Some unfiltered thoughts on Claude Code
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Everyone is right, Claude Code is fucking mindblowing.
dang it can build the code, run it, see an error, and modify the code all itself without returning to me
omg
- Why do AI companies hate the productization part? It’s so bizarre that on the first launch they give you an option of 6 different color schemes, but windows support is a coming-maybe feature
- The idea of using this on an untrusted codebase is … yikes. I see they warn you not to. But once you try it, the temptation will be strong. And when you have a project with open contribution (on GitHub, accepts PRs, etc), that’s like, a gaping hole.
- If you have a project you’ve wanted to start but don’t have time, set it up and start from zero.
- OK more on productization and security: I appreciate that it asks me before running bash commands, but it would be nice if they would whitelist commands like touch and mkdir. Also it keeps asking me to cat files in the repo which it already has access to, come on bro
- Really wish it kept a transcript of my interactions that was saved to the repo. Or saved the prompts to the commits. Or something.
uhhhhhhhhhhhh. this thing is amazing.
It wrote an ldap client for me
and created users and groups in my actual ldap server
this is unbelievable
It took me longer to set up a test LDAP server than it did to have it write code to connect and sync users and groups
…
2700 lines of code in less than 4 hours, with tests. It actually works on my real LDAP server.
- I wonder if this + voice recog LLMs means I can code on a laptop without using an ergo keyboard or having my hands hurt
- As my codebase gets bigger this thing is really lighting money on fire. Edits taking 5+ minutes regularly
- Honestly this thing really needs to be able to work in its own branch. While I’m sitting here waiting up to 10 minutes in the case of one edit, I would really like to be looking at the codebase and working on something else.
- All told today it wrote 3800 lines of Go in about 5 hours of working with it and $25 of tokens
Product idea 1: patch maintainer
I’m thinking how much more software this will put out into the world. And how much more work it’ll seem like to make an open source project that is all things to all users.
Example: my app manages LDAP users/groups. Config file with users and groups, and some dedicated OUs (think like folders where your users/groups are in the LDAP directory), and it makes the LDAP users/groups look exactly like the config file. Idea is you can keep your users/groups/memberships in git, so your LDAP server has no state. (We made something like this at a previous job as a way to keep people from having access they shouldn’t; we could use git history to tell auditors exactly who had access to what when.)
But right now it’s tied to my LDAP server. LDAP is very configurable, you can keep your users in the “people” OU, or the “users” OU, or the “accounts” OU, or anything you want. They might be of type inetOrgPerson, or organizationalPerson, or just account, or (as Active Directory does) sAMAccountName, etc. LDAP is a “directory”, and using it as a specific user/group database is not standardized.
So for my tool to be useful to the world at large, I would have to make it as configurable as LDAP is. A ton of setup gunk. One way that could go in the new world of Claude Code et al is, I’ll just write this one for me, and you write one for you, and it’s honestly fine because I did this for my fucking homelab on a weekend day between hanging with family and stuff.
But another option is, I could release this open source, and you could have a build pipeline that has Claude Code in there where you tell it “take this code and change it so that it works with my LDAP structure”.
Product idea 2: Infrastructure as Code platform with locally runnable test
Talking to even expensive APIs like OpenAI o1 about Kubernetes is a mess. Claude Code can write the code, test it, read the errors, and modify it in a loop. I saw it do this multiple times. What if an IaC platform enabled this without deploying first?
This would help humans a lot too!
It would also improve editor support - right now VS Code can F2 -> rename a symbol across multiple files, but Ansible and Kubernetes are just string matching, so if you misspell anything anywhere it just fails. I’m imagining something with a whole syntax and type system like a language.
Or maybe the right solution is just a library on some existing language. Use something with an extensible type system.
Maybe Pulumi could turn into this.
What it’s missing is a high level of integration so that testing locally works exactly like deploying to productionn
My project
- It’s called ldapenforcer
- I want an idempotent LDAP user/group/membership tool, so I can define them in config files and keep them in Git
- I’ve been putting it off because it would be a lot of work, probably a week or two of banging my head against the wall on nights and weekends
- Claude Code just… did it. From a note of ideas to working MVP in one day. I can’t believe it.