I often have people ask how I’m using Claude code so much, given that I have a bot account storming the SciML Open Source Software repositories with tens to hundreds of PRs a day, with many of them successful. Then GSoC students come in with Claude/Codex and spit out things that are clearly just bot spam, and many people ask, what is different? The difference is actually knowing the codebase and the domains. It turns out that if you know how to actually program, you can use the LLM-based interfaces as just an accelerator for some of the tedious work that you have to do. I tend to think about it the same as working with a grad student: you need to give sufficient information for it to work, and if you don’t get good stuff back it’s … READ MORE