As I heard about Claude Code at the end of this week1, I wanted to try it out myself. It took a bit of time to get the CLI going as Claude Code only works on Linux, and my WSL Node.js setup was both old and misconfigured.
The task I put it up to was to help me show the hidden posts of this Hugo site, as I had no clues. Honestly, I was surprised to hit a speed bump already, having to buy some token credits first ($5) without any trial. But then it correctly suggested that I forgot about the draft: true front matter field I had copy-pasted in multiple locations.
Next, I asked Claude Code to apply the fix, which it did, but it confused me with this broken diff view of the changes I had to confirm:
I wonder if it might have been due to the post’s Markdown table. It’s a bug nonetheless, though understandable in this research preview of the CLI.
As final thoughts, Anthropic’s approach to building a CLI tool for code assistance might be unique compared to their competition (Google’s Gemini Code Assist, Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, etc.), which targets IDE integrations. I think one of their points was the CLI’s ability to be used in CI/CD pipelines and other workflows. That sounds rather unpredictable to rely on at the moment, but I guess we’ll eventually get there :)
In conclusion, while Claude Code shows promise, it still has some rough edges to smooth out. I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves and improves over time.