…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.

  • OwOarchist@pawb.socialBannedEnglish
    6·
    11 days ago

    I find it works best when you give it a very small/simple task to do.

    If it’s a small/simple task, why do I need help at all?

    • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 days ago

      Because it might be something that needs to be done in lots of places. Or it may just be something you don’t want to do so you fire it off then go look at or work on something else.

      Now, that might be useless for your work flow, but not every tool is useful in every circumstance.

      And you can still use it for larger tasks, but often I need to come behind it and clean up its work. Just like you would an intern or junior dev.

    • lepinkainen@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 days ago

      Because the simple tasks are boring as fuck?

      If an LLM can generate 90% of a HTTP API correctly, why would you want to do it manually?

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialBannedEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        If an LLM can generate 90% of a HTTP API correctly, why would you want to do it manually?

        Because figuring out which 10% it did wrong and then fixing that will take longer and be more effort than just doing it from scratch myself.

        • lepinkainen@lemmy.world
          1·
          10 days ago

          You must type really fast then 😅

          I personally read code a fuckton faster than I write it. And tests are for determining correctness, reading is just a part of it.