Comment by bluGill

9 hours ago

I've been trying Claude on my large code base today. When I give it the requirements I'd give an engineer and so "do it" it just writes garbage that doesn't make sense and doesn't seem to even meet the requirements (if it does I can't follow how - though I'll admit to giving up before I understood what it did, and I didn't try it on a real system). When I forced it to step back and do tiny steps - in TDD write one test of the full feature - it did much better - but then I spent the next 5 hours adjusting the code it wrote to meet our coding standards. At least I understand the code, but I'm not sure it is any faster (but it is a lot easier to see things wrong than come up with green field code).

Which is to say you have to learn to use the tools. I've only just started, and cannot claim to be an expert. I'll keep using them - in part because everyone is demanding I do - but to use them you clearly need to know how to do it yourself.

7 comments

bluGill

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simonw  9 hours ago

Have you tried showing it a copy of your coding standards?

I also find pointing it to an existing folder full of code that conforms to certain standards can work really well.

  • bflesch  9 hours ago

    Yeah let's share all your IP for the vague promise that it will somehow work ;)

    • simonw  8 hours ago

      You just gave me a revelation as to why some people report being unable to get decent results out of coding agents!

    • CamperBob2  6 hours ago

      (Shrug) If you're not willing to make that tradeoff, you'll be outcompeted by people who are. Your call.

rob  8 hours ago

I've been playing around with the "Superpowers" [0] plugin in Claude Code on a new small project and really like it. Simple enough to understand quickly by reading the GitHub repo and seems to improve the output quality of my projects.

There's basically a "brainstorm" /slash command that you go back and forth with, and it places what you came up with in docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md.

Then you can run a "write-plan" /slash command on the docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-design.md file, and it'll give you a docs/plans/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>-implementation.md file that you can then feed to the "execute-plan" /slash command, where it breaks everything down into batches, tasks, etc, and actually implements everything (so three /slash commands total.)

There's also "GET SHIT DONE" (GSD) [1] that I want to look at, but at first glance it seems to be a bit more involved than Superpowers with more commands. Maybe it'd be better for larger projects.

[0] https://github.com/obra/superpowers

[1] https://github.com/glittercowboy/get-shit-done