Looking at the prompts op has shared, I'd recommend more aggressively managing/trimming the context. In general you don't give the agent a new task without /clearing the context before. This will enable the agent to be more focused on the new task, and decrease its bias (if eg. reviewing changes it has made previously).
The overall approach I now have for medium sized task is roughly:
- Ask the agent to research a particular area of the codebase that is relevant to the task at hand, listing all relevant/important files, functions, and putting all of this in a "research.md" markdown file.
- Clear the context window
- Ask the agent to put together a project plan, informed by the previously generated markdown file. Store that project plan in a new "project.md" markdown file. Depending on complexity I'll generally do multiple revs of this.
- Clear the context window
- Ask the agent to create a step by step implementation plan, leveraging the previously generated research & project files, put that in a plan.md file.
- Clear the context window
- While there are unfinished steps in plan.md:
-- While the current step needs more work
--- Ask the agent to work on the current step
--- Clear the context window
--- Ask the agent to review the changes
--- Clear the context window
-- Ask the agent to update the plan with their changes and make a commit
-- Clear the context window
I also recommend to have specialized sub agents for each of those phases (research, architecture, planning, implementation, review). Less so in terms of telling the agent what to do, but as a way to add guardrails and structure to the way they synthesize/serialize back to markdown.
I have been reluctant to use AI as a coding assistant though I have installed claude code and bought a bunch of credits. When I see comments like this I genuinely asking what's the point. Are you sure that going through all of these manipulation instead of directly editing the source code makes you more productive? In which way?
and it will completely ignoring the instructions because user input cannot afect it, but it will waste even more context space to fool you that it did.
"Proceed with caution" seems to be the overwhelming consensus, at least with models having this level of capability. I commend the author for having the humility to recognize the limit of their capability, something we developers too often lack.
> Since our landing page is isolated from core product code, the risk was minimal. That said, I was constantly sanity-checking what Claude was changing. If I ever “vibed” too hard and lost focus, Claude would sometimes change the wrong files.
> Still, I wouldn’t trust Claude, or any AI agent, to touch production code without close human oversight.
My experience has been similar, and it's why I prefer to keep LLMs separate from my code base. It may take longer than providing direct access, but I find it leads to less hidden/obscure bugs that can take hours (and result in a lot of frustration) to fix.
Tell Claude to fix the scroll-blocker on the codeyam.com landing page.
This seems to be a bad practice LLMs have internalized; there should be some indication that there’s more content below the fold. Either a little bit of the next section peeking up, or a little down arrow control.
I vibe coded a marketing website and hit the same issue.
Claude Code has been an awesome experience for me too... without ever subscribing to an Anthropic account!
I've never liked the free-tier Claude (Sonnet/Opus) chat sessions I've attempted with code snippets. Claude non-coding chat sessions were good, but I didn't detect anything magical about the model and the code it churned out for me to decide for a Claude Max Plan. Neither Cursor (I'm also a customer), with its partial use of Claude seemed that great. Maybe the magic is mostly in CC the agent...
So, I've been using a modified CC [1] with a modified claude-code-router [2] (on my own server), which exposes an Anthropic endpoint, and a Cerebras Coder account with qwen-3-coder-480b. No doubt Claude models+CC are well greased-out, but I think the folks in the Qwen team trained (distilled?) a coding model that is Sonnet-inspired so maybe that's the reason. I don't know. But the sheer 5x-10x inference speed of Cerebras makes up for any loss in quality from Sonnet or the FP8 quantization of qwen on the Cerebras side. If starting from zero every few agentic steps is the strategy to use, that with Cerebras is just incredible because it's ~ instantaneous.
I've tried my Cerebras Coder account with way too many coding agents, and for now CC, Cline (VS Code) and Qwen Code (a Gemini Code fork) are the ones that work best. CC beats the pack as it compresses the context just right and recovers well from Cerebras 429 errors (tpm limit), due to the speed (hitting ~1500 tps typically) clashing with Cerebras unreasonably tight request limits. When a 429 comes trough, CC just holds its breath a few seconds then goes at it again. Great experience overall!
