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0 pointsWowfunhappy1y ago0 comments

Here's an experience I've had with Claude Code several times:

1. I'll tell Claude Code to fix a bug.

2. Claude Code will fail, and after a few rounds of explaining the error and asking it to try again, I'll conclude this issue is outside the AI's ability to handle, and resign myself to fixing it the old fashioned way.

3. I'll start actually looking into the bug on my own, and develop a slightly deeper understanding of the problem on a technical level. I still don't understand every layer to the point where I could easily code a solution.

4. I'll once again ask Claude Code to fix the bug, this time including the little bit I learned in #3. Claude Code succeeds in one round.

I'd thought I'd discovered a limit to what the AI could do, but just the smallest bit of digging was enough to un-stick the AI, and I still didn't have to actually write the code myself.

(Note that I'm not a professional programmer and all of this is happening on hobby projects.)

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sdesol1y ago· 2 in thread

> I once again ask Claude Code to fix the bug, this time including the little bit I learned in #3. Claude Code fixes the problem in one round.

Context is king, which makes sense since LLM output is based on probability. The more context you can provide it, the more aligned the output will be. It's not like it magically learned something new. Depending on the problem, you may have to explain exactly what you want. If the problem is well understood, a sentence would most likely be suffice.

the_snooze1y ago

>If the problem is well understood, a sentence would most likely be suffice.

I feel this falls flat for the rather well-bounded use case I really want: a universal IDE that can set up my environment with a buildable/runnable boilerplate "hello world" for arbitrary project targets. I tried vibe coding an NES 6502 "hello world" program with Cursor and it took way more steps (and missteps) than me finding an existing project on GitHub and cloning that.

WowfunhappyOP1y ago

Absolutely! What surprises me is how rarely I actually have to get all the way down to writing the code myself.

theshrike791y ago

I had Claude go into a loop because I have cat aliased as bat

It wanted to check a config json file, noticed that it had missing commas between items (because bat prettifies the json) and went into a forever loop of changing the json to add the commas (that were already there) and checking the result by 'cat'ing the file (but actually with bat) and again finding out they weren't there. GOTO 10

The actual issue was that Claude had left two overlapping configuration parsing methods in the code. One with Viper (The correct one) and one 1000% idiotic string search system it decided to use instead of actually unmarshaling the JSON :)

I had to use pretty explicit language to get it stop fucking with the config file and look for the issue elsewhere. It did remember it, but forgot on the next task of course. I should've added the fact to the rule file.

(This was a vibe coding experiment, I was being purposefully obtuse about not understanding the code)

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