literally brand spanking new. We're just getting started.
I have now witnessed first hand what the unexpected benefits might be. I expected CC to be a boon to overburdened teams, because it's now possible to spend $2 on compute and have it write a mostly-one-off tool that nobody would ever otherwise have the capacity or time for.
Sure, that's happening too, but to a lesser degree than I thought. CC with a number of "enterprise integrations" (really: corporate MCPs) is a pretty hefty force-multiplier for operations teams. "Go summarise and dissect this weird client request for me. Documentation is spread across at least $THESE_ENTERPRISE_DATA_SILOES." Saves a bunch of time pinging the different people across continents who happen to know intimate details. That was not entirely unexpected.
It's the technically minded but not necessarily otherwise technical people who keep surprising me in weird and wacky ways. People are building themselves and their immediate peers disposable dashboards. Who needs a service to pull data for a real-time display when CC can collect the necessary information and construct a local, static HTML file with all the info neatly in one place? I'm sure there will be a hangover because the compute cost for doing these in JIT fashion will surely feel like death by a thousand cuts at some point, but the ability to really quickly validate whether certain types of data aggregations are useful is proving to be ... a positive development.
I disagree about the ease of maintaining the software, though. You still need the skills to really understand what the code is doing, and with the original "why" possibly lost in the adrenaline haze, the maintenance effort floor has shifted.