Comment by sensanaty
5 months ago
In any moderately sized codebase it's basically useless indeed. Pretty much all the praise and hype I ever see is from people making todo-list-tier applications and shouting with excitement how this is going to replace all of humanity.
Hell, I still have to remind it (Cursor) to not give me fucking React a few messages after I've already told it to not give me React (it's a Vue application with not a single line of React in it). Genuinely maddening, but the infinite wisdom of the higher ups forces me into wasting my time with this crap
There's a middle ground, I find.
Absolutely, when tasked with something quite complex in a complex code base, it doesn't really work. It can get you some of the way there, and some of the code it produces gives you great ideas on where to go from, but it doesn't work.
But there are certainly some tasks where it excels. I asked it to refactor a rather gnarly function (C++), and it did a great job at decomposing it. The initial decomposition was a bit naive: the original function took in a vector, and would parse what the function & data from the vector, and the decomposition split out the functions, but the data still came in as a vector. For instance, one of the functions took a filename, and file contents, and it took it as element 0 and element 1 from a vector, when it should obviously be two parameters. But some further prompting and it took it to the end.
Claude's predilection and evangelism for React is frustrating. Many times I have used it as search with a question like "In the Python library X how do I do Z?" And I'll get a React widget that computes what I was trying to compute.
I have the opposite experience. I'm incredibly produce with 3.5 in Agent/Composer mode. I wonder if it's something to do with the size of the Vue community (and thus the training data available) versus React.