Comment by black_knight
18 hours ago
My experience was similar to yours, upon till earlier this year. Now the code which comes out of Claude code is acceptable most of the time.
It usually takes me two or three iterations to get there though. Discussing design and principles before writing the bulk of the code is a must. And then a pass or two of review to weed out ugliness.
Still saves time compared to writing the code by hand. Especially for tricky things, where type checking and tests can verify correctness.
>It usually takes me two or three iterations to get there though.
That's the whole problem with AI imo and I think the slot machine analogy is mostly right. It's just not predictable whatsoever and then you won't even be able to review all of the thousands of lines of code that you generate. You never know what you get and this has some serious safety implications that are not acceptable. Yes, it's fine as chat to just generate some snippets here and there that can be easily reviewed. Agentic coding is horrible imo.
> It usually takes me two or three iterations to get there though. Discussing design and principles before writing the bulk of the code is a must. And then a pass or two of review to weed out ugliness.
Am I crazy, or hasn't it been this good for a very long time? The ability to get code out of it after correcting it, correcting it, specifying and respecifying, instrumenting and reinstrumenting, reviewing and demanding refactoring, "no not like that", etc. has been there (for me) nearly from the start. They're great when you're working on something you're not an expert at, and fine if you're working on something that you are pretty good at (if you like to have a cheerleader that sometimes trips and falls on her face.)
My problem is that they don't understand some things that are very clear, and after you've corrected them to get them on track, you're exhausted. You put all of those corrections into a file for them so that when they make the same mistake in the next session you won't have to wrack your brain correcting them, then they a) ignore the file, or b) make a bunch of spurious objections because they were all ready to object and the saved response killed all of the content of those objections. They still seem remarkably dumb.
>>after you've corrected them to get them on track
They all still insist on serving bash code for FreeBSD where bash is not native. I've had to correct them all this whole year and they apologize profusely but, the next time, still use bash.
Note: you can install and run bash on FreeBSD. It's just not in the base installation or usage and I do not use it there.
I've explained to Claude Opus and Fable how rg is recursive by default so they shouldn't run it with -r. It's in my CLAUDE.md file. It's in a memory too. And still the newest versions of those models make the mistake several times per week.