It’s not just good for small code bases. In the last six months I’ve built a collaborative word processor with its own editor engine and canvas renderer using Claude, mostly Opus. It’s practically a mini Google Docs, but with better document history and an AI agent built in. I could never have built this in 6 months by myself without Claude Code.
I think if you stick with a project for a while, keep code organized well, and most importantly prioritize having an excellent test suite, you can go very far with these tools. I am still developing this at a high pace every single day using these tools. It’s night and day to me, and I say that as someone who solo founded and was acquired once before, 10 years ago.
Once the war ends and both sides can start clarifying their troop classifications. There's always going to be uncertainty because an MIA could be dead, or it could be some guy who successfully deserted and started a new life for himself somewhere. But as both sides return captured troops, exchange bodies, and so on - everything will be made much more clear. And there will also be less political motivation to lie.
I think this is impossible to answer for now. All you can do is look at known data and draw probable conclusions with an extremely high degree of uncertainty. So what do we know for certain about each side and the current state of the war?
Russia: Invaded with less than 200k soldiers. They later on mobilized approximately 300k soldiers. This mobilization was extremely unpopular and resulted in mass resistance within Russia, Russians emigrating and so on. Since then they swapped entirely to a 'voluntary' system of deployment, with some reported incidents of coercion. Benefits for soldiers are extremely high which is likely driving a significant rate of enlistment. Soldiers are demobilized after their contract ends, which is a very important issue for a war entering into its 4th year.
Ukraine: Had approximately 300k soldiers before the invasion. After the invasion they closed their borders, prevented men of 'fighting age' from leaving, and declared a general mobilization so that anybody between the ages of 27-60 could be forcibly conscripted and deployed to fight. They have carried out this mobilization very aggressively as well as constantly lowered the minimum age, and standard, of mobilization in a country that already had a severe demographic crisis before the war. Demobilization is somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent.
Current: Both sides seem to agree that Russia has a significant manpower advantage with an army of approximately 700k soldiers remaining in Ukraine.
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To even begin to create comparative casualty measures you need to create estimates for how many soldiers Russia was able to 'voluntarily' enlist and estimates for their contract length to account for demobilization. And then you need to contrast this against how many people Ukraine was able to conscript and mobilize. You can find numbers for these online, but nobody's even pretending to try to be remotely objective and there's highly organized propaganda abounds, so the numbers are completely meaningless.
And then on top of that you also need to somehow figure out how many are actual casualties and how many are desertions. For instance Ukraine has apparently filed more than 300,000 criminal cases over desertion. Of course they also have numerous major motivations to avoid KIA classifications. So basically yeah - you're not going to be able to realistically estimate casualties on either side, with anything even resembling a reasonable degree of confidence, until the war is over.
Probably not but it’s unlikely to be that massively different, Ukraine wasn’t that much less willing to engage in “meat grinder” style tactics earlier in the war. Even 1:1.5 rate would be pretty horrible given the demographic disparity.
For Ukraine, war deaths would likely be a footnote compared to emigration when a new census is eventually completed (I don't mean to sound cavalier, but am trying to put things into perspective). An estimated 20% of their population has left since the start of the full scale invasion - ~10 million people - by now they've settled into new lives abroad (my 8 year old daughter's class here in Canada has 3 kids from Ukraine alone).
Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues to deal with when the dust settles (and I am cheering for them!).
> Ukraine is going to have some painful demographic issues
The scariest thing is that even in the best-case scenario, this may no longer be possible. Even before the war, Ukraine's demographics were dire, then young people left, and no matter how the war ends, there's no objective reason for them to return.
It depends on what happens. If Europe/US just shrugs and moves onto the next thing after the war, which is probably the most likely outcome, then yeah. But there is a real chance that they try to go full Marshall Plan with the goal of weaponizing Ukraine. If so, then there's going to be a lot of money flowing about there with some big opportunities.
With what surplus resources? Europe seems to be suffering from some pretty catastrophic looking political blowback with groups like Reform, AfD and a host of similar-looking parties gaining popularity because people don't think their interests are being prioritised. The US has a Trumpism phenomenon that might be matched by a left-wing revolt (crazy policies waiting in the wings Mamdani prioritising New York over Israel. The gall of the man).
On paper the US is broke. I'm not sure about the Europe situation but I doubt they're doing well either the growth statistics I saw last were a joke. They're all struggling to even arm Ukraine for this war.
If I were a Ukrainian strategist I too would not count on some sort of vast infusion of resources appearing after the war. These are not the conditions of the Marshall Plan where Europe had massive economic potential and the US was the world's leading industrial superpower with wealth to spare.
What is the right pattern? Do you just send a list of tool names & descriptions, and just give the agent an "install" tool that adds a given tool to the schema on the next turn?
- claudes tool search tool
- list of skills (markdown files) the agent can grep
- claude skills
- context compaction
- sub-agents
- plans
There is no one “right” pattern. But yes it all generalizes to context engineering.
With plans for example, you write out potential distractions for later, to keep (the AI and the Human context) focused on a task at hand.
That pattern solves a distinctly different use case than the skills folder, but plans can also refer to skills in specific ways.
Context engineering is evolving with overlapping complementary patterns, and while certain vendors are branding patterns, i think we will hopefully we see tools converge.
Hi HN. I've been working on Revise since May. My goal is to build a collaborative docs editor that can try out new UI/UX paradigms in how people interact with written content now that computers can actually understand it. I think there's a lot of room for innovation when it comes to computer-aided proofreading, document history tracking, and more.
Would love some beta testers and feedback! You can email me art@revise.io if you have thoughts. Thank you.
I understand that. But "this feature" is simply sending a file around between the two big mobile operating systems. It's absurd to me how this is a big product launch in 2025.
https://revise.io
I think if you stick with a project for a while, keep code organized well, and most importantly prioritize having an excellent test suite, you can go very far with these tools. I am still developing this at a high pace every single day using these tools. It’s night and day to me, and I say that as someone who solo founded and was acquired once before, 10 years ago.
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