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Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
51–60 of 125 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#52Sounds right. Any one shot anything is cap
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#53Have you read the best practices? https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices Are you using plan mode?
The whole thing is worth reading, multiple times over, if you want to find success in using the tool. But I'll call attention to this passage especially:
> Include tests, screenshots, or expected outputs so Claude can check itself. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#54Typical flow for a greenfield project for me is:
First prompt, ask it to come with a plan, break it down to steps and save it to a file.
Edit file as needed.
Launch CC again, use the plan file to implement stage by stage, verify and correct. No technical debugging needed. Just saying X is supposed to be like this, but it’s actually like that goes a long way.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#55What 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 f…
That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#56I listened to a conversation between two superstar developers in their 50's, who have been coding for more than most readers here have been alive, about their experience with Claude Code.
I wanted to tear my ears out.
What is crystal clear to me now is using LLMs to develop is a learned and practiced skill. If you expect to just drop in and be productive on day one, forget it. The smartest guy I know _who has a PhD in AI_, is hopeless at using it.
Practice practice practice. It's a tool, it takes practice. Learn on hobby projects before using it at work.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#57What 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 f…
> 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. ;)
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#58What 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 f…
That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.
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?
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#59When claude or codex does something other than what you want, instead of getting mad at it, ask it what it saw in your prompt that led it to do what it did, and how should you have prompted it to achieve what you wanted. This process tends to work very well and gives you the tools you need to learn how to prompt it to achieve the results you want.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#60What 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 f…
... 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.