Last week, curious what would be generated, told Cursor (with Claude Opus 4.5) to create an animated LED strip effect for an ESP32 device in C. Pretty simple stuff. It thinks for a long time. Creates a ton of scaffolding, docs, step-by-step agentic checklists, even a Makefile to build and deploy the binary. It then says: “Done.”
I go compile it. Lots of errors. I paste over the logs and ask it what’s wrong. Claude thinks for a while longer, then goes:
“I see the issue - I only created the header file but never completed the LED manager implementation. Let me check what’s there and finish the implementation.”
It said it had. Obviously, a fabrication. Even after it said it implemented it, it took a couple more hours of coaxing it and pointing whst should be done before it actually worked.
Point is, one shouldn’t go near these LLMs for coding unless they know what to do and how to look for problems.
Last week, curious what would be generated, told Cursor (with Claude Opus 4.5) to create an animated LED strip effect for an ESP32 device in C. Pretty simple stuff. It thinks for a long time. Creates a ton of scaffolding, docs, step-by-step agentic checklists, even a Makefile to build and deploy the binary. It then says: “Done.”
I go compile it. Lots of errors. I paste over the logs and ask it what’s wrong. Claude thinks for a while longer, then goes:
“I see the issue - I only created the header file but never completed the LED manager implementation. Let me check what’s there and finish the implementation.”
Could you try something else and when it says it’s done, ask it to check for errors first? Just curious, and not a programmer.
It said it had. Obviously, a fabrication. Even after it said it implemented it, it took a couple more hours of coaxing it and pointing whst should be done before it actually worked.
Point is, one shouldn’t go near these LLMs for coding unless they know what to do and how to look for problems.