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Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#101

Post by Leftium »

Mumps wrote: post #98
Leftium wrote: post #4

It seems to me you expect Claude to be able to one-shot your tool based on a single prompt. Potentially "vibe-coding" as in the sense: you don't know how to develop this yourself (perhaps you are not a software developer?) While this may be possible, it likely requires a very detailed prompt and/or spec document. --- Here is an example of something I successfully built with Claude: https://rift-transcription.vercel.a…

Thanks for sharing! Like OP, I've been similarly struggling to get as much value from CC (grok et c) as "everyone" else seems to be. I'm quite curious about the workflow around the spec you link. To me, it looks like quite an extensive amount of work/writing. Comparable or greater than the coding work, by amount, even. Basically trading writing code files for writing .md files. 150 chat sessions is also nothing to sn…

Yes, it's a lot of spec work. But a lot of it is research and exploring alternatives. Sometimes Claude suggests ideas I would have never thought of or attempted on my own. Like a custom python websocket server: https://github.com/Leftium/rift-local

(I also implemented the previous version with only a high-level, basic understanding of websockets: https://rift-transcription.vercel.app/sherpa)

I think of Claude like a "force-multiplier."

I have been able to implement ideas I previously gave up on. I can test out new ideas much faster.

For example, https://github.com/Leftium/gg started out as 100% hand-crafted code. I wanted gg to be able to print out the expression in the code in addition to the value like python icecream. (It's more useful to get both the value and the variable name/expression.) I previously tried, and gave up. Claude helped me add this feature within a few hours.

And now gg has its own virtual dev console optimized for interacting with coding agents. A very useful feature that I would probaly not have attempted without Claude. It's taken the "open in editor" feture to a completely new level.

I have implemented other features that I would have never attempted or even thought about. For example without Claud's assistance https://ws.leftium.com would not have many features like the animated background that resembles the actual sky color.

60 minute forecast was on my TODO list for a long time. Claude helped me add it within an afternoon or so.

Note: depending on complexity of the feature I want to add the spec varies in the level of detail. Sometimes there is no spec outside Claude's plans in the chat session.

[1]: https://github.com/gruns/icecream

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#102

Post by SyneRyder »

nottorp wrote: post #94
Leftium wrote: post #4

It seems to me you expect Claude to be able to one-shot your tool based on a single prompt. Potentially "vibe-coding" as in the sense: you don't know how to develop this yourself (perhaps you are not a software developer?) While this may be possible, it likely requires a very detailed prompt and/or spec document. --- Here is an example of something I successfully built with Claude: https://rift-transcription.vercel.a…

> It seems to me you expect Claude to be able to one-shot your tool based on a single prompt. Yes, this is what the hype says doesn't it? Or... are they all lying?

That isn't what the hype is. If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching, you should find better sources. You can one-shot some things, and it makes for an impressive demo (oh yay, yet another video game made instantly) but anything larger and more useful will probably be a conversation. (Though not necessarily with a human, AIs can discuss it among themselves too.)

Your first one-shot might be a good rough prototype. From there, you continue the conversation with your refinements. While Claude goes and works on that for 15 minutes - you can go and do other work. Or talk with another Claude in another window to make progress on another project.

A good mental model is to imagine you're talking to a remote developer. You need to give them an extremely detailed spec on the first go if you expect them to get it right the first time. Sometimes it's better to explain "this is my grand vision, but how about we first mockup a prototype to see if that's actually how I want it to work". Sometimes Claude will suggest you talk about your plan together first to remove the ambiguities from the plan, or you can encourage Claude to do that with you.

(Also, the remote developer mindset is useful - treat the remote developer with respect, with humanity, and they're more likely to be helpful towards you and motivated to align with your goals.)

Consider that in an hour or two of conversation, you now have your app, completed, fully debugged... and not once did you look at the code, and you spent half of that time catching up on your other tasks. That's vibe coding.

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#103

Post by MarleTangible »

Leftium wrote: post #68
trcf23 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow thanks for sharing! Could you explain how you made the specs? Did you already know pretty much everything you wanted to cover before hand? Was one CC session enough to go through it? In my experience, trying to make a plan/specs that really match what I want often ends in a struggle with Claude trying to regress to the mean. Also it’s so easy to write code that I always have tons of ideas I end up implementing th…

- No, I did not know everything I wanted to cover beforehand. Claude helps me brainstorm, research, and elaborate on my ideas. The spec is a living document that I occasionally check in: https://github.com/Leftium/rift-transcription/commits/main/s... - It was definitely not one CC session. In fact, this spec is a spin-off of several other specs on several other branches/projects. - I've actually experienced quite the…

The what-why switch is quite useful, because it also helps you avoid Claude's "great idea!" responses as well.

