…and I still don’t get it. I paid for a month of Pro to try it out, and it is consistently and confidently producing subtly broken junk. I had tried doing this before in the past, but gave up because it didn’t work well. I thought that maybe this time it would be far along enough to be useful.
The task was relatively simple, and it involved doing some 3d math. The solutions it generated were almost write every time, but critically broken in subtle ways, and any attempt to fix the problems would either introduce new bugs, or regress with old bugs.
I spent nearly the whole day yesterday going back and forth with it, and felt like I was in a mental fog. It wasn’t until I had a full night’s sleep and reviewed the chat log this morning until I realized how much I was going in circles. I tried prompting a bit more today, but stopped when it kept doing the same crap.
The worst part of this is that, through out all of this, Claude was confidently responding. When I said there was a bug, it would “fix” the bug, and provide a confident explanation of what was wrong… Except it was clearly bullshit because it didn’t work.
I still want to keep an open mind. Is anyone having success with these tools? Is there a special way to prompt it? Would I get better results during certain hours of the day?
For reference, I used Opus 4.6 Extended.
Don’t jump right in to coding.
Take a feature you want, and use the plan feature to break it down. Give the plan a read. Make sure you have tests covering the files it says it’ll need to touch. If not, add tests (can use LLM for that as well).
Then let the LLM work. Success rates for me are around 80% or higher for medium tasks (30 mins–1 hour for me without LLM, 15–30 mins with one, including code review)
If a task is 5 mins or so, it’s usually a hit or miss (since planning would take longer). For tasks longer than 1 hour or so, it depends. Sometimes the code is full of simple idioms that the LLM can easily crush it. Other times I need to actively break it down into digestible chunks