Has Claude become a useful tool for bitcoin developers?

[Antidote47k]

I have noticed Claude coming up more often in discussions surrounding bitcoin development and technical works.
My question is, for those who are actively building, reviewing code or contributing to Bitcoin-related projects, how are you actually finding it in practice?

Does it actively help in undertaking tasks like understanding bitcoin core, reviewing BIPs, debugging or general security research? Or is it still more useful in the aspect of explanation and exploration rather than serious development work?

Generally I’m really interested in hearing how people are integrating it into their workflow.

[NotATether]

Never use AI to operate wallets or to handle pull requests / issues on sensitive codebases such as Core.

Linux kernel is a bit different since the worst that can happen is crashes, but on Bitcoin Core, the code is money. So this is why such projects should stick with mainly human reviewers while using AI to help understand the prognosis and assist in creating bugfixes only.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I used it to draft this testnet softfork proposal and to write the code for it. I also periodically use it to write custom scripts that allow me to calculate useful info, such as for observing the sustainability of the network overtime.

Yes, it's capable of undertaking pretty serious tasks, there just needs to be someone responsible to prompt it right, and review the output.

[gmaxwell]

I think that using closed hosted LLMs is not very compatible with the ethos of Bitcoin.  In addition the the direct effect of any work done historically any work w/ bitcoin has prepared you to do *future* work as necessary.  But if you work using a closed hosted LLM you only get the direct benefit and potentially get worse at actually doing the work-- you become dependent.

You also allow unknown third parties realtime remote access to your systems and the ability to effectively impersonate you.

If you're using it on a system with your wallet(s) vs development in a sandbox a hosted LLM absolutely blows your privacy because the providers will log and retain all information that goes in and out.  I know from first hand experience that commercial LLM providers retain data far beyond what you would expect from their public statements and will provide it in response to absolutely anyone carrying a subpoena.

I would suggest as an alternative using Qwen-3.6-27B-- many regard it as competitive with Opus 4 and it has open weights and can be run on a workstation class gpu.  Even if you currently don't have the resources to run it locally using a hosted copy at least improves the autonomy since you can run locally if push comes to shove and you have many choices of where to host.

I can say first hand that Qwen running with a vm-sandboxed hermes is capable of very sophisticated development work.

[vapourminer]

I would suggest as an alternative using Qwen-3.6-27B-- many regard it as competitive with Opus 4 and it has open weights and can be run on a workstation class gpu. 

a >= 24 gb consumer class gpu (AMD 7900XTX, Nvidia 4090/5090) will run  qwen 3.6-27b q4 locally too. but the context window may not be enough for really big tasks if youre used to workstation stuff.

[dkbit98]

Claude can only be useful to check the code and find some hidden bugs and flaws in the code.
Someone already used this tool to exploit some shitcoins, and I am sure hackers are using it steal coins from exchanges.
But totally replacing any human bitcoin developer with Claude or any other AI would be stupid and dangerous.

[xmrbro]

i use claude quite a bit for bitcoin-related work, mostly for understanding core internals and reviewing BIPs. it's genuinely useful for getting up to speed on complex topics quickly — things that would take hours of reading docs can be clarified in minutes.
for actual security-critical code review though i wouldn't rely on it blindly, it can miss subtle consensus-layer issues. best used as a "second pair of eyes" rather than the final word.
where it really shines is explaining why something works the way it does — the reasoning behind design decisions in bitcoin core for example. for that it's hard to beat.
still a tool, not a replacement for actual expertise — but a pretty good one if you know its limits

[Mario0]

Claude can only be useful to check the code and find some hidden bugs and flaws in the code.
Someone already used this tool to exploit some shitcoins, and I am sure hackers are using it steal coins from exchanges.
But totally replacing any human bitcoin developer with Claude or any other AI would be stupid and dangerous.