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#104

Post by MarleTangible »

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #84
kuschku wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Could you explain how a chat session progresses, with an example if possible?

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#105

Post by redhale »

You need to give it the tools to check its own work, and remove yourself from that inner low-level error resolution loop.

If you're building a web app, give it a script that (re)starts the full stack, along with Playwright MCP or Chrome DevTools MCP or agent-browser CLI or something similar. Then add instructions to CLAUDE.md on how and when to use these tools. As in: "IMPORTANT: You must always validate your change end-to-end using Playwright MCP, with screenshot evidence, before reporting back to me that you are finished.".

You can take this further with hooks to more forcefully enforce this behavior, but it's usually not necessary ime.

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#106

Post by nottorp »

SyneRyder wrote: post #102
nottorp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to me you expect Claude to be able to one-shot your tool based on a single prompt. Yes, this is what the hype says doesn't it? Or... are they all lying?

That isn't what the hype is. If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching, you should find better sources. You can one-shot some things, and it makes for an impressive demo (oh yay, yet another video game made instantly) but anything larger and more useful will probably be a conversation. (Though not necessarily with a human, AIs can discuss it among themselves too.) Your first one-shot might be a goo…

> If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching

HN - posts and comments - is full of it.

And my personal experiments with the free chatbots contradict it ofc.

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#107

Post by anonzzzies »

I (and my colleagues) get consistent good results and I am starting to believe it is because our experience is in running large projects for decades with outsourcing companies. We would get assigned a project and a company, usually on the other side of the world, and we would need to make it work: seems LLMs is pretty much the same type of work. And we get consistent gains (better than with outsourcing on average, also because our tasks run 247 which was never financially possible even with the large clients we worked with) from this. Reading that so many people have issues with even trivial stuff makes me think my team has at least some kind of skill others do not have; we kind of assumed everyone is getting the same benefits really.

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#108

Post by Jeremy1026 »

MarleTangible wrote: post #104
Jeremy1026 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you explain how a chat session progresses, with an example if possible?

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/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"

---

Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?

#109

Post by Jeremy1026 »

MarleTangible wrote: post #104
Jeremy1026 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you explain how a chat session progresses, with an example if possible?

Another example is the tower stat caps. When Claude Code generate the first pass, it make it so that the tower level would control each individual stat's cap. Which was way too high. I didn't know exactly what the limits were, but knew they needed to be pulled back some. So I asked it:

-Start Prompt-

Currently, a towers level sets the maximum a single stat can be. Can you tell me what those stat caps are?

-End Prompt-

This primed the context to have information about the stat caps and how they are tied to levels. I followed up after it gave me a chart back with Tower Level and Max Stat Rank with some real stats from play

-Start Prompt-

Lets change the stat cap, the caps are currently far too high. All towers start at 1 for each IMPACT stat, my oldest tower is Level 5, and its stats are I-3, M-4, P-6, A-3, C-1, T-1. How do you think I could go about reducing the cap in a meaningful way.

-End Prompt-

It came back with a solution to reduce the individual stat cap for individual stats to be tower level + 1. But I felt that was too limiting. I want players to be able to specialize a tower so I told it have the stat cap be total, not per stat.

-Start Prompt-

I'm thinking about having a total stat cap, so in this towers case, the total stats are 18.

-End Prompt-

It generated a couple of structures of how the cap could increase and presented them to me.

-Start Prompt-

Yes, it would replace the per-stat cap entirely. If a player wants to specialize a tower in one stat using the entire cap that is fine.

Lets do 10 + (rank * 3), that will give the user a little bit of room to train a new tower.

Since it's a total stat cap, if a user is training and the tower earns enough stat xp to level beyond the cap, lock the tower at max XP for that stat, and autoamtically level the stat when the user levels up the tower.

-End Prompt-

It added the cap, but introduced a couple of build errors, so I sent it just the build errors.

-Start Prompt-

/Users/myuser/Development/Shelter Defense/Shelter Defense/Views/DebugTowerDetailView.swift:231:39 Left side of mutating operator isn't mutable: 'tower' is a 'let' constant

/Users/myuser/Development/Shelter Defense/Shelter Defense/Views/DebugTowerEditorView.swift:181:47 Left side of mutating operator isn't mutable: 'towerInstance' is a 'let' constant

-End Prompt-

And thus, a new stat cap system was implemented.

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