[1] I've decompiled CC and modified some constants for Cerebras to fix some hickups
[2] had to remove some invalid request json keys sent by CC using CCR, and added others that were missing
Nice looking page! One note, all the images seem to be right-justified (on my Android Chrome). That could be a good thing vs centered, but just thought I'd note it.
The product/website itself is interesting as a founder who believes heavily in implementing simulations to rigourously test complex systems. However I noticed lots of screenshots and less substance about how it actually works. If your ICP is technical, the frontend and marketing shouldn't be overdone IMO.
I need substance and clear explanations of models, methodology, concepts with some visual support. Screenshots of the product are great but a quick real or two showing different examples or scenarios may be better.
I'm also skeptical many people who are already technical and already using AI tools will now want to use YOUR tool to conduct simulation based testing instead of creating their own. The deeper and more complex the simulation, the less likely your tool can adapt to specific business models and their core logic.
This is party of the irony of AI and YC startups, LOTS of people creating this interesting pieces of software with AI when part of the huge moat that AI provides is being able to more quickly create your own software. As it evolves, the SaaS model may face serious trouble except in the most valuable (e.g. complex and/or highly scalable) solutions already available with good value.
However simulations ARE important and they can take a ton of time to develop or get right, so I would agree this could be an interesting market if people give it a chance and it's well designed to support different stacks and business logic scenarios.
OP here - I appreciate the feedback and you taking the time to look at the product/website beyond my personal blog post and learnings!
> If your ICP is technical, the frontend and marketing shouldn't be overdone IMO.
Great point. The ICP is technical, so this is certainly valid.
> I need substance and clear explanations of models, methodology, concepts with some visual support. Screenshots of the product are great but a quick real or two showing different examples or scenarios may be better.
We're working hard to get to something folks can try out more easily (hopefully one day Show HN-worthy) and better documentation to go with it. We don't have it yet unfortunately, which is why the site is what it is (for now).
>I'm also skeptical many people who are already technical and already using AI tools will now want to use YOUR tool to conduct simulation based testing instead of creating their own.
Ironically, we'd first assumed simulations would be easy to generate with AI (that's part of why we attempted to do this!) but 18+ months of R&D later and it's turned out to be something very challenging to do, never mind to replicate.
I do think AI will continue to make building SaaS easier but I think there are certain complex products, simulations included (although we'll see), that are just too difficult to build yourself in most cases.
To some extent, as I think about this, I suppose build vs. buy has somewhat always been true for SaaS and it's a matter of cost versus effort (and what else you could do with that effort). E.g. do you architect your own database solution or just use Supabase?
> However simulations ARE important and they can take a ton of time to develop or get right, so I would agree this could be an interesting market if people give it a chance and it's well designed to support different stacks and business logic scenarios.
I appreciate this, and it's certainly been our experience! We're still working to get it right, but it's something I'm quite excited about.
For anyone else on the fence about moving to CLI: I'm really glad I did.
I am converting a WordPress site to a much leaner custom one, including the functionality of all plugins and migrating all the data. I've put in about 20 hours or so and I'd be shocked if I have another 20 hours to go. What I have so far looks and operates better than the original (according to the owner). It's much faster and has more features.
The original site took more than 10 people to build, and many months to get up and running. I will have it up single-handedly inside of 1 month, and it will have much faster load times and many more features. The site makes enough money to fully support 2 families in the USA very well.
My Stack: Old school LAMP. PHPstorm locally. No frameworks. Vanilla JS.
Original process: webchat based since sonnet 3.5 came out, but I used Gemini a lot after 2.5 pro came out, but primarily sonnet.
- Use Claude projects for "features". Give it only the files strictly required to do the specific thing I'm working on.
- Have it read the files closely, "think hard" and make a plan
- Then write the code
- MINOR iteration if needed. Sometimes bounce it off of Gemini first.
- the trick was to "know when to stop" using the LLM and just get to coding.
- copy code into PHPStorm and edit/commit as needed
- repeat for every feature. (refresh the claude project each time).
Evolution: Finally take the CLI plunge: Claude Code
- Spin up a KVM: I'm not taking any chances.
