Transforming AI Development with Claude Code (and other tools)

Claude code has boosted my productivity, both on personal projects (such as this) and on my job. It can be really good to have someone sitting by your side and helping you understand legacy code that you are just opening for the first time, however on most projects that is not the case, resources are tight, the developer who developed that app has left the company and no one can reach him, so on and so on.

That is where a tool like this can jump in to help. The first project I got contained a large amount of legacy code, comments in other languages (other than English yea that kind of comments) and I did not know where to start. At that time I was not using claude code nor was I using any other AI coding assistants and had to spend around a week or two just going through the code reading and understanding it. If I got myself into that situation again here is what I would do differently:

The AI approach to a new project

Setup a coding assistant, initiate the coding assistant by telling it to read the readme.md file and go through the architecture of the code to gather knowledge. After that, tell it to create a comprehensive Developers.md file which future developer can reference when trying to work on the application. The AI itself will also reference this Developers.md file when starting a new session so that we do not spend our tokens on repeat tasks.

Now you have a starting point, and you can also query the AI anything related to the current codebase and it will be able to answer.

What else can AI do for you?

This approach is all good and fine until you start falling down the vibe coding rabbithole, which is hard to escape, trust me. You should never give AI full features to develop nor should you trust it like you would another developer working on the application. The current state of coding agents is not at the point where it doesn't make mistakes, it's more like an intern. You would not give some hard new feature implementation to your intern wouldn't you? Then why give similar tasks to coding assistants?

Coding assistants act best as helpers that work alongside you. Either use them as an extension of yourself, like asking it to tell you which files might possibly be affected by some changes you made and then going and checking for yourself. Or asking them how certain things are connected in the code.

The Future of AI-Assisted Development

As AI development becomes more complex, tools like Claude Code will become essential. The ability to have a coding partner that understands both the technical requirements and the business context is transformative.

The key is not replacing human creativity and problem-solving, but augmenting it with AI capabilities that handle the routine tasks and provide intelligent suggestions for the complex ones.

Remember one thing, DO NOT trust AI to come up with ideas, at the end of the day ideas are only human while LLMs and thinking models are algorithms that generate and predict the next word in a given sentence.