I've watched people throw Claude at every problem, and half the time they're just wasting tokens. But when you actually understand what it's good at, it becomes genuinely useful. Here's what I've learned building production workflows with it.
The Real Strengths
Complex reasoning tasks. Claude actually thinks through multi-step problems. I built a code review system that catches architecture issues, not just linting errors. You describe the pattern you want enforced, and it reasons about trade-offs. That actually works.
Refactoring existing code. Need to migrate from one pattern to another? Give Claude the code and the target pattern. It understands context better than find-and-replace, and the output usually requires minimal cleanup. I used this to refactor a Vue 2 app to 3 in half the time I expected.
Documentation generation. Write the function. Ask Claude to write docs that explain why not just what. The narrative-style docs are actually useful for other developers, not the generated garbage you get from some tools.