- Run PHPStorm + CC in the KVM as a "contract developer"
- the "KVM developer" cannot push to main
- set up claude.md carefully
- carefully prompt it with structure, bounds, and instructions
- run into lots of quirks with lots of little "fixes"
-- too verbose
-- does not respect "my coding style"
-- poor adherence to claude.md instructions when over half way through context, etc
- Start looking into subagents. It feels like it's not really working?
- Instead: I break my site into logical "features"
-- Terminal Tab 1: "You may only work in X folder"
-- Terminal Tab 2: "You may only work in Y folder".
-- THIS WORKS WELL. I am finally in a "HOLY MOLLY, I am now unquestionably more productive territory!"
Codex model comes out
- I open another tab and try it
- I use it until I hit the "You've reached your limit. Wait 3 hour" message.
- I go back to Claude (Man is this SLOW! and Verbose!). Minor irritation.
- Go back to Codex until I hit my weekly limit
- Go back to Claude again. "Oh wow, Codex works SO MUCH BETTER for me".
- I actually haven't fussed with the AGENTS.md, nor do I give it a bunch of extra hand-holding. It just works really well by itself.
- Buy the OpenAI PRO plan and haven't looked back.
I haven't "coded" much since switching to Codex and couldn't be happier. I just say "Do this" and it does it. Then I say "Change this" and it does it. On the rare occasions it takes a wrong turn, I simply add a coding comment like "Create a new method that does X and use that instead" and we're right back on track.
We are 100% at a point where people can just "Tell the computer what you want in a web page, and it will work".
Neat. Although I get the feeling you're more technical than you give yourself credit for. I gotta try the Figma MCP server and see if it can generate HTML and styles, as that's the most boilerplaty part of front end.
The way I work with Claude Code is to stage partial changes that I am happy with gradually so its easy to discard unstaged changes. It's a hack to mimic the keep all undo flow in Cursor Agent. Hopefully they can just have an easier way of reverting in future.
Talking about coding websites: I'm a seasoned dev who loves to be in control of the website code, but hates debugging nitty gritty layouting issues, which steal tons of time and attention. I want to progress fast building great landing websites for my tech products, with the same speed that I code the products themselves. What stacks and LLM tools (if any) do you recommend that help writing great looking websites with great SEO support... fast?
I'm far from an expert, but I think depending on whether you have website designs or not already, you could use the Figma Dev Mode MCP Server + Claude Code as I did.
I've heard increasingly good things about Cursor and Codex, but haven't tried them as recently. Cline (as a VS Code extension) might also be helpful here.
If you need designs, something like v0 could work well. There are a ton of alternatives (Base44, Figma Make, etc.) but I've found v0 works the best personally, although it probably takes a bit of trial and error.
For SEO support specifically, I might just try asking some of the existing AI tooling to try to help you optimize there although I'm not sure how well the results would be. I briefly experimented with this and early results seemed promising, but did not push on it a lot.
> I wasted several hours on occasions where Claude would make changes to completely unrelated parts of the application instead of addressing my actual request.
Every time I read about people using AI I come away with one question. What if they spent hours with a pen and paper and brainstormed about their idea, and then turned it into an actual plan, and then did the plan? At the very least you wouldn't waste hours of your life and instead enjoy using your own powers of thought.
> What if they spent hours with a pen and paper and brainstormed about their idea, and then turned it into an actual plan, and then did the plan? At the very least you wouldn't waste hours of your life and instead enjoy using your own powers of thought.
OP here - I am a bit confused by this response. What are you trying to say or suggest here?
It's not like I didn't have a plan when making changes; I did, and when things went wrong, I tried to debug.
That said, if what you mean by having a plan (which again, I might not be understanding!) is write myself a product spec and then go build the site by learning to code or using a no/low code tool, I think that would have been arguably far less efficient and achieved a less ideal outcome.
In this case, I had Figma designs (from our product designer) that I wanted to implement, but I don't have the programming experience or knowledge of Remix as a framework to have been able to "just do it" on my own in a reasonable amount of time without pairing with Claude.
So while I had some frustrating hours of debugging, I still think overall I achieved an outcome (being able to build a site based on a detailed Figma design by pairing with Claude) that I would never have been able to achieve otherwise to that quality bar in that little amount of time.
I'm sorry but this article is marketing. From the 3rd paragraph from the end:
> Since our landing page is isolated from core product code, the risk was minimal.
