One area where it really shines for me is personal projects. You know, the type of projects you might get to spend a couple hours on once the kids are in bed... Spending that couple hours guiding Claude do do what I want is way quicker than doing it all myself. Especially since I do have the skills to do it all myself, just not the time. It's been particularly effective around UI stuff since I've selected a popular UI library (MUI) but I don't use it in my day job; I had to keep looking up documentation but Claude just bangs it out very easily.

One thing where it hasn't shone is configuring my production deployment. I had set this project up with a docker-compose, but my selected CI/CD (Gitlab) and my selected hosting provider (DigitalOcean) seemed to steer me more towards Kubernetes, which I don't know anything about. Gitlab's documentation wanted me to setup Flux (?) and at some point referred to a Helm chart (?)... All words I've heard but their documentation is useless to newcomers ("manage containers in production!": yes, that's obviously what I'm trying to do... "Getting started: run this obscure command with 5 arguments": wth is this path I need to provide? what's this parameter? etc.) I honestly can't believe how complex the recommended setup is, to ultimately run 2 containers that I already have defined in ~20 lines of docker-compose...

Claude got me through it. Took it about 5-6 hours of trying stuff, build failing, trying again. And even then, it still doesn't deploy when I push. It builds, pushes the new container images, and spins up a new pod... which it then immediately kills because my older one is still running and I only want one pod running... Oh well, I'll just keep killing the old pod until I have some more energy to throw at it to try and fix it.

TL;DR: it's much better at some things than others.

Totally. Being able to start shipping from the first commit using something like Picocss and just add features helps gets things out of the design stage, but shipping features individually.

Some folks seem to like Docker Swarm before kubernetes as well and I've found it's not bad for personal projects for sure.

AI will always return the average of it's corpus given the chance (or not clear direction in the prompt). I usually let my opinions rip and say to avoid building myself a stack temple to my greatness. It often comes back with a nice lean stack.

I usually avoid or minimize Javascript libraries for their brittleness, and the complexity can eat up more of the AI's context and awareness to map the abstractions vs something it knows incredibly well.

Python is great, but web stuff is still emerging, FastAPI is handy though, and putting something like Pico/HTMX/alpine.js on the front seems reasonable.

Laravel is also really hard to overlook sometimes when working with LLMs on quick things, there's so much working code out there that it can really get a ton done for an entire production environment with all of the built in tools.

Happy to learn about what other folks are using and liking.