Claude is an awesome tool, whether you have coding experience or not. While it is not a magic bullet to all of your problems, it can give you leverage on any problem you might have. Claude is flexible with how you can interact with it, being either a peer programmer, a lead, a subordinate code monkey etc, depending on your own level of experience and how you utilize it.
The same things that benefit a human programmer in terms of productivity, Claude also benefits from. A well architected code base is always going to be easier to modify than some convoluted mess. When implementing new functionality, having well defined goals, constraints, and potential pain points goes a long way. My first tip for getting the most out of Claude is to start your prompts with a planning phase. Ask Claude to brainstorm with you a plan. Define the problem you are trying to solve and any potential issues you might see as well as you can. If you are unsure, you can prompt just on identifying them. Ask Claude to include options. Claude is great at designing multi phase plans that can get your feature implemented cleanly. If the feature is significant enough, it can also be a good idea to iterate on the plan, nailing down everything so that Claude does not have to do any guesswork when it comes time for implementing.
While you can make decent progress "vibe" coding, relying heavily on Claude for solving everything for you, you likely will need to eventually do another pass on your code with your brain more turned on. Both because the code quality will degrade over time, but also your understanding of the state of the code will also degrade. Misunderstanding and clunkier code will quickly reduce the results you can get out of relying on Claude to do all of the thinking. However its not a bad thing to need to iterate on your code and understanding, its part of the development process and just as you can't really skip it, neither can Claude. Claude is very solid at refactoring/iterating. It can identify all the work that needs to be done to accomplish the new iteration, and implement it all in nicely phased steps.
A really great use for Claude is feeding it youtube transcripts of technical videos from people who know what they are talking about and having it summarize it for you. Not only can you get a solid concise summary of hour+ long videos, you can use that summary as part of your prompt for Claude to implement. Similarly, if you want to implement a feature that an open source program already implements, you can ask Claude to study how that project accomplishes that feature, and how you could implement it into your project.
As far as usage, I have tried every tier.
20/mo - For hobbyist and beginner use, it's a good start. You will easily hit limits, both five hour session and weekly.
100/mo - Adequate for actual productive use. This is what I currently use. I easily hit my weekly limit, and occasionally hit a 5h session limit. I get good use out at if it though, perhaps 30~40 hours or so using the smartest model with extending thinking for everything.
200/mo - If you are in a workaholic grindset, this is great. I had a manic month of deving where I would struggle to sleep, 20 hour days coding. I never hit a limit. At peak I would have multiple chat sessions churning at once. I think if I get gooder and clean up some of my workflow I could hit my weekly usage limit if I really went for it, but practically speaking you're not worrying about usage limits here. If you are, I am impressed!
The mindset shift from, "how can I better utilize my usage to make the most out of it?", to, " I have so much usage, how can I make sure I actually use all of it?" was an awesome experience trying out the 200$ tier. If and when I hit another streak of mania, I will definitely use it again. For now, the 100$ tier works for me to get things done while also not being stressed about making sure I am not throwing away my usage by not hitting my limit each week.
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is this new, i'm on a paid plan. wtf, it's SUNDAY. they must have changed something?
You can check your usage limits in the settings. The weekly limit is based on when you first send a message, then after a week it restarts the next time you send a message.