Coding in the rain

Meet Claude Code for web - it codes while you get soaked

The other day I was out in the hills. The wind howled and blew the rain into my face. On the face of it, it wasn’t a terribly nice day. But I was feeling happy - I’d just received an email from Anthropic offering me $1,000 in Claude Code credits - there was fun to be had playing with Claude.

But there were two catches. First, I had to use them within the next two weeks. And, second, they were only usable with Claude Code for the web. Challenge accepted - could I use them up?

Web coding

Web coding is a relatively recent development. Codex introduced it earlier this year - initially it was the only way to use Codex - but now others are catching up. The idea is simple - spin up a VM in the cloud, sync a git repo to it, run Claude against that repo and then provide a web interface to Claude. It looks a bit like this (you can see I need to get moving on spending my credit…)

The first thing to realise is you can run multiple sessions in parallel. Each merrily toodles along doing its thing - it’s much easier to see what’s going on in multiple sessions. This is nice.

The workflow Claude uses is to cut a branch and then make the changes in that branch. Then, if you’re happy with them, press the "Create PR" button to create a pull request and merge the changes back in.

New ways of working

This offers at least two new ways of working. First, it’s now trivial to build multiple versions of the same change. Making a UI tweak and not sure quite what you want? Get Claude to build two, or three, or four versions. Each goes in a separate branch.

Second, Couch Coding is easier than ever. Last weekend I was sitting on the sofa and I found my hands picking up my iPad, logging into Claude Code for web and checking on some background tasks. The gap between an idea popping into your head and being able to realise it is smaller than ever. You can generate code on the bus, in the hills, on the couch.

But…

But it has a couple of problems. First there’s the spectre of merge conflicts. My current workflow has multiple agents working against the same branch (or main) to avoid merge conflicts. Multiple separate branches? Oh, hello, merge conflicts…

Secondly it’s harder to test. If I want to interactively test the changes, then I need to checkout the branch, build it and then test. Not impossible. But more friction. And I can’t do it from the Claude Code web app. It quickly gets old when you’ve got multiple branches to test.

But this is less a failing of Claude Code and more a failing of our current code management tools. Git is built for, well, humans. Humans writing code at human speed. It isn’t surprising it struggles when faced with an onslaught of changes and branches.

Git is going to need to evolve - it’s not clear what the right workflow is when we’re building multiple versions of the same change in parallel (Codex has a different flow which avoids multiple branches, where Codex overlays different changes - which brings a different set of problems). At a minimum we need better merge tools (maybe get AI embedded to do the merge for us) and some sort of mechanism for supporting multiple versions of the same "feature" in the codebase (perhaps Git needs to support some form of overlays).

But is it any good?

Claude Code for web is pretty cool. The ability to kick off tasks from my phone is handy (although it’s yet more erosion of the boundary between work & home). But, more usefully, it’s nice to be able to see all the tasks I’m working on in a single place and view that from my PC, iPad, phone.

But it has some sharp corners. I see this "execution failed" error rather too often:

And it’ll get stuck - I’ve got sessions which seem to have frozen partway through. Take this session below. It got stuck overnight writing a guide. And then claimed it wasn’t stuck…

It’s been "running" for over a day since that - but still hasn’t completed. I suspect the backend is no longer there…

And so?

Web coding tools are an interesting new tool. Cheaply implementing multiple versions of the same feature is a useful new ability for some situations. Couch coding can be useful too.

Claude Code for web will mature; the bugs will get fixed. Even right now it’s useful - it’s a great place to kick off a set of things (code coverage improvements, test suite running & fixing) to run overnight. It’ll get terminal access in time so you can interact with the code it’s built.

But we also need to think about the development workflow more generally; git needs to adapt to this new world as well. But that adaptation will take time.

For now, web coding tools like Claude Code are a useful addition to the toolkit - not a replacement; great for exploratory work, for overnight tasks, for generating multiple variations. But not (yet) ready to be a primary development environment. Give it six months, though.

Still, it was able to use up $100 in credits bolstering my test coverage, freeing me to enjoy the peculiar delights of horizontal rain in Scotland.