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

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...

What you’re doing is the so called “slot machine AI”, where you put some tokens in, pray, and hope to get what you want out. It doesn’t work that way (not well, at least)

The LLM under the hood is essentially a very fancy autocomplete. This always needs to be kept in mind when working with these tools. So you have to focus a lot on what the source text is that’s going to be used to produce the completion. The better the source text, the better the completion. In other words, you need to make sure you progressively fill the context window with stuff that matters for the task that you’re doing.

In particular, first explore the problem space with the tool (iterate), then use the exploration results to plan what needs doing (iterate), when the plan looks good and makes sense, only then you ask to actually implement.

Claude’s built in planning mode kind of does this, but in my opinion it sucks. It doesn’t make iterating on the exploration and the plan easy or natural. So I suggest just setting up some custom prompts (skills) for this with instructions that make sense for the particular domain/use case, and use those in the normal mode.

Ah.

There used to be more or less one answer to the question of "how do I implement this UI feature in this language"

Now there are countless. Welcome to the brave new world of non-deterministic programming where the inputs can produce anything and nothing is for certain.

Everyone promises it can do something different if you "just use it this way".

I don't think that's true, I've seen examples to the contrary. Here for example a recent article [1] from a non programmer building a tool. The article is long so I pasted the relevant part below. My thoughts go more in the direction, the article author built something that is complicated for non technical people, but in essence simple -- he says it so himself "copy paste". What if what the OP here is building is something novel and Claude doesn't know how to build it?

Relevant excerpt:

I spent a bit of time last month building a site to solve a problem I’ve always found super-annoying about the legislative process. It’s hard to read Federal bills because they don’t map to the underlying code. Anyone who has worked in Congress knows what I mean, you get a bill that says “change this word from ‘may’ to ‘shall’ in section XYZ of Federal law.” To understand what it does, and find possible loopholes they are trying to sneak in, you have to go to that underlying Federal law and look at where it says “may” and then put “shall” in there and read it. It’s basically like a manual version of copy and pasting, except much more complicated and with lawyers trying to trick you.

So I wrote an app that lets you upload legislation, and it automatically shows you how it changes Federal law. There are commercial versions of this software, and some states do it for their proposed legislation. But I haven’t seen anything on the Federal level that is free, so I built it. (The code is here.) It’s not very good. It’ll probably break a lot. There’s no “throat to choke” if you use it and it’s wrong. And my guess is that Anthropic or Gemini ultimately will be able to do this function itself eventually. But the point is that if I can build something like this in my spare time and deploy it without any training at all, then it’s just not that hard for an organization with some capital to get rid of some of its business software tools.

[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-2-t...

But that is ... a lot of work.