Comment by trencedamp
2 hours ago
> But so far most of what they do is make more annoying work for me. More integrations to debug, more auth tokens to refresh, more bills to keep track of, more meandering and drawn out descriptions of non-bugs with bogus fix suggestions and misinformed “root cause” analyses. It’s tiresome.
God this times 1000. I'm so sick of having AI chase a bug and having to lead it by the hand like a toddler to try and help me solve bugs. The difference is, a toddler learns when you explain. An LLM holds your responses in context and uses them to generate more authentic sounding garbage, but next session, foomf, the lesson is unlearned again.
I had a tiny problem with prerendering not working on a react site last night, I must have spent close to an hour running commands it asked me to run like a moron, verifying dumb things I had already checked like "did the file actually upload to ftp" or had I restarted Apache or was there some magic htaccess file somewhere. Eventually I just gave up on Claude and tried some different paths in Apache virtual host settings and it worked.
Of course if I went back to Claude and reported that, as would be my instinct with a human, it would confidently explain why that was the bug, why it couldn't spot the issue, and how smart I am for finding it. And then it would forget everything tomorrow
I suspect the issue there was Claude, especially Opus 5, which just hates the idea that it could ever be wrong about anything.
> I'm so sick of having AI chase a bug and having to lead it by the hand like a toddler to try and help me solve bugs.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I can give it a vague description of the problem and have it find it pretty easily without any more input from me.
I do think there's a pretty big variation in tools and setups and what output people are getting. I'm now just using OpenAI Codex in VS Code and it churns through problems like they're nothing.
Sometimes I have to get it to not over-engineer a solution; not because it's necessarily wrong but because I don't need that much correctness.