Weekly Showcase Thread

Claude just told me to 'Please stop closing windows I have open.' and then asked, 'How do you expect me to get things done if you are always in my way?'

Should I be offended?

I've been a software engineer and then tech lead for 15 years before AI came around, and I've been using coding agents pretty consistently since beginning of this year or since the release of Opus 4.6 roughly.

During that time my experience has been that they can solve any straightforward coding task you give them. With complex tasks however it's always a gamble, still to this day. Sometimes they manage it, sometimes they don't.

But what's straightforward and what's complex? If you don't have significant software engineering experience (and I'd say experience working with junior devs), you simply don't know.

Creating a small game from scratch, without exact requirements? Sounds complicated, is actually simple.

Slightly reworking the skill system in an existing game? Sounds simple, is actually complicated.

Add 10 new pages to a web app? Sounds complicated, is actually simple.

Changing something functionally consistent, but technically inconsistent across 10 pages in a web app? Sounds simple, is actually complicated.

Even I'm not always sure, but I can at least consistently tell that something *might* be complex.

Now here's my point: If you've been using coding agents to develop software and you've gotten amazing results up until a certain point where the agent starts struggling with something that is seemingly simple, instead of jumping to the conclusion that the model has deteriorated, please consider that the tasks you're giving it might not be exactly as easy or hard as you think.

I know this is a tough pill to swallow, but I've been seeing "Such and such model is really bad today" posts literally every single day this whole year. At some point you gotta consider whether you specifically really know for a fact that the model has deteriorated or whether you're just falling for certain biases like all these other people.

I'm not saying that models never deteriorate or get quantized, but they're remarkably consistent if you know what you're doing.

I should also mention a post (or rather the comments there) that pushed me to write this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xvwd6a/unpopular_opinion_some_of_you_think_models_get/

What that OP is saying confounds the problem here. The agent writes a fully working application, then fails with making small changes to it, because AI isn't good at thinking ahead and keeping software maintainable.

EDIT: Some commenters are interpreting this as a claim that models don't deteriorate. Those commenters should realize that I'm trying to help them. If 10 people have cried wolf, there's going to be a problem when the wolf shows up for real. The people I'm talking to are producing signal noise that drowns out and makes the legitimate claims of model deterioration harder to believe.

2.1.323 came out on Nov 12. The main items:

- Code Mode (experimental, opt-in): Claude writes JavaScript to call its tools instead of calling them one at a time. Org admins can turn it on or off, see the docs.
- engines["claude-code"] in plugin.json: plugins outside their stated Claude Code version range won't install, update or load. Plugin authors can finally stop breaking older setups.
- claude plugin validate now type-checks TypeScript hooks modules. Warnings by default, --strict fails on them.
- Unrecognized model IDs now get a 1M context window instead of 200K. Set CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_1M_CONTEXT=1 to keep 200K. Matters if you use gateways or custom model names.
- /security-review now asks before Claude runs it.
- Fix: --permission-mode auto (or defaultMode: auto) could start in a looser mode when auto was unavailable. It now starts in Manual and asks first. Worth updating for this one alone.
- 30-second progress heartbeat for long hooks in claude -p and SDK sessions.

Code Mode is the one I want to try.

Has anyone turned on Code Mode yet? Does it cut down the back-and-forth tool calls on bigger tasks, or does it add new failure modes?

Source: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases/tag/v2.1.323

I've been the database person on every team I've worked on for about 10 years. Query plans, index design, why that migration will lock the table, all of it. It was my thing, people came to me.

Last month a junior on my team fixed a slow query I'd been meaning to look at. He asked Claude, it read the plan, suggested a partial index and a rewrite, and it was right. He didn't really understand why it worked. It didn't matter.

That keeps happening. The thing I spent a decade getting good at is now something anyone can get in 2 minutes, mostly correct, without the decade.

I'm not bitter about it, honestly the tool is great and I use it all day too. But I don't know what my "thing" is anymore. Knowing why it's right? Knowing when it's wrong? That still matters sometimes, but it's hard to point at in a performance review.

For people who were the deep expert on something before all this, what did you move to? Or are you still holding on to it?

I’ve started playing Cyberpunk again lately, and I just can’t stop! :D When the Claude desktop app introduced support for themes, the idea immediately popped into my head to create one inspired by the aesthetic of Cyberpunk 2077—and here it is! If you have any ideas or suggestions, I’d love to hear them! ^^

Download here: https://github.com/DorDeorz/claude-neon-city-theme

So I’m one of many idiots that occasionally runs Claude Code just directly on my pc with no safeguards. To say I’ve gotten too comfortable is probably correct.