The real question to ask is why your landing page so complex, it is a very standard landing page with sign-ups, pretty graphics, and links to the main bits of the website and not anything connected to a demo instance of your product or anything truly interactable.
Also, you claim this avoided you having to hire another engineer but you then reference human feedback catching the LLM garbage being generated in the repo. Sounds like the appropriate credit is shared between yourself, the LLM, and especially the developer who shepherded this behind the scenes.
As someone who walked into 20k+ loc React/Next project, 95%+ vibecoded, I can say it's a relative nightmare to untangle the snarl of AI generated solutions. Particularly it is bad at separation of concerns and commingling the data. I found several places where there were in-line awaits for database objects, then db manipulations being done inline too, and I found them in the ux layer, the api layer, and even nested inside of other db repo files!
Someone once quipped that AI is like a college kid who studied a few programming courses, has access to all of stack overflow, lives in a world where hours go by in the blink of an eye, and has an IQ of 80 and is utterly incapable of learning.
There were definitely some silly Claude responses. CTO mode responses I shared with our (very human, very amazing) actual CTO who I think found it funny too.
Design wise the website seems interesting and good. However, the "how it works" box instantly screamed AI to me because of the emoji list (which, at least to me, instinctively evokes a negative reaction).
However, I do applaud you being transparent about the AI use by posting it here.
33 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] threadThe overall approach I now have for medium sized task is roughly:
- Ask the agent to research a particular area of the codebase that is relevant to the task at hand, listing all relevant/important files, functions, and putting all of this in a "research.md" markdown file.
- Clear the context window
- Ask the agent to put together a project plan, informed by the previously generated markdown file. Store that project plan in a new "project.md" markdown file. Depending on complexity I'll generally do multiple revs of this.
- Clear the context window
- Ask the agent to create a step by step implementation plan, leveraging the previously generated research & project files, put that in a plan.md file.
- Clear the context window
- While there are unfinished steps in plan.md:
-- While the current step needs more work
--- Ask the agent to work on the current step
--- Clear the context window
--- Ask the agent to review the changes
--- Clear the context window
-- Ask the agent to update the plan with their changes and make a commit
-- Clear the context window
I also recommend to have specialized sub agents for each of those phases (research, architecture, planning, implementation, review). Less so in terms of telling the agent what to do, but as a way to add guardrails and structure to the way they synthesize/serialize back to markdown.
Not trolling, true question.
> Still, I wouldn’t trust Claude, or any AI agent, to touch production code without close human oversight.
My experience has been similar, and it's why I prefer to keep LLMs separate from my code base. It may take longer than providing direct access, but I find it leads to less hidden/obscure bugs that can take hours (and result in a lot of frustration) to fix.
This seems to be a bad practice LLMs have internalized; there should be some indication that there’s more content below the fold. Either a little bit of the next section peeking up, or a little down arrow control.
I vibe coded a marketing website and hit the same issue.
I've never liked the free-tier Claude (Sonnet/Opus) chat sessions I've attempted with code snippets. Claude non-coding chat sessions were good, but I didn't detect anything magical about the model and the code it churned out for me to decide for a Claude Max Plan. Neither Cursor (I'm also a customer), with its partial use of Claude seemed that great. Maybe the magic is mostly in CC the agent...
So, I've been using a modified CC [1] with a modified claude-code-router [2] (on my own server), which exposes an Anthropic endpoint, and a Cerebras Coder account with qwen-3-coder-480b. No doubt Claude models+CC are well greased-out, but I think the folks in the Qwen team trained (distilled?) a coding model that is Sonnet-inspired so maybe that's the reason. I don't know. But the sheer 5x-10x inference speed of Cerebras makes up for any loss in quality from Sonnet or the FP8 quantization of qwen on the Cerebras side. If starting from zero every few agentic steps is the strategy to use, that with Cerebras is just incredible because it's ~ instantaneous.
I've tried my Cerebras Coder account with way too many coding agents, and for now CC, Cline (VS Code) and Qwen Code (a Gemini Code fork) are the ones that work best. CC beats the pack as it compresses the context just right and recovers well from Cerebras 429 errors (tpm limit), due to the speed (hitting ~1500 tps typically) clashing with Cerebras unreasonably tight request limits. When a 429 comes trough, CC just holds its breath a few seconds then goes at it again. Great experience overall!
