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CC was slow and the results I was getting were subpar having it debug some easy systems tasks. Later in the afternoon it recovered and was able to complete all my tasks. There’s another aspect to these coding agents: the providers can randomly quantize (lobotomize) models based on their capacity, so the model you’re getting may not be the one someone else is getting, or the same model you used yesterday.
I’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.
Add https://github.com/obra/superpowers and then try again.
I’m not a software engineer by training nor trade, so caveats apply, but I found that the brainstorming -> plan writing -> plan execution flow provided by the skills in this plugin helps immensely with extracting assumptions and unsaid preferences into a comprehensive plan—-very similar to the guidance elsewhere in this thread, except automated/guided along by the plugin skills
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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, sim…
This is especially true when the vision is a little hazy and the path isn’t clear. When doing it yourself, you can make decisions in the moment, try things, pivot… when trying to delegate these things, it becomes a chore to try to clarify things that are inherently unclear, and pivot an idea when the person (or AI) being delegated to doesn’t fully grasp the pivot and keeps bringing in old ideas.
I think most people have had an experience trying to delegate a task, where it becomes so much work to wrangle the person, that they just do it themselves. I’ve run into this countless times. That’s how it feels to use AI.
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 f…
That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.
Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.
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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, sim…
It’s more work in the same sense that trying to delegate a task to someone who doesn’t understand what needs to be done, and needs their hand held, is more work than doing it yourself. This is especially true when the vision is a little hazy and the path isn’t clear. When doing it yourself, you can make decisions in the moment, try things, pivot… when trying to delegate these things, it becomes a chore to try to clar…
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…
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…
- 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 opposite: I suggest an idea for the spec and Claude says "great idea!" Then I change my mind and go in the opposite direction: "great idea!" again. Once in a while, I have to argue with Claude to get my idea implemented (like adding dependencies to parse into a proper AST instead of regex.)
- One tip: it's very useful to explain the "why" to Claude vs the "what." In fact, if you just explain the why/problem without a specific solution, Claude's suggestions may surprise you!
I 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 i…
I don’t blame people for being upset when it can’t do what all the hype says it will do.
The way people talk about the latest Claude Code is the same way people were talking 2-3 years ago about whatever the latest model was then. Every release gets marketed as if it’s a new level of magic, yet we’re still here having the same debates about merit, because reality doesn’t match the marketing and hype.
It has gotten better, I tried something with early ChatGPT that failed horribly (a basic snake game written in C), and just tried the exact same thing again last week and it worked—it wasn’t good, but it technically worked. But if it took 3 years to get good enough to pass my basic test, why was I being fed those lies 3 years ago? The AI companies are like the boy who cried wolf. At this point, it’s on them to prove they can do what they say, not up to me to put in extraordinary efforts to try and get value out of their product.
Last week I sat through a talk from one of our SVPs who said development is cheap and easy now, then he went on about the buy vs build debate for 20 minutes. It’s like he read a couple articles and drank the kool-aid. I also saw someone talking about ephemeral programs… seeing a future where if you want to listen to some MP3s, you’ll just type in a prompt to generate a bespoke music player. This would require AI to reliably one-shot apps like Winamp or iTunes in a few words from a layperson with no programming background. These are the ideas the hype machine is putting in people’s minds that seem detached from reality.
I don’t think the, “you’re holding it wrong”, type responses are a good defense. It’s more that it’s being marketed wrong, because all these companies need to maintain the hype to keep raising money. When people use the AI the way the hype tells them it should work… it doesn’t work.
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With this kind of workflow you run out of tokens quickly, in my experience.
I mainly use it in a work context where it’s not my money I burn. I do have a private subscription that I’m going to use for a project. Do you have any tips how to try and do kind of what I describe, but in a more cost sensitive way?
For context, I’ve built about 15k loc since Christmas on the $20 plan, plus $18 of extra usage. Since this is a side project, I only hit the limits once or twice per week.