I also specifically instruct Claude how to use a globally git ignored scratch folder “tmp” in each repo. Curious what your approach is

You store your project context in an ignored tmp folder? Share more plz - what does it look like? What do you store?

Not memory, I just instruct it to freely experiment with temporary scripts and artifacts in a specific folder.

This helps it organize temporary things it does like debugging scripts and lets it (or me) reference/build on them later, without filling the context window. Nothing fancy, just a bit of organization that collects in a repo (Git ignored)

How can you - or any human - review that much code?

From personal experience, most of my time in Claude Code is spent experimenting, iterating, and refining approaches. The amount of code it produces as it relates to time spent working on it tends to be pretty logarithmic in practice.

When I'm coding I have about 6 instances of VSCode on the go at once; each with their own worktree and the terminal is a dangerous cc in docker. most of the time they are sitting waiting for me. Generally a few are doing spec work/reporting for me to understand something - sometimes with issue context; these are used to plan or redirect my attention if I might've missed something. A few will be just hacking on issues with little to no oversight - I just want it to iterate tests+code+screenshots to come up with a way to do a thing / fix a thing, I'll likely not use the code it generates directly. Then one or two are actually doing work that I'll end up PR'ing or if I'm reviewing they'll be helping me do the review - either mechanically (hey claude, give me a script to launch n instances with a configuration that would show X ... ok, launch them ... ok, change to this ... grab X from the db ... etc.) or insight based (hey claude, check issue X against code Y - does the code reflect their comments; look up the docs for A and compare to the usage in B, give me references).

I've TL'd and PM'd as well as IC'd. Now my IC work feels a lot more like a cross between being a TL and being a senior with a handful of exuberant and reasonably competent juniors. Lots of reviewing, but still having to get into the weeds quickly and then get out of their way.

>I've TL'd and PM'd as well as IC'd. Now my IC work feels a lot more like a cross between being a TL

Interesting... I've been in management for a few years now and recently doing some AI coding work. I've found my skills as a manager/TL are far more adaptable to getting the best out of AI agents than my skills as a coder.

Same, I was a very average dev coming out of CS, and a PM before this. I find that my product training has been more useful, especially with prototypes, but I do leave nearly all of the hard system, infra, and backend work to my much much more competent engineering teammates.

TBH I'm not building "production grade" apps depended on by hundreds of thousands of users - our clients want to get to a live MVP as fast as possible and love the ability to iterate quickly.

That said, it's well know that Anthropic uses CC for production. You just slow things down a bit, spend more time on the spec/planning stage and manually approve each change. IMO the main hurdle to broader Claude Code adoption isn't a code quality one, it's mostly getting over the "that's not how I would have written it" mindset.

They don’t, they just push garbage, someone else quickly looks over it (or asks another llm to review for him), and merges.