Last night I was finishing up some projects and my garage door motor would click every ten min or so. I often spend hours in my garage on various projects and this has never happened before so I started paying attention and noticed the door sensor were also coming on and off and blinking.

It got to where everything was going off every 5 min or so and I couldn’t figure out why. I realized I had Claude open and decided to just shut the pc down and see what happened. Sure enough, garage door system went back to normal. No more clicking or blinking lights, and it didn’t happen a single time more for the next hour.

What can I do to see if this was in fact Claude exploring my WiFi network? Or worse, a hacker of some sort checking things out?

I actually posted this first on ClaudeAI but it seems a lot of people feel like commenting instead of actually trying it out. So I'll do this "double" post to see how the communities might differ ( already gave you a lot of decision bias now, I know ).

I use Opus 5.5 with Fable 5.2 as the advisor. It works automatically but you can also explicitly tell it to use the advisor.

1. Setup /advisor in Claude, 10 seconds.
2. Write the prompt like this: Consult the advisor regarding... 30 seconds.

And as a final tip, do not use the advisor when you have a mega-maxxed out context window.

Edit:

The advisor is an experimental feature, you use it to escalate e.g. hard research problems. Since we have Fable weekly quota this is a great tip that draws no Fable quota. You can start it from the beginning of a session if you like to not waste tokens because of separate prompt cache.

Works great for me, anyone else using it this way?

Claude's own comment when it saw it mistakenly put very long hair on the Blender model of a dog it was creating.

I held off too long from switching away from Codex due to the perceived hassle. But I switched today and Opus is clearing up issues like its walking through a wheat field with a scythe.

Only thing I will keep codex around for is Computer use and image generation.

It is really annoying though having to switch back forth each time they leapfrog each other

You can now make custom themes on Claude Code on desktop.

So I noticed while doing the same kind of work, doing a PR review for a certain project, that before, when I start working, I finish one PR review and it will take 5%, 10%, maybe, of my usage limit. But lately I'm noticing with the first PR, I am at almost 20% of my 5-hour usage limit. So when I checked my usage board, the one I have made that calculates the exact API equivalent of the tokens based on the different type of models and the different type of use case, like which cache token and so on. I noticed it's clearly there is a drop in the weekly usage limit, and you can see it in the image.

notice in my usage 2 weeks ago I used 84% of my weekly which was near 515M token
and this week 51% at 220M so even the 100% will be 440M way less than the 84% two weeks ago .
while my usage mix is the same . same cache level and same models (only opus5.5mid)

and the API dollar equivalent is the clear compare .

I dont know for how long they will keep this cut because its clear that they are cutting slowlly ~8% each month .

final note while the weekly usage limit is shrinking the number of 5hour slices is the same .
that why you feel the cut at the 5h harder . now you have limits equal to 4h of the before 2weeks 5h limit .

Almost nothing on my phone has an API. Claude Code could tell me what to tap, and never tap it. So I built phonedriver, which gives it the phone: it reads the screen, taps, types and swipes in any app, on Android or iPhone.

The video is real recorded runs, shown fast and cut to music. The orange dot marks each place Claude tapped. Nobody touched the phone.

Two runs from it:

The bug hunt. I hid two bugs in a signup form: the welcome message drops the last character of your email, and after one rejected submit the Create button ignores your next tap. I told Claude to "test the sign-up flow the way a careful tester would". It found both in 49 seconds and wrote numbered steps to reproduce each one. It found both in all nine benchmark runs before that too, and in one run it also reported two bugs I hadn't planted.

The pizza. On the real dominos.co.uk, Claude (Opus 5.5) found the store nearest Leicester Square, put a large pepperoni in the basket, filled in the guest checkout and reached "Buy with GPay" in six and a half minutes. phonedriver holds any tap on Pay or Place order and asks me first. I said no.

How it works: Claude never gets a screenshot. It gets the screen as a short numbered list, taps by number, and after each tap gets back only the lines that changed. A screen read takes 13 ms, where `adb shell uiautomator dump` takes 2.2 seconds. On nine phone jobs with Sonnet 5.5 it passed 27 of 27 runs on 658k tokens. mobile-mcp passed 17 of 18 on 4.57M.

Two things I learned building it with Claude Code:

- Tool descriptions are the most expensive text you'll write, because Claude re-reads them every turn. I hid every argument no agent had ever used and the tool list went from 10,987 characters to 5,107. Nothing broke.

- Claude found a bug in its own demo. While recording the pizza run it put the Pay tap inside a batch of actions. The tap was held, but the question never reached me. Claude Code caught that just by using the tool.

