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…
With this kind of workflow you run out of tokens quickly, in my experience.
Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
41–50 of 125 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#42Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#43Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#44Try this: * have Claude produce wireframes of the screens you want. Iterate on those and save them as images. * then develop. Make sure Claude has the ability to run the app, interact with controls, and take screenshots. * loop autonomously until the app looks like the wireframes. Feedback loops are required. Only very simple problems get one-shot.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#45Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#46The 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 we have an approach, I will ask it to create an implementation plan in a markdown file, I clear context and then tell it to implement the plan.
Check out the “brainstorming” skill and the “git worktrees” skill. They will usually trigger the planning -> implementation workflow when the work is complex enough.
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#47There 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…
Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#48Re: Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?
#49I’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.
Furthermore, and more generally, one of the great things about (traditional) coding is that it allows 'thinking through making' - by building something you learn more about the problem and thus how best to solve it. Code generation just leaves you with reviewing, which is less powerful in this way I believe. See also 'thinking through writing [prose]'.