…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.
I’ve also started using it recently and I’m not sure if the way I’m doing it is particularly “right”.
I don’t have a lot of knowledge of practical coding practices because in school we literally had a new project every two weeks so I never learned things like you need unit tests or proper architectural design. It was mostly making sure whatever project there was that week ran and didn’t crash.
So now I’m working as a sysadmin doing the random junk a sysadmin gets pushed on them. What I’ve been doing is telling it my project plan, Claude will write up something that looks better, and I continue to have a back and forth about architecture and libraries, asking it if it thinks any particular idea is good or bad, until I get to a place I’m happy.
Then because I want to learn rust and implement it myself, I’m having Claude basically guide me through creating it like a teacher would, with it taking on a very Socratic tone (“now that we’ve done this, what do you think is the next step?” “We have a list of CSVs so what do you need to do to read their values?”). And I’ve been moving forward but by bit like this.
I don’t know if it’s a particularly good way, honestly, I’d love feedback from anyone who’s done something similar or whatever!