4 ms·

I used to really like Claude for code tasks but lately it has been a frustrating experience. I use it for writing UI components because I just don’t enjoy FE ev

I used to really like Claude for code tasks but lately it has been a frustrating experience. I use it for writing UI components because I just don’t enjoy FE even though I have a lot of experience on it from back in the day. I tell it up front that I am using react-ts and mui. 80% of the time it will use tailwind classes which makes zero sense. It won’t use the sx prop and mui system. It is also outdated it seems. It keeps using deprecated props and components which sucks and adds more manual effort on my end to fix. I like the quality of Claude’s UX output, it’s just a shame that it seems so bad on actual coding tasks. I stopped using it for any backend work because it is so outdated, or maybe it just doesn’t have the right training data. On the other hand, I give ChatGPT a link to the docs and it gives me the right code 90% or more of the time. Only shame is that its UX output is awful compared to Claude. I am also able to trust it for backend tasks, even if it is verbose AF with the explanations (it wants to teach me even if I tell it to return code only). Either way, using these tools in conjunction saves me at least 30 min to an hour daily on tasks that I dislike. I can crank out code better than AI, and I actually know and understand systems design and architecture to build a scalable codebase both technically and from organizational level. Easy to modify and extend, test, and single responsibility. AI just slams everything into a single class or uses weird utility functions that make no sense on the regular. Still, it’s a useful tool in the right use cases. Just my 2 cents.

emseetech 2y ago
I've stopped using LLMs to write code entirely. Instead, I use Claude and Qwen as "brilliant idiots" for rubber ducking. I never copy and paste code it gives me, I use it to brainstorm and get me unstuck. I'm more comfortable using it this way.
- glouwbug 2y ago
  Having spent nearly 12 hours a day for a year with GPTs I agree that this is the way. Treat it like a professor on office hours who’s sometimes a little apathetically wrong because they’re overworked and underfunded
- qup 2y ago
  People should try to switch to a more code-focused interface, like aider. Copy and pasting code it gives you just means your workflow is totally borked, and it's no wonder you wouldn't want to try to let it generate code, because it's such a pain in your ass to try it, diff it, etc.
  - emseetech 2y ago
    The workflow isn’t the problem. The code is.
    - evilduck 2y ago
      The code that ChatGPT and Claude will output via their chat interfaces is a night and day difference from what will be output from tools built around their APIs. You "can" get the web UI to behave similarly but it's both tedious and slow to manually copy and paste all of that into your context during each interaction and the output will be unfriendly towards human interaction to paste it back out to your project. But that's like saying you "can" browse the internet with a series of CURL commands and pasting the output into files you save locally and then viewing them locally from your browser, nobody is advised to do that because it's a painfully bad experience compared to just having your browser fetch a site's files directly and rendering them directly. Just go check out Aider or Cline's project repos and look at the dramatically different amounts of code, repo and task specific context they can automatically inject for you as part of their interface, or how much different the built in system prompts are from whatever the default web UIs use, or even the response structures and outputs and how those are automatically applied to your work instead. I've never once exhausted my daily API limits just treating their APIs as Chat interface backends (via Open WebUI and other chat options), but I exhausted my Claude API token limits _the very first day_ I tried Cline. The volume of information you can easily provide through tooling is impossible to do in the same timeframe by hand.
      - emseetech 2y ago
        I give every AI tool a college try and have since the copilot beta. I’m simply not interested in having these tools type for me. Typing is nowhere near the hardest part of my job and I find it invaluable as a meditative state for building muscle memory for the context of what I’m building. Taking shortcuts has a cost I’m not willing to pay.
SparkyMcUnicorn 2y ago
To each their own, and everyone's experience seems to vary, but I have a hard time picturing people using Claude/ChatGPT web UIs for any serious developmen. It seems like so much time would he wasted recreating good context, copy/pasting, etc. We have tools like Aider (which has copy/paste mode if you don't have API access for some reason), Cline, CoPilot edit mode, and more. Things like having a conventions file and exposing the dependencies list and easy additional of files into context seem essential to me in order to make LLMs productive, and I always spend more time steering results when easy consistent context isn't at my fingertips.
- danielbln 2y ago
  Before tue advent of proper IDE integrations and editors like Zed, copy pasting form the web UI was basically how things were done, and man was it daunting. As you say, having good, fine grained, repeatable and we'll integrated context management is paramount to efficient LLM based work.
  - qup 2y ago
    You gave me flashbacks of editing html, php, and perl in some shitty web editor within cPanel in the 1990s. That was before, or maybe alongside, my Notepad++ / CuteFTP workflow.
Shakahs 2y ago
Both these issues can be resolved by adding some sample code to context to influence the LLM to do the desired thing. As the op says, LLMs are going to be biased towards doing the "average" thing based on their training data. There's more old backend code on the internet than new backend code, and Tailwind is pretty dominant for frontend styling these days, so that's where the average lands.

