I used Claude Code for the first time last week. I know, I am a little late to the party. Until now I have been using Claude with their API, and I wasn't using it enough to justify a monthly fee.
Last weekend I was adding some more features to my HabitTed app trying to get it production ready and ended up spending $8 after only a few hours of back and forth. So I figured it was about time I signed up for a subscription.
If you are doing any coding using AI, I think the $20/month plan is definitely worth it and quite reasonable. I wonder how long it will stay at that price as I am sure they are losing money with it.
I am still quite frugal with my AI usage, and I am certainly using it more as a tool or assistant than vibe coding whole applications. Even so, the experience has been pretty positive.
The first time you run Claude on a project you run /init and it will scan your repository and put together a CLAUDE.md file explaining what your application does and the necessary commands to build and run tests. I didn't need to adjust this at all it was spot on, even for building Swift apps on the command line.
I am still a novice at Claude Code and haven't got into writing custom commands yet or doing anything particularly fancy.
My general workflow is as follows:
- For every new feature start a new chat. This is so the context window doesn't get too large.
- Run in plan mode to start with and write a detailed prompt and
@include any relevant files if you know where the code needs to go. - Review the plan and make any suggestions.
- Then let Claude continue on Edit mode and make the changes.
- Review and manually test.
- Then have Claude write the relevant unit and integrations tests in the style of your existing tests.
This has worked pretty well for me and by giving Claude enough context up front of what it needs to do it doesn't tend to get stuck and burn through credits.
For particularly difficult features which I am not 100% sure how I would implement, I go down the TDD route. I first write out all the unit tests and integration tests that should pass and then have Claude figure out the code to make them pass.
The downsides #
I have experienced some downsides when using Claude Code which is relevant to all LLMs and not just Claude.
If you have an iPhone you may have upgraded to iOS 26 which now comes with a new glassy look and feel. The new version also comes with some new components and some different ways of doing things.
Naturally being a new release, Claude Code knows nothing about these new features and can't help with any of the code related to them. Even when I told Claude I was using iOS 26 and not iOS 18 it corrected me and told me I was wrong and proceeded to ignore all of my suggestions.
Luckily I am no stranger to going back to documentation and Googling things. If you find a solution you can also copy and paste the solution into the prompt, and it will use it as context when coding.
While trying to make my app production ready I did notice in quite a few places that my code wasn't following best practices. There were quite a few hard coded colours and a few custom components that could be replaced with native ones. To be fair to Claude Code, some of these were likely added when I created the first version of the app with Cursor.
The $20/month plan seems to be plenty for me, but I can see how people could need the Max plan which is $100-$200 a month if they go down the fully AI agent route.
If you have any tips for using Claude Code or you are using something else let me know.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article — 🔗 The software essays that shaped me — I have read a few of these and will be adding all the others to my read later list.
📝 Article — You did no fact checking, and I must scream — This is pretty poor especially in this day and age where you can't trust anything you see any more. Anytime I get sent a video of something unbelievable I am checking if it is AI. Although it is getting a lot harder to tell.
📝 Article — Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout — AWS went down the first week and Azure down the second. What was surprising was the length of the outages in both cases was over 4 hours. This is what happens when you lay off most of your experienced workforce.
📝 Article — Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server — I like to teach my kids the difference between expensive and overpriced. Something can be expensive but worth it whereas overpriced means you can get the same thing cheaper elsewhere. AWS, Azure, Heroku and the like are overpriced. You can get a lot more power for your money with a Hetzner box.
🛠️ Tool — MinIO stops distributing free Docker images — I have used MinIO in the past, but it is worth noting that there are no more Docker images being built so you will need to change your setup to stay up to date. They could have done this better.
📝 Article — Why I'm teaching kids to hack computers — I am part of the pre-internet computer generation and if something was broken I would have to use my brain and work out how to fix it. As a result I am stuck teaching both my kids and my parents anything technical. Despite my profession my kids have shown little interest in going beyond iPad levels of technicalness.
📝 Article — Scripts I wrote that I use all the time — I have a few useful scripts I have shared in my notes before, but I am definitely stealing some of these. Not sure why I haven't thought of mkcd before, genius!
📝 Article — Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division — and so the layoffs continue. Even working in AI isn't safe.
🤖 AI — Ovi: Twin backbone cross-modal fusion for audio-video generation — I have not had much luck trying to run AI videos models locally, but it is good to see an open source alternative to Google Veo.
📝 Article — Programming with Less Than Nothing — I think I might have to read this a few times before I can follow it. If you are going to go to this extreme you might as well just write everything in assembly.
📝 Article — What caused the large AWS outage? — It's always DNS.
🛠️ Tool — The Swift SDK for Android — For someone who has just started learning Swift and has an unreasonable dislike for Java this is quite cool.
🛠️ Tool — D2: Diagram Scripting Language — This looks like a good alternative to Mermaid diagrams.
📝 Article — It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts — In a world where everything is increasingly AI generated it is refreshing to read something written by an actual human, flaws 'n' all.
📝 Article — Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013) — They really should get rid of daylight savings time already.
🤖 AI — Generative AI Image Editing Showdown — I have used Flux Kontext with mixed results. I am going to have to give Qwen Image Edit a try as well.
📝 Article — AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS — It is crazy that bare metal actually turn out cheaper than AWS. There is definitely a threshold though which you need to cross before the investment is worth it.
🛠️ Tool — I made a heatmap diff viewer for code reviews — this looks interesting and could help with doing code reviews.
🛠️ Tool — Affinity Studio now free — I have been waiting to see what the announcement would be. This is great. I am going to be using Affinity for all my YouTube thumbnails from now on.
📝 Article — Phone numbers for use in TV shows, films and creative works — This is cool. Could be useful for dummy data for applications as well. Better than accidentally putting in someones actual phone number.
📝 Article — Ask HN: Who uses open LLMs and coding assistants locally? Share setup and laptop — It seems most people are using either gpt-oss-120b or gpt-oss-20b. I am going to have to try this with OpenCode and see how it compares to Claude Code.
📝 Article — SQLite concurrency and why you should care about it — If you are using SQLite in your projects this is worth a read.
📝 Article — How I use every Claude Code feature — There are some good tips in here I am going to have to try out.
📚 Book — How To Create A Sexy Hardcover Book | #311 — I have talked about Paul Millerd's book The Pathless Path before. I want to read it again, but I may end up quitting my job as a result. This book cover looks amazing! I showed my wife, and she has ordered me one for Christmas 😍. I am quite difficult to buy for, so I don't mind that I already know.
👾 Game? — A CSS-Only Terrain Generator — This is such fun to play around with.
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