4 ms·

What you are trying to do is quite easy to do with Claude. I have done way more complex things than that in hours. But having programming, managing(with humans)

by cladopa 8mo ago

What you are trying to do is quite easy to do with Claude. I have done way more complex things than that in hours. But having programming, managing(with humans) and engineering experience is extremely useful. It seems you try to tell the tool to do everything in one shot. That is a very wrong approach, not just with Claude but with everything(you ask a woman for a date and if you do not get laid in five minutes you failed?). When I program something manually and compiles, I expect it to be wrong. You have to iron it and debug it. Instead of that: 1.Divide the work in independent units. I call this "steps" 2.Subdivide steps into "subsets" You work in an isolated manner on those subsets. 3.Use an inmediate gui interface like dear imgui to prototype your tool. Translating then into using something else once it works is quite easy of LLMs. 4.Visualize everything. You do not need to see the code but you need to visualise every single thing you ask it to do. 5.Tell Claude what you want and why you want it and update the documentation constantly. 6. Use git in order to make rock solid steps that Claude will not touch when it works and you can revert changes or ask the ia to explore a branch, explaining how you did something and want something similar. 7. Do not modify code that already works rock solid. Copy it into another step leaving the step as reference and modify it there. 5.Use logs. Lots of logs. For every step you create text logs and you debug the problems giving Claude the logs to read them. 6.Use screenshots. Claude can read screenshots. If you visualise everything, clause can see the errors too. 7.Use asserts, lots of asserts, just like with manual programming. It is not that different from managing a real team of people...

amelius 8mo ago
But that is ... a lot of work.
kuschku 8mo ago
That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.
- furyofantares 8mo ago
  No it's not? Stuff like "divide the work up" is something you do when doing it yourself. Making a GUI prototype isn't really much work at all in the age of LLMs, akin to drawing up a few ideas on a notepad. Using git for small steps is something lots of people do for their own work and rebase later. Using extensive logging is mostly just something you have in your AGENTS.md for all your projects and forget about, similarly getting it setup to make and look at screenshots. What part of this is more work than doing it yourself?
  - al_borland 8mo ago
    It’s more work in the same sense that trying to delegate a task to someone who doesn’t understand what needs to be done, and needs their hand held, is more work than doing it yourself. This is especially true when the vision is a little hazy and the path isn’t clear. When doing it yourself, you can make decisions in the moment, try things, pivot… when trying to delegate these things, it becomes a chore to try to clarify things that are inherently unclear, and pivot an idea when the person (or AI) being delegated to doesn’t fully grasp the pivot and keeps bringing in old ideas. I think most people have had an experience trying to delegate a task, where it becomes so much work to wrangle the person, that they just do it themselves. I’ve run into this countless times. That’s how it feels to use AI.
    - furyofantares 8mo ago
      You can probably assume the person who suggested it isn't having the experience of it being more work to do that way.
- cvwright 8mo ago
  It’s really not. For anything substantial, the things that you do to manage an LLM are the same things that you should be doing to manage a team of human devs, even if the team is just yourself. Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.
- Jeremy1026 8mo ago
  Not even close. A friend and I are working on an iOS game (a tower defense style game). We are writing 0 code ourselves. We both have a history of iOS development, he is still actively involved and I've move away from it in recent years. In about 2 weeks we have a functional game, 60 levels, 28 different types of enemies, a procedurally generated daily challenge mode, an infinity mode. Tower crafting and upgrades, an economy system in the game for pay for the upgrades. This likely would have taken us months to get to the point that we are at, it was playable on Day 2.
  - MarleTangible 8mo ago
    Could you explain how a chat session progresses, with an example if possible?
    - Jeremy1026 8mo ago
      I start with what I want to build. In the initial prompt I provide an overview of what I want, and then some specifics. Last night I added an archive to the Daily Challenge mode, so if you missed a day's challenge you could go back and play it. This is what my initial prompt looked like: --- I'd like to add an archives mode to the daily challenge. This will allow players to complete any daily challenges they didn't attempt on the actual day. It will look like a calendar, with the dates in Green if it was played, and in white if not. The archive should only go back to January 30, 2026, the day the project started. Include a to do to change this date prior to release. Rewards for completing daily challenges via the archive should be 25% of the normal value. --- Claude Code then asked me a couple of clarifying questions before it harnessed the superpowers:writing-plans skill and generate a document to plan the work. The document it put together is viewable at https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f5d8b1a6 https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f... There were a couple of edits that I made to the document before I told it to implement. It then fired off a couple of agents to perform the tasks in parallel where possible. Once it finished I tested and it worked as I had hoped. But there was a couple of follow up things that would make it more intertwined with everything else going on around daily challenges. So I followed up with: --- lets give 1 cell for compelting an archived daily challenge --- And finally: --- Now that we are tracking completions, can we update the notification to complete daily mission to include "Keep your X day streak" ---
layer8 8mo ago
> you ask a woman for a date and if you do not get laid in five minutes you failed? If successfully using Claude Code is as difficult as successful dating, I'm not sure this tech will prevail. ;)
deterministic 8mo ago
... which is why it is usually faster for me to just write the code myself :-) However ChatGPT is really helpful doing sysadmin style tasks on Linux.
LennyHenrysNuts 8mo ago
It's like managing a team of 6-8 year olds. Put that down! What are you doing? Don't put that in your mouth. Where are you going? Stop that! Why are you sitting there alone, Johnny?

