Honest developer assessment- Claude is not always the right tool:
Very recent library versions. Claude’s training has a cutoff. If you’re using a library that released a major API change after that date, Claude may give you outdated patterns. Always check the current docs.
Highly specific business logic. Claude doesn’t know your domain. For code that encodes complex business rules, you’ll spend as much time explaining context as you would writing it yourself.
Guaranteed correctness. Claude doesn’t run the code. It predicts plausible code. For anything security-critical or mathematically precise, treat it as a starting point that needs careful review — not a finished implementation.
Very large refactors. For broad, architectural refactoring across a large codebase, Claude Code (the agentic CLI tool) handles this better than the chat interface. The chat interface has limited ability to track changes across many files simultaneously.
Niche or proprietary tooling. If you’re working with internal tools, private APIs, or obscure libraries with little public documentation, Claude’s training data won’t have good coverage and the output quality drops significantly.