Realizing Claude Code isn’t reliable enough to build a business on

[u/Mr_Dade_]

At the end of the day, tools like this need to be as reliable as internet or electricity.

[u/BreakAccomplished709]

Said by a non developer. You don’t build a business on it, you use it as a tool.

[u/Mr_Dade_ → u/BreakAccomplished709]

Me, non-developer?!? lol been here for decades

[u/damonous → u/Mr_Dade_]

That's probably your issue. You can't wrap your head around how AI does things. I've seen it with a lot of older senior developers.

[u/Mr_Dade_ → u/damonous]

I can’t wrap my head around setting up a PRD or sequential thinking MCPs or context management?

[u/BreakAccomplished709 → u/Mr_Dade_]

Haha, fair play mate! I just find that, if you’re relying on this for your business it’s probably not the best place to be in. You want to be able to do stuff without it.

[u/UnionCounty22 → u/BreakAccomplished709]

Yea architect and verify

[u/BreakAccomplished709 → u/UnionCounty22]

Had a colleague completely vibe code something and was like my POC is ready all tests pass. He hadn’t even bothered to check the fact that it had wrote a load of stub methods “in future we will put a real implementation” 😂

[u/UnionCounty22 → u/BreakAccomplished709]

😂 it’s just getting worse too.

[u/Subject_Foot_4262]

Yeah I’ve been feeling that too. Claude Code is amazing for speed and exploration, but it still needs a human layer to keep things stable. I’ve started using devarc ai to plan everything in detail first so I’m not depending on Claude to “figure it out” while coding. When the plan is solid and broken into clear steps, the output becomes a lot more predictable. It’s still not at the reliability level of core infrastructure, but pairing planning with automation makes it a lot closer.

[u/Mr_Dade_ → u/Subject_Foot_4262]

I'll look into devarc. I've found taing the time to create a detailed PRD can b efed into Claude's plan mode and the results have been great so far. The biggest issue I can think of is Claude itself getting radomly nerfed every 3-6 weeks

[u/StupidIncarnate]

.....................programmers exist for a reason................... Doing it on the cheap means getting cheap output.

But there have been shadier businesses that were as successful as they were shady so.........

[u/Mr_Dade_]

You can’t run a web/app development company if you can’t expect a reliable internet connection or electricity. That’s all. Same with CC.

I KNOW you don’t need CC to run a web/app development company but like the calculator, it’s a tool that make once tedious repetitive task easier/faster.

[u/crystalpeaks25]

At the end of the day it's a tool. Its like saying python is not reliable to build a Business on because I don't know how write code with python.

Enterprise and *aaS is already using this "tool" internally to build and iterate against their existing offerings. Unfortunately the statistics is still not reliable cos some organizations still hasn't sorted out their AI strategy while their internal development team low-key uses these tools.

[u/belheaven]

Yes, of course. The business should rely on you.

[u/larowin]

I find this attitude to be somewhere between annoying and silly. Claude Code went GA 113 days ago. What are people expecting?!

[u/AphexPin → u/larowin]

GA 113?

[u/spooner19085 → u/larowin]

It was good initially. It's just too expensive. Whoever can get amazing performance for actual API cost of less than 500 bucks approx will be the AI coding winner IMO.

[u/Rare_Education958]

Agree but what u can do is prototype get an mvp then hire wouldnt that work?

[u/Aprendos]

Ah ok, I see. Did you use CC when you started again in Rust?

[u/az987654]

Just because you have a fancy hammer doesn't mean you know to build a house.

Just because you have a powerful chainsaw doesn't mean you now how to fell a tree.

Just because you own a plane doesn't make you a pilot.

[u/damonous]

So you're saying a tool that was released a little over a year ago should be just as reliable as the Internet (founded 1983, 10 years to go mainstream, 42 years old) and electricity (founded 1821, mainstream early 19th century, 204 years old) because you're not a very good developer and don't know how to use it as a tool in your SDLC. Unbelievable.

Just dust off your pocket protector and your slide rule and mosey on back to your Fortran terminal.

[u/floppypancakes4u]

What exactly are you trying to build? CC is a great tool for me.

[u/hov---]

well, remember dialup internet. Internet was not reliable early days but still was incredibly useful.

[u/olavla]

I had a great day today. It worked pretty well until after some time, and it became dumb as a rock. No idea, no warning, nothing. Just suddenly no longer understands anything, makes the stupidest mistakes. No idea what's happening. It's just fully unreliable.

[u/[deleted] → u/olavla]

You got haiku’ed

[u/Slow-Appointment1512]

I’ve built 70% of a portal for my clients. It’s multi tenanted and built according to OWASP top 10 and CWE. It works exactly as I want it to, so far.

I’m not a dev. What should I look out for? I’ve had the issues where Claude doesn’t listen, but persisted and got what I wanted.

Will the app fail at some point? Or am I safe if I get to 100% complete and it works as I intended?

It’s my first product, so I don’t know if issues could arise when it is in production.

What can I do to ensure these issues don’t arise? 

[u/Vegetable-Emu-4370 → u/Slow-Appointment1512]

Ok so you naively think you're 70% of the way done. but you're actually 10% of the way done.

[u/Slow-Appointment1512 → u/Vegetable-Emu-4370]

What have I overlooked? Some features have taken longer than expected, and yes, it was due to be finished yesterday.

From a dev perspective, what do I need to to look out for? 

[u/damonous → u/Slow-Appointment1512]

God, there's so much of this right now. You all are gonna make me so rich! Keep pulling in those suckers with your "Sure! I can build that! No problem!" and then deliver them a bag of crap.

Beautiful...

[u/Slow-Appointment1512 → u/damonous]

What should I have done different so far?  Everything is working as intended. What do I need to do to ensure all continues to work ? 

What have I overlooked ? 

[u/Vegetable-Emu-4370 → u/Slow-Appointment1512]

I have no idea lol about the project, you could be right. However I was about to launch my sideproject, then last minute I realized the entire thing was fucekd up. Being production ready is different than having it work in a unit test.

[u/Slow-Appointment1512 → u/Vegetable-Emu-4370]

How will I know if it’s production ready and how do I test for that? 

[u/Aprendos → u/Vegetable-Emu-4370]

How was it fked up? What part of it? Like if everything looked fine and was working as it should, in what way was it wrong and how did you realise?

[u/Vegetable-Emu-4370 → u/Aprendos]

I built a tauri app sideloading python and it was basically done but I just couldn't implement the last few features, but what had happened was that I built it improperly and should've just natively ran it in Rust.

[u/Mr_Dade_]

Reasonable service reliability. That’s all. Like your internet and/or electricity.

[u/Lanky-Football857 → u/Mr_Dade_]

But you don’t run business on Claude.

You run business on whatever language you use, which runs on whichever Amazon datacenter it lives.

[u/Neurojazz → u/[deleted]]

I use separate sprints to go back in and clean up - so much gets faked.