by cladopa 8mo ago

amelius 8mo ago

But that is ... a lot of work.

kuschku 8mo ago

That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.

furyofantares 8mo ago
No it's not? Stuff like "divide the work up" is something you do when doing it yourself. Making a GUI prototype isn't really much work at all in the age of LLMs, akin to drawing up a few ideas on a notepad. Using git for small steps is something lots of people do for their own work and rebase later. Using extensive logging is mostly just something you have in your AGENTS.md for all your projects and forget about, similarly getting it setup to make and look at screenshots. What part of this is more work than doing it yourself?
- al_borland 8mo ago
  It’s more work in the same sense that trying to delegate a task to someone who doesn’t understand what needs to be done, and needs their hand held, is more work than doing it yourself. This is especially true when the vision is a little hazy and the path isn’t clear. When doing it yourself, you can make decisions in the moment, try things, pivot… when trying to delegate these things, it becomes a chore to try to clarify things that are inherently unclear, and pivot an idea when the person (or AI) being delegated to doesn’t fully grasp the pivot and keeps bringing in old ideas. I think most people have had an experience trying to delegate a task, where it becomes so much work to wrangle the person, that they just do it themselves. I’ve run into this countless times. That’s how it feels to use AI.
  - furyofantares 8mo ago
    You can probably assume the person who suggested it isn't having the experience of it being more work to do that way.
cvwright 8mo ago
It’s really not. For anything substantial, the things that you do to manage an LLM are the same things that you should be doing to manage a team of human devs, even if the team is just yourself. Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.
Jeremy1026 8mo ago
Not even close. A friend and I are working on an iOS game (a tower defense style game). We are writing 0 code ourselves. We both have a history of iOS development, he is still actively involved and I've move away from it in recent years. In about 2 weeks we have a functional game, 60 levels, 28 different types of enemies, a procedurally generated daily challenge mode, an infinity mode. Tower crafting and upgrades, an economy system in the game for pay for the upgrades. This likely would have taken us months to get to the point that we are at, it was playable on Day 2.
- MarleTangible 8mo ago
  Could you explain how a chat session progresses, with an example if possible?
  - Jeremy1026 8mo ago
    I start with what I want to build. In the initial prompt I provide an overview of what I want, and then some specifics. Last night I added an archive to the Daily Challenge mode, so if you missed a day's challenge you could go back and play it. This is what my initial prompt looked like: --- I'd like to add an archives mode to the daily challenge. This will allow players to complete any daily challenges they didn't attempt on the actual day. It will look like a calendar, with the dates in Green if it was played, and in white if not. The archive should only go back to January 30, 2026, the day the project started. Include a to do to change this date prior to release. Rewards for completing daily challenges via the archive should be 25% of the normal value. --- Claude Code then asked me a couple of clarifying questions before it harnessed the superpowers:writing-plans skill and generate a document to plan the work. The document it put together is viewable at https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f5d8b1a6 https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f... There were a couple of edits that I made to the document before I told it to implement. It then fired off a couple of agents to perform the tasks in parallel where possible. Once it finished I tested and it worked as I had hoped. But there was a couple of follow up things that would make it more intertwined with everything else going on around daily challenges. So I followed up with: --- lets give 1 cell for compelting an archived daily challenge --- And finally: --- Now that we are tracking completions, can we update the notification to complete daily mission to include "Keep your X day streak" ---

layer8 8mo ago

> you ask a woman for a date and if you do not get laid in five minutes you failed? If successfully using Claude Code is as difficult as successful dating, I'm not sure this tech will prevail. ;)

deterministic 8mo ago

... which is why it is usually faster for me to just write the code myself :-) However ChatGPT is really helpful doing sysadmin style tasks on Linux.

LennyHenrysNuts 8mo ago

It's like managing a team of 6-8 year olds. Put that down! What are you doing? Don't put that in your mouth. Where are you going? Stop that! Why are you sitting there alone, Johnny?