zlacker

I don't know if I'm understanding you correctly, but my experience reflects what (I think) you're saying. Given a fully formed older project and a clean set of feature requests, Claude can be a beast. On the other hand, steering it through a greenfield project feels more labor intensive than writing the code myself.

I'm a full stack dev, and solo, so I write data schema, backends and frontends at the same time, usually flipping between them to test parts of new features. As far as AI use, I'm really just at the level of using a single Claude agent in an IDE - and only occasionally, because it writes a lot of nonsense. So maybe I'm missing out on the benefits of multiple agents. But where I currently see value in it is in writing (1) boilerplate and (b) sugar - where it has full access to a large and stable codebase. Where I think it fails is in writing overarching logical structures, especially early on in a project. It isn't good at writing elegant code with a clear view of how data, back and front should work together. When I've tried to start projects from scratch with Claude, it feels like I'm fighting against its micro-view of each piece of code, where it's unable to gain a macro-view of how to orchestrate the whole system.

So like, maybe a bottomless wallet and a dozen agents would help with that, but there isn't so much room for errors or bugs in my work code as there is in my fun/play/casual game code. As a result I'm not really seeing that much value in it for paid work.

>>noduer+(OP)
I've found it to do quite well if you form a detailed design doc and you state all your implementation detail opinions up front. Architecture, major third party libraries, technologies, etc. But it can generate a lot of code very fast - it's hard to steer everything. There is certainly a tradeoff between speed and control. At one end, if you want to specify how every single line is written then yeah, it's going to be faster if you do it yourself. On the other hand, if you want to let it make more assumptions on implementation details, it can go extremely fast.

If your end goal is to produce some usable product, then the implementation details matter less. Does it work? Yes? OK then maybe dont wrestle with the agent over specific libraries or coding patterns.