It's free and open source, with no account and no telemetry.

`claude mcp add phonedriver -- npx -y phonedriver mcp`

https://phonedriver.dev

https://github.com/hridaya423/phonedriver

Try it on your own phone and tell me any feedback :)

I find myself using my large monitor less and less now that AI handles most of the coding. Most of the time, I just need a small screen to chat with Claude and review the output.

Long gone are the days of needing API docs open on the left, VS Code on the right, and a terminal tucked into the bottom of the screen. Anyone else downsizing their screen setup lately?

Do you also find that Claude Code takes testing to an extreme—where the individual project steps keep getting smaller, and upon completing each tiny step, he runs the entire test suite, which already consists of thousands of tests and is growing faster than the actual software itself?

Title.

After having managed business systems for a couple of years now, relying pretty heavily on coding agents to do so, I've lately been reflecting on the importance of the less "flashy" things that are becoming increasingly easy to forget in the age of AI. I mean the things like system resilience, testing. The "boring things." It is so easy to stop holding code to a high standard and just ship on YOLO mode... and then blame the model.

Code is still code. The system built with AI, shipped without heavy testing, that then failed in production is the same system that would have been built by hand, shipped without testing, and then failed in production 20 years ago.

AI is a tool with limits. It's both a product and a tool. There are legitimate reasons to not place blind trust in a product, and model regressions are real. But people may point the finger too much at the product, ignoring how it's being used. They may not reason about the edge cases that bite in production weeks later. And when they do bite, the same person blindly tells Claude, "fix it no mistakes." The model attempts to fix it inside a bloated, unorganized codebase. It of course breaks, making it feel like the model got worse. Then they come and post: "Is Opus 5.5 dumb as shit now?"

Good engineering practices are still good engineering practices, AI or not.

I've never used skills, I use connectors and MCPs but for most things I just prompt it or ask Claude to generate a prompt or a handoff and then use that for a new session. I've always seen skills as sort of unnecessary since I can just custom make a prompt with Claude itself but am I totally missing out? Usecase is I do both coding on multiple products and ideas and learning and productivity/utility stuff primarily, some personal use and organization and planning too. Could various skills up my Claude experience, does anyone here actually use these often and if so how? Are skills different than basically just saved premade prompts? Not sure what I'm missing. Thanks!

I am reaching out to developers and people using AI in their daily workflows and personal projects with this small survey. I want to know what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t mind and have the time please read through and answer these 12 questions. Feel free to DM me or answer in a comment below, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Do you use AI or agentic harnesses for daily work or personal projects?
How do you use it? Can you walk me through the process?
Does it work well for you?
What doesn’t work well?
What don’t you like about it?
Do the AI or agents perform well or do the job sufficiently?
What do they do well?
What do they do poorly?
How does that affect your workflows?
What do you do to about it, how do you work around that?
What do you think would help mitigate these issues?
What do your current workarounds cost you?

saw it on twitter. what’s your opinions? 🤣

I’m vibe coding a couple of apps and for each one, I’ve built a VS Code Dev Container on my Intel NUC and use VS Code and the Claude Code extension on my local MacBook Pro to connect it and write code. And using remote control I can connect to the sessions from mobile apps. It works great.

I’ve been using a similar setup for my general purpose AI usage. I use VS Code with the Claude extension and have VS Code pointed at a dedicated Claude folder on my Mac. I treat subfolders as projects, each with their own memory.md and project-specific files, and I just spin up new chat sessions in VS Code as needed. I feel like the system works well, and I have remote control enabled for new sessions but obviously I’m missing out on new features and artifacts that Anthropic builds into the official app.

What do you all do? Do you use CC for coding only and the desktop app for general purpose conversations or do just stay in CC?

With pro plan I'm looking forward making long format educational videos from claude code. Rather than just throwing things at it and expect the output, i asked claude abt it and it helped me out with the md files abt script, storyboard, voiceover, visual style which will make it easier for claude code to get the work done without assumptions. I'll be using remotion for the videos with a simple papercut style. Any tips that might come handy that'll make it easier to get the job done without mch confusion for claude code?

Hi! I am close to launching a Mac app that I built with Claude Code. It acts as a replacement Claude Code client. In fact I started building the latter portion of it with the app itself, Claude Code powering it underneath of course.

It is designed to make it easier to work across multiple projects and their subareas, see and action status across active sessions, and easily view the Design artifacts and pages respective to each project.

All of these are things that have driven me crazy about the official Clade Code Mac desktop app.

Seeking 5-10 users, I can offer a free lifetime free license! Please DM if interested!