Comment by LeBit

I’m a different person and definitely not a genius but my experience today goes even beyond theirs.

I had Opus trying to simplify a query for me which was slow - it ran for maybe 30 minutes, including writing and running tests, and came up with a refactor across 9 files with a couple hundred lines changed. I was looking through the output before moving onto the next step, and noticed something a little fishy- I said “why does it do x, isn’t that a more complex y?”

Opus thought for another 20-30 seconds then output “Actually that would make the majority of the diff irrelevant, if we do that change it is just these 4 lines in this single file instead.

So then I had it do that. 5-10 minutes of writing and testing and that was done.

So my company spent $25 in tokens and I spent probably an hour in total for a 4 line change that, in the days before Claude, I probably could have found the correct file and thought through the problem, understood the solution, and written the 4 lines of code myself. Probably in the same amount of time.

So basically there was no benefit at all for my time, an extra cost to the company of $25, and now I understand our codebase a little bit less instead of more if I had done all the work.

As good as Claude is at building greenfield projects it still struggles a lot at complex ones

It's not so much that I can code fast, it's that it takes a significant amount of time to tell the model what exactly I want the script to accomplish, and at that point I might as well write the script myself. And often, figuring out what I want the script to do is that hardest part, so it doesn't really matter whether writing the script takes 10% or 20% of the total time.