[1] I've decompiled CC and modified some constants for Cerebras to fix some hickups
[2] had to remove some invalid request json keys sent by CC using CCR, and added others that were missing
I run Dropbox on my laptop almost entirely as insurance against my laptop breaking or getting stolen before I've committed and pushed my work to git.
I need substance and clear explanations of models, methodology, concepts with some visual support. Screenshots of the product are great but a quick real or two showing different examples or scenarios may be better.
I'm also skeptical many people who are already technical and already using AI tools will now want to use YOUR tool to conduct simulation based testing instead of creating their own. The deeper and more complex the simulation, the less likely your tool can adapt to specific business models and their core logic.
This is party of the irony of AI and YC startups, LOTS of people creating this interesting pieces of software with AI when part of the huge moat that AI provides is being able to more quickly create your own software. As it evolves, the SaaS model may face serious trouble except in the most valuable (e.g. complex and/or highly scalable) solutions already available with good value.
However simulations ARE important and they can take a ton of time to develop or get right, so I would agree this could be an interesting market if people give it a chance and it's well designed to support different stacks and business logic scenarios.
> If your ICP is technical, the frontend and marketing shouldn't be overdone IMO.
Great point. The ICP is technical, so this is certainly valid.
> I need substance and clear explanations of models, methodology, concepts with some visual support. Screenshots of the product are great but a quick real or two showing different examples or scenarios may be better.
We're working hard to get to something folks can try out more easily (hopefully one day Show HN-worthy) and better documentation to go with it. We don't have it yet unfortunately, which is why the site is what it is (for now).
>I'm also skeptical many people who are already technical and already using AI tools will now want to use YOUR tool to conduct simulation based testing instead of creating their own.
Ironically, we'd first assumed simulations would be easy to generate with AI (that's part of why we attempted to do this!) but 18+ months of R&D later and it's turned out to be something very challenging to do, never mind to replicate.
I do think AI will continue to make building SaaS easier but I think there are certain complex products, simulations included (although we'll see), that are just too difficult to build yourself in most cases.
To some extent, as I think about this, I suppose build vs. buy has somewhat always been true for SaaS and it's a matter of cost versus effort (and what else you could do with that effort). E.g. do you architect your own database solution or just use Supabase?
> However simulations ARE important and they can take a ton of time to develop or get right, so I would agree this could be an interesting market if people give it a chance and it's well designed to support different stacks and business logic scenarios.
I appreciate this, and it's certainly been our experience! We're still working to get it right, but it's something I'm quite excited about.
I am converting a WordPress site to a much leaner custom one, including the functionality of all plugins and migrating all the data. I've put in about 20 hours or so and I'd be shocked if I have another 20 hours to go. What I have so far looks and operates better than the original (according to the owner). It's much faster and has more features.
The original site took more than 10 people to build, and many months to get up and running. I will have it up single-handedly inside of 1 month, and it will have much faster load times and many more features. The site makes enough money to fully support 2 families in the USA very well.
My Stack: Old school LAMP. PHPstorm locally. No frameworks. Vanilla JS.
Original process: webchat based since sonnet 3.5 came out, but I used Gemini a lot after 2.5 pro came out, but primarily sonnet.
- Use Claude projects for "features". Give it only the files strictly required to do the specific thing I'm working on. - Have it read the files closely, "think hard" and make a plan - Then write the code - MINOR iteration if needed. Sometimes bounce it off of Gemini first. - the trick was to "know when to stop" using the LLM and just get to coding. - copy code into PHPStorm and edit/commit as needed - repeat for every feature. (refresh the claude project each time).
Evolution: Finally take the CLI plunge: Claude Code - Spin up a KVM: I'm not taking any chances. - Run PHPStorm + CC in the KVM as a "contract developer" - the "KVM developer" cannot push to main - set up claude.md carefully - carefully prompt it with structure, bounds, and instructions
- run into lots of quirks with lots of little "fixes" -- too verbose -- does not respect "my coding style" -- poor adherence to claude.md instructions when over half way through context, etc - Start looking into subagents. It feels like it's not really working? - Instead: I break my site into logical "features" -- Terminal Tab 1: "You may only work in X folder" -- Terminal Tab 2: "You may only work in Y folder". -- THIS WORKS WELL. I am finally in a "HOLY MOLLY, I am now unquestionably more productive territory!"
