I have been using Claude for the last two days and I'm impressed! Thinking of buying the Pro subscription, but before that I need to confirm whether Claude is the best AI Code Assist available right now.

Since ChatGPT came out about a year ago the way I code, but also my productivity and code output has changed drastically. I write a lot more prompts than lines of code themselves and the amount of progress I’m able to make by the end of the end of the day is magnitudes higher. I truly believe that anyone not using these tools to code is a lot less efficient and will fall behind.

A little bit o context: I’m a full stack developer. Code mostly in React and flaks in the backend.

My AI tools stack:

Claude Opus (Claude Chat interface/ sometimes use it through the api when I hit the daily limit)

In my experience and for the type of coding I do, Claude Opus has always performed better than ChatGPT for me. The difference is significant (not drastic, but definitely significant if you’re coding a lot).

GitHub Copilot

For 98% of my code generation and debugging I’m using Claude, but I still find it worth it to have Copilot for the autocompletions when making small changes inside a file for example where a writing a Claude prompt just for that would be overkilled.

I don’t use any of the hyped up vsCode extensions or special ai code editors that generate code inside the code editor’s files. The reason is simple. The majority of times I prompt an LLM for a code snippet, I won’t get the exact output I want on the first try. It of takes more than one prompt to get what I’m looking for. For the follow up piece of code that I need to get, having the context of the previous conversation is key. So a complete chat interface with message history is so much more useful than being able to generate code inside of the file. I’ve tried many of these ai coding extensions for vsCode and the Cursor code editor and none of them have been very useful. I always go back to the separate chat interface ChatGPT/Claude have.

Prompt engineering

Vague instructions will product vague output from the llm. The simplest and most efficient way to get the piece of code you’re looking for is to provide a similar example (for example, a react component that’s already in the style/format you want).

There will be prompts that you’ll use repeatedly. For example, the one I use the most:

Respond with code only in CODE SNIPPET format, no explanations

Most of the times when generating code on the fly you don’t need all those lengthy explanations the llm provides before/after the code snippets. Without extra text explanation the response is generated faster and you save time.

Other ones I use:

Just provide the parts that need to be modified

Provide entire updated component

I’ve the prompts/mini instructions I use saved the most in a custom chrome extension so I can insert them with keyboard shortcuts ( / + a letter). I also added custom keyboard shortcuts to the Claude user interface for creating new chat, new chat in new window, etc etc.

Some of the changes might sound small but when you’re coding every they, they stack up and save you so much time. Would love to hear what everyone else has been implementing to take llm coding efficiency to another level.