Speaking for myself, I long for the day I can dump the comparatively garbage experience of Claude Code for something more enjoyable and OSS like OpenCode. But the fact is that it is simply not economically viable to do so.

So the PMF is not really for Claude Code alone -- it is for Claude Code + Claude Max.

I don't really see why evals are assumed to be exclusively in the domain of data scientists. In my experience SWEs-turned-AI Engineers are much better suited to building agents. Some struggle more than others, but "evals as automated tests" is, imo, so obvious a mental model, and can be so well adapted to by good SWEs, that data scientists have no real role on many "agent" projects.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that it's what I'm observing in practice.

For context, I'm a SWE-turned-AI Engineer, so I may be biased :)

Solved it.

Agents are coming for the other engineering disciplines as well.

The challenge is really crafting your main agent prompt such that the agent only reads the ADRs when absolutely necessary. Otherwise they muddy the context for simple inside-the-box tasks.

I'm not sure what to say. It's like someone claiming that automobiles don't improve personal mobility. There are a lot of logical reasons to be against the mass adoption of automobiles, but "lack of effectiveness as a form of personal mobility" is not one of them.

Hearing things like this does give me a little hope though, as I think it means the total collapse of the software engineering industry is probably still a few years away, if so many companies are still so far behind the curve.

Sorry to be so blunt, but it's not surprising that you aren't able to get much value from these tools, considering you don't use them much.

Getting value from LLMs / agents is a skill like any other. If you don't practice it deliberately, you will likely be bad at it. It would be a mistake to confuse lack of personal skill for lack of tool capability. But I see people make this mistake all the time.

I love Claude Code and use it all day, every day for work. I would self identify as an unofficial Claude Code evangelist amongst my coworkers and friends.

But Claude Code is buggy as hell. Flicker is still present. Plugin/skill configuration is an absolute shitshow. The docs are (very) outdated/incomplete. The docs are also poorly organized, embarrassingly so. I know Claude Code's feature set quite well, and I still have a hard time navigating their docs to find a particular thing sometimes. Did you know Claude Code supports "rules" (similar to the original Cursor Rules)? Find where they are documented, and tell me that's intuitive and discoverable. I'm sorry, but with an unlimited token (and I assume, by now, personnel) budget, there is no excuse for the literal inventors of Claude Code to have documentation this bad.

I seriously wish they would spend some more cycles on quality rather than continuing to push so many new features. I love new features, but when I can't even install a plugin properly (without manual file system manipulation) because the configuration system is so bugged, inscrutable, and incompletely documented, I think it's obvious that a rebalancing is needed. But then again, why bother if you're winning anyway?

Side note: comparing it to Gemini CLI is simply cruel. No one should ever have to use or think about Gemini CLI.

I have a framed "Structural Dynamics of Flow" poster on my wall in my home office, visible on Teams calls. Only 1 person has ever recognized the reference.

If you're building a web app, give it a script that (re)starts the full stack, along with Playwright MCP or Chrome DevTools MCP or agent-browser CLI or something similar. Then add instructions to CLAUDE.md on how and when to use these tools. As in: "IMPORTANT: You must always validate your change end-to-end using Playwright MCP, with screenshot evidence, before reporting back to me that you are finished.".

You can take this further with hooks to more forcefully enforce this behavior, but it's usually not necessary ime.

There are plenty of things to be sad about when it comes to AI. But the loss of this kind of "subscription" app is not one of them, imo.

Good riddance to this hellscape of a market. We now face the dawning of a new slopocalypse era, and its whole new set of problems.

I continue to find it painfully ironic that the Claude Code team is unable to leverage their deep expertise and unlimited token budget to keep the docs even close to up-to-date automatically. Either that or they have decided accurate docs aren't important.

[0] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/interactive-mode#built-in-co...

[0] https://mdflow.dev/

Also, just because SOMEONE planted a flag in 2023 saying that an LLM could build an app certainly does NOT mean that "people were not claiming that LLMs "can't write a full feature"". People in this very thread are still claiming LLMs can't write features. Opinions vary.