Bootcamp Day 1

Oh the things you’ll learn and do when Claude is next to you!

skillful claude use

What’s the difference between vibe coding and Claude writing code for me? This was the main question I was considering today.

Granularity was the first answer I considered. This isn’t exactly right, as Claude can make large changes I understand and small changes that bamboozle me.

The instructors mentions ideas of using Claude to automate everything and to have a staff engineer attitude of understanding all of the changes Claude makes.

My instinct is that I should design the system to fit together cleanly and so that I can understand it, and Claude can implement the pieces.

a wizard’s sanctum

Today I learned about Claude’s memory (CLAUDE.md) and skills. These allow Claude to have extended behavior than out-of-the-box Claude, providing additional speed or custom functionality to a project. Several 1% speedups can compound speed rather quickly (and tbh many speedups are probably »>1%). This, along with high-quality prompting, seems to form the basis of a user’s “Claude Skill Level”. I didn’t spend that much time on this today; there seems to be massive amounts of juice to squeeze out and I want to investigate further.

In my head, this is like a wizard’s sanctum in D&D. A wizard gains additional power from being in their sanctum, and so improving their sanctum results in a positive feedback loop. So too with Claude.

wielding our tools elegantly

Before starting the bootcamp, I transferred my laptop from a Framework to a Mac. I thought I had properly configured the Mac to be a good dev environment, but found myself fiddling with package management, git authentication, and vim configuration. I sunk at least an hour into. These actions were both time-costly and broke flow of whatever task I was working on. This is a pretty egregious cost to speed.

Furthermore, it revealed gaps in my knowledge. I think it would be unfair to claim my skills were just a little rusty, as package management is still a bit nebulous to me. It usually takes a little googling to figure out.

These issues were mostly setup issues today, but could be a different class of problem tomorrow. The general solutions I’m considering are: 1. code in enough volume such that the common classes of stumbling blocks are quickly identified and learned, and 2. put in extra effort to master small skills such that big skills (that depend on several small skills) can be wielded elegantly.

top ongoing questions