Codex model comes out - I open another tab and try it - I use it until I hit the "You've reached your limit. Wait 3 hour" message. - I go back to Claude (Man is this SLOW! and Verbose!). Minor irritation. - Go back to Codex until I hit my weekly limit - Go back to Claude again. "Oh wow, Codex works SO MUCH BETTER for me". - I actually haven't fussed with the AGENTS.md, nor do I give it a bunch of extra hand-holding. It just works really well by itself. - Buy the OpenAI PRO plan and haven't looked back.
I haven't "coded" much since switching to Codex and couldn't be happier. I just say "Do this" and it does it. Then I say "Change this" and it does it. On the rare occasions it takes a wrong turn, I simply add a coding comment like "Create a new method that does X and use that instead" and we're right back on track.
We are 100% at a point where people can just "Tell the computer what you want in a web page, and it will work".
And I am SOOOO Excited to see what's next.
I await the good software. Where is the good software?
I've heard increasingly good things about Cursor and Codex, but haven't tried them as recently. Cline (as a VS Code extension) might also be helpful here.
If you need designs, something like v0 could work well. There are a ton of alternatives (Base44, Figma Make, etc.) but I've found v0 works the best personally, although it probably takes a bit of trial and error.
For SEO support specifically, I might just try asking some of the existing AI tooling to try to help you optimize there although I'm not sure how well the results would be. I briefly experimented with this and early results seemed promising, but did not push on it a lot.
Every time I read about people using AI I come away with one question. What if they spent hours with a pen and paper and brainstormed about their idea, and then turned it into an actual plan, and then did the plan? At the very least you wouldn't waste hours of your life and instead enjoy using your own powers of thought.
I’d rather put hours in figuring out what works and what doesn’t to get more value out of my future use.
OP here - I am a bit confused by this response. What are you trying to say or suggest here?
It's not like I didn't have a plan when making changes; I did, and when things went wrong, I tried to debug.
That said, if what you mean by having a plan (which again, I might not be understanding!) is write myself a product spec and then go build the site by learning to code or using a no/low code tool, I think that would have been arguably far less efficient and achieved a less ideal outcome.
In this case, I had Figma designs (from our product designer) that I wanted to implement, but I don't have the programming experience or knowledge of Remix as a framework to have been able to "just do it" on my own in a reasonable amount of time without pairing with Claude.
So while I had some frustrating hours of debugging, I still think overall I achieved an outcome (being able to build a site based on a detailed Figma design by pairing with Claude) that I would never have been able to achieve otherwise to that quality bar in that little amount of time.
What languages do you use?
What kind of projects?
Do you maintain these projects or is this for greenfield development?
Could you fix any bugs without Claude?
Are these projects tested, who writes the tests. If it's Claude how do you know these tests actually test something sensible?
Is anybody using these projects and what do users think of using these projects?
> Since our landing page is isolated from core product code, the risk was minimal.
The real question to ask is why your landing page so complex, it is a very standard landing page with sign-ups, pretty graphics, and links to the main bits of the website and not anything connected to a demo instance of your product or anything truly interactable.
Also, you claim this avoided you having to hire another engineer but you then reference human feedback catching the LLM garbage being generated in the repo. Sounds like the appropriate credit is shared between yourself, the LLM, and especially the developer who shepherded this behind the scenes.
Someone once quipped that AI is like a college kid who studied a few programming courses, has access to all of stack overflow, lives in a world where hours go by in the blink of an eye, and has an IQ of 80 and is utterly incapable of learning.
also loved how in cto mode it went right away to "approve with minor comments" in the code review. this is too perfect in character.
> "Approved - Ship It!” and ‘Great work on this!”
This pat on the head from an algorithm gives me the creeps, and I'm really struggling to put my finger on why.
Maybe it's because it's emulated approval, yet generating real feelings of pleasure in the author?
However, I do applaud you being transparent about the AI use by posting it here.