Serious question about using Claude for coding. I maintain a couple of small opensource applications written in python that I created back in 2014/2015. I have used Claude Code to improve one of my projects with features I have wanted for a long time but never really had the time to do. The only way I felt comfortable using Claude Code was holding its hand through every step, doing test driven changes and manually reviewing the code afterwards. Even on small code bases it makes a lot of mistakes. There no way I would just tell it to go wild without even understanding what they are doing and I can't help but think that massive code bases that have moved to vibe coding are going to spend inordinate amounts of time testing and auditing code, or at worst just ship often and fix later.

I am just an amateur hobbyist, but I was dumbfounded how quickly I can create small applications. Humans are lazy though and I can't help but feel we are being inundated with sketchy apps doing all kinds of things the authors don't even understand. I am not anti AI or anything, I use it and want to be comfortable with it, but something just feels off. It's too easy to hand the keys over to Claude and not fully disclose to others whats going on. I feel like the lack of transparency leads to suspicion when anyone talks about this or that app they created, you have to automatically assume its AI and there is a good chance they have no clue what they created.

> Humans are lazy though and I can't help but feel we are being inundated with sketchy apps doing all kinds of things the authors don't even understand... there is a good chance they have no clue what they created.

I have bad news for you about the executives and salespeople who manage and sell fully-human-coded enterprise software (and about the actual quality of much of that software)...

I think people who aren't working in IT get very hung up on the bugs (which are very real), but don't understand that 99% of companies are not and never have met their patching and bugfix SLAs, are not operating according to their security policies, are not disclosing the vulns they do know, etc etc.

All the testing that does need to happen to AI code, also needs to happen to human code. The companies that yolo AI code out there, would be doing the same with human code. They don't suddenly stop (or start) applying proper code review and quality gating controls based on who coded something.

> The only way I felt comfortable using Claude Code was holding its hand through every step, doing test driven changes and manually reviewing the code afterwards.

This is also how we code 'real' software.

> I can't help but think that massive code bases that have moved to vibe coding are going to spend inordinate amounts of time testing and auditing code

This is the correct expectation, not a mistake. The code should be being reviewed and audited. It's not a failure if you're getting the same final quality through a different time allocation during the process, simply a different process.

The danger is Capitalism incentivizing not doing the proper reviews, but once again, this is not remotely unique to AI code; this is what 99% of companies are already doing.

Interestingly, I started coding with Claude a couple weeks ago (with my only other experience being vbcode 20 years ago) and it's been surprisingly good at starting code from scratch but as soon as the code gets a little complex it takes a lot of tokens to make a simple change which makes it somewhat impractical for all but the most basic applications. That said, I'm not referring to objects by inspecting the code and asking for changes to certain lines, I'm saying "In the results bar, change the title of the result to a clickable link that directs to X." which may require a little translation before Claude picks up on what I want. Even so, I was able to build a somewhat usable application within a week (minus a few bugs).

Everyone is using AI, so nothing to be ashamed about. Is better to be open about it and add a disclaimer about how it was used.

Even if it's vibe coded as long as you are open about it there's nothing wrong, it's open source and free if someone doesn't like it can just go write it themselves.