Tell HN: Claude helped me maintain my old open source project

Posted by nergal 3 days ago

I'm probably a bit late to the party. But I just want to tell my short story, because I'm amazed. I have several open source project and especially one that I use every day. It's not a project with huge user-base, but there are some. Some of the user has posted issues, which I have wanted to take care of, but time, is always an issue. Debugging, trying to get into issues other users expirence while I don't, is always harder to get grip of.

So, today I fired up Claude Code, told it about my project and during 2h (including manual review of the generated code), I've fixed several issues. I even managed to get in new features I have wanted as well!

https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss is now v0.5 thanks to this.

Comments

Comment by tokkyokky 3 days ago

That’s a great outcome for 2 hours. If you’re willing to share, what was your rough workflow/prompt sequence (project overview → reproduce → propose patch → add tests → iterate)?

Comment by nergal 2 days ago

First I basically described the project. Since it's quite small, it's easy to give a small summary. Then I started out describing my goals, that I wanted to fix some user issues. Then mostly gave the issue description, some extra information (my idea of what might be wrong). 4/5 times, it made the correct decision and I didn't have to promt any extra. I did have to review the code and polish some minor parts though.

I tried to focus on staying on the subject. For example when I wanted to embed the themes to create a theme switcher ad-hoc and that was done, it could easily generate some new themes for me without any issue at all.

After every edit, I did a `git diff`, modified if needed (using vim), then ran the program and tested it out.

My experience is that it's always easier to fix things fast/correct if you already know the codebase and can give hints to the agent.

Comment by tokkyokky 2 days ago

Thanks for sharing! The "stay on subject" and git diff workflow tips are useful.

Comment by diamond559 3 days ago

Does anybody care? No? Nobody cares what the paid shill has to say, ok moving on...

Comment by nergal 2 days ago

Probably not many cares, but as a developer for many years I've been following the LLM race with excitement. And instead of being afraid of loosing job etc, using these tools for grunt work that previously was both booring and perhaps not too satisfying, I would say it's amazing. It's not perfect, but if you know your domain and know your goal, then it's just something that makes it both fun and productive at a whole new level.

And for my old side-projects that didn't get enough love, it's a perfect match.

Comment by jryle70 2 days ago

Paid shill? OP's name is in public. He was transparent of what he did.

https://github.com/Lallassu

Who are you?

Comment by exabrial 2 days ago

There's a ton of Claude spam on HN ramping up at the end of 2025 and into the new year. There's a huge push by them to be seen as the LLM for techies. Won't be surprised to see a future marketing campaign about "chatgpt is for homework, claude is for science"