Comment by kjksf
8 hours ago
Fixing bugs is the goldilocks zone for ai. Especially if you have a test that the agent can use to test their fix.
AI is not a junior developer, as some analogise, but Rain Man. Ultra autistic entity that can chew through way more logical conditions that you.
As long as you can describe the bug well ai will likely fix it. Logs help.
Let me give you specific example.
Here's a fix made by claude to my SumatraPDF: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/commit/a571c0...
I have a crash reporting system that sends me crash information in text file: callstack of crashed thread, basic os info and logs of this execution.
The way I (well, claude) fixed this bug is: I said "analyze crash report: <paste crash report>" and it does it in under a minute.
Recently I've fixed at least 30 bugs with this process (you can view recent checkins).
Those are crashes that I found hard to fix because even though by human standard I'm both expert developer and expert Windows API developer.
But I'm not an autistic machine that can just connect the dots between how every windows api works and how it ties to the callstack and information from the log, in under a minute.
That fix is just the same code from earlier in that function pasted in again after another asynchronous procedure.
I feel like you’re probably just a worse engineer than you think you are if you needed Claude for this.
There's nothing I love more than unfounded arrogance.
How about you try to make a change to SumatraPDF code base.
Let's see how good of an engineer you are when you actually have to write a line of C++ code in complex codebase as opposed to commenting on a check in with an explanation of the issue and a fix.
Claude fixed this crash in a minute: https://gist.github.com/kjk/d22af052499f70a45708c311eef201ff
Why don't you tell me, smart man, what the fix it and how long it took you to figure out.
If you can do it in less than a day, then we can talk about how better of an engineer you are than me.