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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?

#71

Post by al_borland »

phtrivier wrote: post #23
aristofun wrote: post #9

If 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…

> LLMs make wonders on bootstrapping a greenfield project. Unfortunately, you tend to only do this only once ;)

This is why LLMs look so impressive in demos. Demos are nearly always greenfield, small in scale, and as long as it launches, it looks successful.

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

#72

Post by coffeefirst »

heyts wrote: post #25

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.

Yes. I’m trying it, it’s too early for me to state a conclusion, but it’s not clear what the point is of an interface that requires magic touch best described as je ne sais quoi.

The alternative to this isn’t even necessarily no AI, just not using it this way.

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

#73

Post by domjmich »

It was a bit of a learning curve for me as well. I've found having programming experience comes in handy. I know a lot of non-technical folks (people who don't know how to program) who keep bumping their heads on these tools; crunching through credits when a simple update to the code/push to repo is all that's needed.

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

#74

Post by chrismarlow9 »

Not nearly enough context to be a front page post but here we are. Does everyone just give up on all fundamental expectations including determinism when they see AI in the title? Is the AI final boss to take over the front page of hacker news? /rant

To answer the question I would highlight the wrong regions in neon green manually via code. Now feed the code (zipped if necessary) to the AI along with a screenshot. Now give it relatable references for the code and say "xxxx css class/gtk code/whatever is highlighted in the screenshot in neon. I expect it to be larger but it's not, why?"

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

#75

Post by UncleEntity »

oatmealsnap wrote: post #46

There are skills available that might help you out. The “superpowers” set from Anthropic is really impressive. The idea is, you want to build up the right context before starting development. I will either describe exactly what I want to build, or I ask the agent for guidance on different approaches. Sometimes I’ll even do this in a separate Claude (not Claude Code) conversation, which I feel works a bit faster. Once…

The problem I run into is the propensity for it to cheat so you can't trust the code it produces.

For example, I have this project where the idea is to use code verification to ensure the code is correct, the stated goal of the project is to produce verified software and the daffy robot still can't seem to understand that the verification part is the critical piece so... it cheats on them so they pass. I had the newest Claude Code (4.6?) look over the tests on the day it was released and the issues it found were really, really bad.

Now, the newest plan is to produce a tool which generates the tests from a DSL so they can't be made to pass and/or match buggy code instead of the clearly defined specification. Oh, I guess I didn't mention there's an actual spec for what we're trying to do which is very clear, in fact it should be relatively trivial to ensure the tests match for some super-human coding machine.

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

#76

Post by LennyHenrysNuts »

cladopa wrote: post #32

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…

It's like managing a team of 6-8 year olds.

Put that down! What are you doing? Don't put that in your mouth. Where are you going? Stop that! Why are you sitting there alone, Johnny?

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

#77

Post by awesomeusername »

al_borland wrote: post #69
awesomeusername wrote: post #56

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…

The problem is that it’s being marketed like it’s magic and will make people obsolete… not as a tool with a high learning curve. 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,…

Are you saying that with the models from 3 years ago, with the right context management and prompting, your C snake game would fail?

I agree with you, expectations are not being set correctly.

That's my point. Learn to use the tools, including as they were three years ago, and magic does happen

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

#79

Post by al_borland »

awesomeusername wrote: post #77
al_borland wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it’s being marketed like it’s magic and will make people obsolete… not as a tool with a high learning curve. 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,…

Are you saying that with the models from 3 years ago, with the right context management and prompting, your C snake game would fail? I agree with you, expectations are not being set correctly. That's my point. Learn to use the tools, including as they were three years ago, and magic does happen

I gave it a basic one or two sentences prompt for the snake game, the code it generated wouldn’t compile 3 years ago. It was also unable to fix the errors. A similar prompt last week worked. It wasn’t a “good” version of the game, but it compiled and functioned.

The process being described by many in the comments removes all the magic. It sounds laborious and process heavy. It removes the part of the job I like, while loading the job with more work I don’t enjoy. This feels like the opposite of what we should want AI to do.

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