emseetech 2y ago

I've stopped using LLMs to write code entirely. Instead, I use Claude and Qwen as "brilliant idiots" for rubber ducking. I never copy and paste code it gives me, I use it to brainstorm and get me unstuck. I'm more comfortable using it this way.

glouwbug 2y ago
Having spent nearly 12 hours a day for a year with GPTs I agree that this is the way. Treat it like a professor on office hours who’s sometimes a little apathetically wrong because they’re overworked and underfunded
qup 2y ago
People should try to switch to a more code-focused interface, like aider. Copy and pasting code it gives you just means your workflow is totally borked, and it's no wonder you wouldn't want to try to let it generate code, because it's such a pain in your ass to try it, diff it, etc.
- emseetech 2y ago
  The workflow isn’t the problem. The code is.
  - evilduck 2y ago
    The code that ChatGPT and Claude will output via their chat interfaces is a night and day difference from what will be output from tools built around their APIs. You "can" get the web UI to behave similarly but it's both tedious and slow to manually copy and paste all of that into your context during each interaction and the output will be unfriendly towards human interaction to paste it back out to your project. But that's like saying you "can" browse the internet with a series of CURL commands and pasting the output into files you save locally and then viewing them locally from your browser, nobody is advised to do that because it's a painfully bad experience compared to just having your browser fetch a site's files directly and rendering them directly. Just go check out Aider or Cline's project repos and look at the dramatically different amounts of code, repo and task specific context they can automatically inject for you as part of their interface, or how much different the built in system prompts are from whatever the default web UIs use, or even the response structures and outputs and how those are automatically applied to your work instead. I've never once exhausted my daily API limits just treating their APIs as Chat interface backends (via Open WebUI and other chat options), but I exhausted my Claude API token limits _the very first day_ I tried Cline. The volume of information you can easily provide through tooling is impossible to do in the same timeframe by hand.
    - emseetech 2y ago
      I give every AI tool a college try and have since the copilot beta. I’m simply not interested in having these tools type for me. Typing is nowhere near the hardest part of my job and I find it invaluable as a meditative state for building muscle memory for the context of what I’m building. Taking shortcuts has a cost I’m not willing to pay.

SparkyMcUnicorn 2y ago

To each their own, and everyone's experience seems to vary, but I have a hard time picturing people using Claude/ChatGPT web UIs for any serious developmen. It seems like so much time would he wasted recreating good context, copy/pasting, etc. We have tools like Aider (which has copy/paste mode if you don't have API access for some reason), Cline, CoPilot edit mode, and more. Things like having a conventions file and exposing the dependencies list and easy additional of files into context seem essential to me in order to make LLMs productive, and I always spend more time steering results when easy consistent context isn't at my fingertips.

danielbln 2y ago
Before tue advent of proper IDE integrations and editors like Zed, copy pasting form the web UI was basically how things were done, and man was it daunting. As you say, having good, fine grained, repeatable and we'll integrated context management is paramount to efficient LLM based work.
- qup 2y ago
  You gave me flashbacks of editing html, php, and perl in some shitty web editor within cPanel in the 1990s. That was before, or maybe alongside, my Notepad++ / CuteFTP workflow.

Shakahs 2y ago

Both these issues can be resolved by adding some sample code to context to influence the LLM to do the desired thing. As the op says, LLMs are going to be biased towards doing the "average" thing based on their training data. There's more old backend code on the internet than new backend code, and Tailwind is pretty dominant for frontend styling these days, so that's where the average lands.