Claude Code - my coding companion for the past 31 days
It’s been… one month since I purchased a Claude Pro subscription so I could try Claude Code instead of freeloading off of Google Gemini’s CLI. I thought I would take a look at the things I learned while vibe coding a few projects, and other uses that I found for Claude Code besides coding. If you missed it, be sure to check out my initial post about vibe coding, and the followup about how Claude Code was definitely better than Gemini (for now)!
Context is King!
So there’s a lot of talk about how prompt engineering is dead, and “context engineering” is the new hotness. That makes a lot of sense to me, as I ran into this issue constantly while using Claude Code, and to a lesser degree, with Gemini CLI. To understand context, let me first give you some… context.
Claude Code - my new best friend! (I spent a lot of time on this image, btw)
Previously on my blog, I wrote about vibe coding and how I was experimenting with Google CLI, the free agentic AI thing that runs in your command line. I talked about how cool it was, but also how I was too cheap to try anything that cost money. After repeatedly hearing about how good Claude Code was, I decided to scrounge up the last few dollars I had in my vast money bin and spent $20 on Claude Pro. So was it worth it? Heck yeah it was! Claude Code is my new best friend!
As generative AI has gotten better in the past months/years, I’ve been trusting it more to do stuff that I’d normally only trust myself to do. Earlier this year I started yet another refactor of my web app, Anime Nano, since I wanted to get it off of the $10 a month DigitalOcean host I was using. I decided to try using Cloudflare since it’s “serverless” and seems to be able to handle a buttload of traffic (which Anime Nano will never see).
I usually reserve Anime Nano refactors (at this point they’re a pretty regular occurrence, as I’ve refactored it from Rails to Django, and using different databases and hosts, and deployment technologies like Chef and Docker) for technologies that I’m somewhat familiar with. Or technologies that I want to learn. At this point, though, I have a lot less patience for learning stuff that I’m unfamiliar with.
I decided to try and let AI do most of the heavy lifting, and successfully used Google Gemini (I think it might’ve been 2.0 Pro) in January to move the most basic functionality of Anime Nano to Cloudflare. I was hoping to stay on the free tier, but I think the CPU time limits were being killed by my cron jobs for fetching blog posts. So I ended up signing up for the $5 a month plan for workers, which isn’t really that bad. There’s still plenty of capacity left for any other online experiments I want to run, so that’s a bonus. I was thinking of hosting my personal blog on Cloudflare Workers at some point, but GitHub Pages is free and it works just fine. It is a bit annoying writing my blog posts in Markdown and using Jekyll though.
Anyway, this blog post is supposed to be about vibe coding! I did pretty much vibe code the MVP of Anime Nano in AI Studio, though it was kind of a pain because I had to copy and paste stuff and make sure that it worked. And if it didn’t I had to really yell at the AI until it did what I wanted it to do. Still, I found it was a success, and I relaunched the web app in Next.js, a technology that I still don’t really understand all that well!
We recently moved (I guess it’s been like half a year now) to a house that only had “round” (short) toilets, so I lost the use of my butt-cleaning Toto C200 Washlet. I’ve been super busy with home projects and I only just got to the point where I could rectify (pun intended) this situation.
I probably could’ve just attached a way too big bidet toilet seat to a way too small toilet, but whatever. I ended up buying a Toto Drake (meme incoming) toilet because everyone says it’s like the best toilet ever. I never really thought about comparison shopping toilets (or even shopping for a toilet) before, but I figured I might as well get the best one.
So what if I bought the toilet just to make this joke?More …
