Tell HN: Claude helped me maintain my old open source project

13 pointsposted 17 days ago
by nergal

Item id: 46711311

7 Comments

tokkyokky

17 days ago

That’s a great outcome for 2 hours. If you’re willing to share, what was your rough workflow/prompt sequence (project overview → reproduce → propose patch → add tests → iterate)?

nergal

16 days ago

First I basically described the project. Since it's quite small, it's easy to give a small summary. Then I started out describing my goals, that I wanted to fix some user issues. Then mostly gave the issue description, some extra information (my idea of what might be wrong). 4/5 times, it made the correct decision and I didn't have to promt any extra. I did have to review the code and polish some minor parts though.

I tried to focus on staying on the subject. For example when I wanted to embed the themes to create a theme switcher ad-hoc and that was done, it could easily generate some new themes for me without any issue at all.

After every edit, I did a `git diff`, modified if needed (using vim), then ran the program and tested it out.

My experience is that it's always easier to fix things fast/correct if you already know the codebase and can give hints to the agent.

tokkyokky

16 days ago

Thanks for sharing! The "stay on subject" and git diff workflow tips are useful.

diamond559

17 days ago

Does anybody care? No? Nobody cares what the paid shill has to say, ok moving on...

nergal

17 days ago

Probably not many cares, but as a developer for many years I've been following the LLM race with excitement. And instead of being afraid of loosing job etc, using these tools for grunt work that previously was both booring and perhaps not too satisfying, I would say it's amazing. It's not perfect, but if you know your domain and know your goal, then it's just something that makes it both fun and productive at a whole new level.

And for my old side-projects that didn't get enough love, it's a perfect match.

exabrial

17 days ago

There's a ton of Claude spam on HN ramping up at the end of 2025 and into the new year. There's a huge push by them to be seen as the LLM for techies. Won't be surprised to see a future marketing campaign about "chatgpt is for homework, claude is for science"