# Claude 5175 Hacker News commenters recommended Claude and 5005 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.5 years (326 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for debugging from logs, implementing tricky algorithms and performance tuning, but it makes mistakes on large codebase changes and needs close supervision. ## Why people recommend it - Debugging from logs and bug reports (4 comments): "For bugfinding/incident response in distributed systems - which often involves extensive use of Datadog/Sentry MCPs and poring over heaps of logs in addition to reading tons of code - 4.8 has been significantly better than 4.6." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464423)) "I can throw a messy bug report of an intermittent issue at claude, and tell I need issue reproduced and fix developed, and there is a well above 50% chance it'll deliver." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49952082)) "All the time i do it. I will often provide claude with read only credentials to the db or api access to the logs and it will nail the problem almost every time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836435)) - Implements complex algorithms and systems (4 comments): "Claude has done an amazing job implementing some tricky algorithms from some difficult academic papers, saving me time overall, but it does require more babysitting than I would like." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745560)) "asked Claude to implement a terminal emulator for Windows that would render everything using DX12 and support modifyOtherKeys plus DA responses, and within a few days it was ready!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421399)) "I’ve seen Claude do iterative problem solving, spot bad architectural patterns in human written code, and solve very complex challenges across multiple services." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47348725)) - Strong at performance profiling (3 comments): "With a rather short prompt, claude/codex will take your code, write a harness, profile it, build experiments, profile those, and give some pretty solid advice which one to pick." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468735)) "I was able to take down the performance gap on Rust vs C (without Assembly) from 10x to 1.5x through detailed profiling and iterative improvements with Claude." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615674)) "I find it amazing that without access to profilers or anything Claude is able to respond to “anything I can do to improve the speed” with acceptable results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46234003)) - Improves with each model release (4 comments): "For bugfinding/incident response in distributed systems - which often involves extensive use of Datadog/Sentry MCPs and poring over heaps of logs in addition to reading tons of code - 4.8 has been significantly better than 4.6." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464423)) "I started using the ReVa/Ghidra MCP server together with Claude since day 1 (Well, since Claude Sonnet 4.0 was released) and I saw Claude get better at it with every update." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46884243)) "It's been incredible for velocity and the capabilities and accuracy of the models I've been (mostly from Anthropic) have improved immensely over the last few months." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295404)) ## What people warn about - Mistakes on large codebase changes (4 comments): "Claude absolutely CAN produce moderately complex applications when given detailed, well numbered documentation, but it will "make a mess" on existing codebases with large changes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341069)) "Claude is a more "human-like/human-smart" planner than Codex (in a positive way) but is more likely to make mistakes or forget details when implementing major codebase changes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278479)) "the models currently will speculate a (valid, but unlikely/out of our design space/deep edge case) problem, and then cheerfully triple the codebase size and cut speed by 10x" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50086630)) - Needs babysitting and code review (3 comments): "For prototypes they're amazing, but when you're just straight vibe coding you get stuck in a hell where you don't want to or can't efficiently really check what's going on under the hood" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45975578)) "Claude has done an amazing job implementing some tricky algorithms from some difficult academic papers, saving me time overall, but it does require more babysitting than I would like." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745560)) "AI can be helpful in development in very limited scenarios but the main thrust of the comment above yours is that it takes longer to read and understand code than to write it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47894243)) - Inconsistent or degrading quality (4 comments): "Just maintaining a basic interaction framework, consistent behaviours in chat when starting up, was a daily whack-a-mole where well-tested behaviours shift and alter without rhyme or reason." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46821914)) "Last year I had a friend chatting with me about how Claude had rather quickly transformed their small coding shop, except that they noticed after 3pm it consistently became incredibly dumb." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47483273)) "the older Claude models which I genuinely enjoyed writing short stories with have now been deleted, replaced with hypothetically cleverer models which produce text everyone hates" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49416756)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Google Gemini](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gemini.md): 2195 recommend - [ChatGPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chatgpt.md): 2186 recommend - [Grok](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grok.md): 727 recommend - [Microsoft Copilot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-copilot.md): 139 recommend - [Claude Desktop](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-desktop.md): 104 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://claude.ai/login) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Claude", https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).