Comment by SatvikBeri

Comment by SatvikBeri a day ago

22 replies

View on Hacker News

Sure, here are my own examples:

* I came up with a list of 9 performance improvement ideas for an expensive pipeline. Most of these were really boring and tedious to implement (basically a lot of special cases) and I wasn't sure which would work, so I had Claude try them all. It made prototypes that had bad code quality but tested the core ideas. One approach cut the time down by 50%, I rewrote it with better code and it's saved about $6,000/month for my company.

* My wife and I had a really complicated spreadsheet for tracking how much we owed our babysitter – it was just complex enough to not really fit into a spreadsheet easily. I vibecoded a command line tool that's made it a lot easier.

* When AWS RDS costs spiked one month, I set Claude Code to investigate and it found the reason was a misconfigured backup setting

* I'll use Claude to throw together a bunch of visualizations for some data to help me investigate

* I'll often give Claude the type signature for a function, and ask it to write the function. It generally gets this about 85% right

sauwan 21 hours ago

>My wife and I had a really complicated spreadsheet for tracking how much we owed our babysitter – it was just complex enough to not really fit into a spreadsheet easily. I vibecoded a command line tool that's made it a lot easier.

Ok, please help me understand. Or is this more of a nanny?

Reply View 1 reply
  • SatvikBeri 16 hours ago

    Not technically a nanny, but not dissimilar. In this case, they do several types of work (house cleaning, watching 1-3 kids, daytime and overnights, taking kids out.) They are very competent – by far the best we've found in 3 years – and charge different rates for the different types of work. We also need to track mileage etc. for reimbursement.

    They had a spreadsheet for tracking but I found it moderately annoying – it was taking 5-10 minutes a week, so normally I wouldn't have bothered to write a different tool, but with vibe coding it was fairly trivial.

    Reply View 0 replies
mrdependable a day ago

Why is your babysitting bill so complicated?

Reply View 13 replies
  • SatvikBeri a day ago

    There are several different types of work they can do, each one of which has a different hourly rate. The time of day affects the rate as well, and so can things like overtime.

    It's definitely a bit of an unusual situation. It's not extremely complicated, but it was enough to be annoying.

    Reply View 12 replies
    • whackernews 18 hours ago

      Jesus, are you ok? Can’t you just, like, give em a 20 when you get home?

      I find it quite funny you’ve invented this overly complex payment structure for your babysitter and then find it annoying. Now you’ve got a CLI tool for it.

      Reply View 11 replies
      • mcpeepants 17 hours ago

        why assume the billing model is being imposed by the customer rather than the service provider?

        Reply View 6 replies
      • SatvikBeri 16 hours ago

        I didn't choose the payment structure, and the point is that a CLI is not a high bar. Something that we used to spend ~10 minutes a week on with spreadsheets is now ~1 minute/week.

        Reply View 3 replies
mdavid626 11 hours ago

Are you serious?

“Most of these were really boring and tedious to implement (basically a lot of special cases) and I wasn't sure which would work, so I had Claude try them all.”

I doubt you verified the boring edge cases.

Reply View 1 reply
  • SatvikBeri 4 hours ago

    I mean, as I said, I literally had Claude prototype them, and then I rewrote the working one from scratch. I didn't commit any of the code written by Claude.

    Reply View 0 replies