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I’m honestly baffled by this. I don’t want to tell you “you’re holding it wrong” but if this is your normal experience there’s something weird happening. Frida
by wrs 7mo ago
I’m honestly baffled by this. I don’t want to tell you “you’re holding it wrong” but if this is your normal experience there’s something weird happening.
Friday afternoon I made a new directory and told Claude Code I wanted to make a Go proxy so I could have a request/callback HTTP API for a 3rd party service whose official API is only persistent websocket connections. I had it read the service’s API docs, engage in some back and forth to establish the architecture and library choices, and save out a phased implementation plan in plan mode. It implemented it in four phases with passing tests for each, then did live tests against the service in which it debugged its protocol mistakes using curl. Finally I had it do two rounds of code review with fresh context, and it fixed a race condition and made a few things cleaner. Total time, two hours.
I have noticed some people I work with have more trouble, and my vague intuition is it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy. It works better when you tell it what to do, rather than letting it decide. That can be at a pretty high level, though. Basically reduce the problem to a set of well-established subproblems that it’s familiar with. Same as you’d do with a junior developer, really.
- shireboy 7mo agoSimilar. I regularly use Github copilot (with claude models sometimes) and it works amazingly. But I see some who struggle with them. I have sort of learned to talk to it, understand what it is generating, and routinely use to generate fixes, whole features, etc. much much faster than I could before.
- maccard 7mo agoI’ve found copilot to generate worse code, and the editor integrations to be unusable (lets insert this block of code at the wrong place in the file for example), but overall for it to do the right thing enough that I can patch it. I’ve found Claude code just goes mad and gets stuck in a loop and I need to pull it out and figure out where in the hundreds of lines of code it’s generates in the last few minutes it’s gone so wrong.
- thwarted 7mo ago> it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy. It works better when you tell it what to do, rather than letting it decide. That can be at a pretty high level, though. Basically reduce the problem to a set of well-established subproblems that it’s familiar with. Same as you’d do with a junior developer, really. Equating "junior developers" and "coding LLMs" is pretty lame. You handhold a junior developers so, eventually, you don't have to handhold anymore. The junior developer is expected to learn enough, and be trusted enough, to operate more autonomously. "Junior developers" don't exist solely to do your bidding. It may be valuable to recognize similarities between a first junior developer interaction and a first LLM interaction, but when every LLM interaction requires it to be handheld, the value of the iterative nature of having a junior developer work along side you is not at all equivalent.
- wrs 7mo agoI didn’t say they are equivalent, nor do I in any way consider them equivalent. One is a tool, the other is a person. I simply said the description of the problem should be broken down similar to the way you’d do it for a junior developer. As opposed to the way you’d express the problem to a more senior developer who can be trusted to figure out the right way to do it at a higher level.
- maccard 7mo ago> I have noticed some people I work with have more trouble, and my vague intuition is it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy What’s giving too much autonomy about “Please load settings.toml using a library and print out the name key from the application table”? Even if it’s under specified, surely it should at least leave it _compiling_? I’ve been posting comments like this monthly here, my experience has been consistently this with Claude, opencode, antigravity, cursor, and using gpt/opus/sonnet/gemini models (latest at time of testing). This morning was opus 4.6
- wrs 7mo agoThere’s nothing wrong with it that I can see. Like I said, I’m a bit baffled at your experience. I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, but usually one short iteration later that’s fixed. Claude Code will usually even do that iteration by itself.
- maccard 7mo ago> I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, We’ve gone from “I’m baffled at your experience” to well yeah it often fails” in two sentences here…
- saulpw 7mo agoIt's not unusual for my initial output (as a programmer) not to compile either. I wouldn't say I "failed" if I can then get it to compile. Which as people are saying, is what happens with Claude Code and Opus, either automatically or at most when I say "get it to compile".