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The highest quality codebase

gricha.dev

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Re: The highest quality codebase

#31

Post by mingus88 »

rtp4me wrote: post #22
kderbyma wrote: post #3

Yeah. I noticed Claud suffers when it reaches context overload - its too opinionated, so it shortens its own context with decisions I would not ever make, yet I see it telling itself that the shortcuts are a good idea because the project is complex...then it gets into a loop where it second guesses its own decisions and forgets the context and then continues to spiral uncontrollably into deeper and deeper failures -…

For me, too many compactions throughout the day eventually lead to a decline in Claude's thinking ability. And, during that time, I have given it so much context to help drive the coding interaction. Thus, restarting Claude requires me to remember the small bits of "nuggets" we discovered during the last session so I find myself repeating the same things every day (my server IP is: xxx, my client IP is: yyy, the code…

Shouldn't you put those things you keep repeating into CLAUDE.md?

Re: The highest quality codebase

#33

Post by rtp4me »

mingus88 wrote: post #31
rtp4me wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, too many compactions throughout the day eventually lead to a decline in Claude's thinking ability. And, during that time, I have given it so much context to help drive the coding interaction. Thus, restarting Claude requires me to remember the small bits of "nuggets" we discovered during the last session so I find myself repeating the same things every day (my server IP is: xxx, my client IP is: yyy, the code…

Shouldn't you put those things you keep repeating into CLAUDE.md?

Perhaps, but I already have a CLAUDE.md file for the general coding session. Unique items I stumble upon each day probably should go into another file that can be dynamically updated. Maybe I should create a /slash command for this?

Edit: Shortly after posting this, I asked Claude the same type of question (namely how to persist pieces of data between each coaching session). I just learned about Claude's Memory System - the ability to store these pieces of data between coding sessions. I learn something new every day!

Re: The highest quality codebase

#34

Post by airstrike »

plufz wrote: post #25
xnorswap wrote: post #18

Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems. "Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could. "Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest. It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all " Recommended " about it, but when I pointed out that the…

I think slash commands are great to help Claude with this. I have many like /code:dry /code:clean-code etc that has a semi long prompt and references to longer docs to review code from a specific perspective. I think it atleast improves Claude a bit in this area. Like processes or templates for thinking in broader ways. But yes I agree it struggles a lot in this area.

Somewhat tangential but interestingly I'd hate for Claude to make any changes with the intent of sticking to "DRY" or "Clean Code".

Neither of those are things I follow, and either way design is better informed by the specific problems that need to be solved rather than by such general, prescriptive principles.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#35

Post by whatshisface »

thevillagechief wrote: post #7
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m keeping Claude’s tasks small and focused, then if I can I clear between. It’s REAL FUCKING TEMPTING to say ”hey Claude, go do this thing that would take me hours and you seconds” because he will happily, and it’ll kinda work. But one way or another you are going to put those hours in. It’s like programming… is proof of work.

Yes, this is exactly true. You will put in those hours.

In this vein, one of the biggest time-savers has turned out to be its ability to make me realize I don't want to do something.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#37

Post by bikeshaving »

https://github.com/Gricha/macro-photo/blob/highest-quality/l...

The logger library which Claude created is actually pretty simple, highly approachable code, with utilities for logging the timings of async code and the ability to emit automatic performance warnings.

I have been using LogTape (https://logtape.org) for JavaScript logging, and the inherited, category-focused logging with different sinks has been pretty great.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#39

Post by f311a »

pawelduda wrote: post #30
f311a wrote: post #10

I like to ask LLMs to find problems o improvements in 1-2 files. They are pretty good at finding bugs, but for general code improvements, 50-60% edits are trash. They add completely unnecessary stuff. If you ask them to improve a pretty well-written code, they rarely say it's good enough already. For example, in a functional-style codebase, they will try to rewrite everything to a class. I have to adjust the prompt t…

If you just ask it to find problems, it will do its best to find them - like running a while loop with no return condition. That's why I put some breaker in the prompt, which in this case would be "don't make any improvements if the positive impact is marginal". I've mostly seen it do nothing and just summarize why, followed by some suggestions in case I still want to force the issue

I guess "marginal impact" for them is a pretty random metric, which will be different on each run. Will try it next time.

Another problem is that they try to add handling of different cases that are never present in my data. I have to mention that there is no need to update handling to be more generalized. For example, my code handles PNG files, and they add JPG handling that never happens.

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