I think at the current state of the art, LLM tools can help you build things very quickly, but they can't help you build something you yourself are incapable of building, at least not in a sustained way. They need hand holding and correction constantly.
Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#22Show us your prompts.
Two questions:
1. How are you using Claude? Are you using https://claude.ai and copying and pasting things back and forth, or are you running one of the variants of Claude Code? If so, which one?
2. If you're running Claude Code have you put anything in place to ensure it can test the code it's writing, including accessing screenshots of what's going on?
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#23If you expect it to _do_ things for you - you're setting yourself up for failure. If you treat it as an astonishingly sophisticated and extremely powerful autocomplete (which it is) - you have plenty of opportunities to make your life better.
To be fair with OP, the hype about what the tool is "supposed" to be doing ("your accountants will rebuild the ERP over the week end, you don't need programmers, etc...") is setting a dev up for frustration.
Personnaly, I'm trying to learn the "make it write the plan, fix the plan, break it down even more, etc..." loops that are necessary; but I haven't had a use case (yet?) where the total time spent developing the thing was radically shorter.
LLMs make wonders on bootstrapping a greenfield project. Unfortunately, you tend to only do this only once ;)
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#24AI seems to work a lot better once you acquire some AI equity, you go from not working at all to AI writing all the code. /s
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#25I’m probably going to be downvoted for this but this thread doesn’t really reflect well on the promises of Generative AI and particularly the constantly reiterated assurance that we’re on the verge of a new industrial Revolution.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#26claude-code added the /insights command which might tell you what you are doing wrong, using your history.
from the basics, did you actually tell it that you want those things? its not a mind reader. did you use plan mode? did you ask it to describe what its going to make?
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#27Try this: * have Claude produce wireframes of the screens you want. Iterate on those and save them as images. * then develop. Make sure Claude has the ability to run the app, interact with controls, and take screenshots. * loop autonomously until the app looks like the wireframes. Feedback loops are required. Only very simple problems get one-shot.
hmm but wouldn't that rapidly spend my tokens?
Effective use of LLMs in this way is not cheap.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#28If you expect it to _do_ things for you - you're setting yourself up for failure. If you treat it as an astonishingly sophisticated and extremely powerful autocomplete (which it is) - you have plenty of opportunities to make your life better.
In other words, if we believe what the CEOs of the AI companies claim, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#29Have you read the best practices? https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices Are you using plan mode?
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#30Are you using plan mode?