I don't think Claude can be utilized for the things you are saying since, as soon as they are added, you will receive a response from Claude because it might negatively impact the AI's reputation, and I'm confident that Claude won't be involved in anything that would lead to criminal activity.  And from what I understand, developers can benefit from it, but not in the way you truly believe.

[suzanne5223]

Claude can only be useful to check the code and find some hidden bugs and flaws in the code.
Someone already used this tool to exploit some shitcoins, and I am sure hackers are using it steal coins from exchanges.
But totally replacing any human bitcoin developer with Claude or any other AI would be stupid and dangerous.

I don't think Claude can be utilized for the things you are saying since, as soon as they are added, you will receive a response from Claude because it might negatively impact the AI's reputation, and I'm confident that Claude won't be involved in anything that would lead to criminal activity.  And from what I understand, developers can benefit from it, but not in the way you truly believe.

What s/he said is true.
I read on Malwarebytes news blog months ago about how some cybercriminal was able to use cutting-edge prompting with jailbreaking to bypass Claude’s protection barriers to use the AI to design vibe coding and launch attacks.
Although this might affect the reputation of AI, as you said, but it is what some people will always abuse innovative technology.

[Italian Panic]

In my experience, I wouldn’t rely on an AI or Claude (although I do recognise that Anthropic’s is the best on the market) because I have found it tends to be rather haphazard when looking for solutions. However, I have found it to be an excellent tool for code review, though you still have to write the code yourself. At most, you can get it to merge various pieces of code, but never start from scratch! The initial structure must always be your own.

[Mahiyammahi]

I think that using closed hosted LLMs is not very compatible with the ethos of Bitcoin.  In addition the the direct effect of any work done historically any work w/ bitcoin has prepared you to do *future* work as necessary.  But if you work using a closed hosted LLM you only get the direct benefit and potentially get worse at actually doing the work-- you become dependent.

You also allow unknown third parties realtime remote access to your systems and the ability to effectively impersonate you.

If you're using it on a system with your wallet(s) vs development in a sandbox a hosted LLM absolutely blows your privacy because the providers will log and retain all information that goes in and out.  I know from first hand experience that commercial LLM providers retain data far beyond what you would expect from their public statements and will provide it in response to absolutely anyone carrying a subpoena.

So even trying to build a simple contracts would be at risks for getting exploited? As for storing data I hope they don't sell our data. If we take accountable these thing almost everything would be impossible to build with AI and scale.

I would suggest as an alternative using Qwen-3.6-27B-- many regard it as competitive with Opus 4 and it has open weights and can be run on a workstation class gpu.  Even if you currently don't have the resources to run it locally using a hosted copy at least improves the autonomy since you can run locally if push comes to shove and you have many choices of where to host.

I can say first hand that Qwen running with a vm-sandboxed hermes is capable of very sophisticated development work.

Local LLMs can save our token consumption and ensure us safety. But to run a compatible LLM requires more GPU which is usually costly. If I wants to run a compatible AI model which would require me 5$/month it would requires me atleast $3k built. So as a consumer level it's expensive.

Do you think we can still use those commercial AI models in any alternative way without having the risks of our data leak and we can make sure our atmost security on our projects.

[pooya87]

AI is definitely a useful tool for coders (a lot of other tasks) but it is important for us to first understand what type of a tool it is. The problem is in the name: A.I. which they chose for marketing purposes. But AI is not intelligence. It cannot think. It cannot reason and most importantly it cannot innovate. A.I. is best described as a statistical pattern matcher. But that doesn't sell! The companies couldn't say "come invest millions in our 'statistical pattern matcher'"

After we get that definition correctly, we can move on to utilize this tool more efficiently. Then you wouldn't expect a "pattern matcher" to write you an innovative code solving a new problem. You'd use it to solve a problem that was solved a million times before my many others and that AI has it in its database aka training data.

My question is, for those who are actively building, reviewing code or contributing to Bitcoin-related projects, how are you actually finding it in practice?

I have only used them for code review and have already found one serious bug (a dumb IndexOutOfRange bug) and a bunch of small improvements in my code.