[jprokay13]

I am coming back to this. I’ve been using Claude pretty hard at work and for personal projects, but the longer I do it, the more disappointed I become with the quality of output for anything bigger than a script. I do love planning things out and clarifying my thoughts. It’s a turbocharged rubber duck - but it’s not a great engineer

[searene]

Me too. I’ve been playing with various coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot for some time, and I would say that their most useful feature is educating me. For example, they can teach me a library I haven’t used before, or help me debug a production issue. Then I would choose to write the code by myself after I’ve figured everything out with their help. Writing code by myself is definitely faster in most cases.

[bootsmann]

> For example, they can teach me a library I haven’t used before.

How do you verify it is teaching you the correct thing if you don't have any baseline to compare it to?

[searene]

You are right, I don't have any baseline. I just try it and see if it works. One good thing about the software field is that I can compile and run the code for verification. It may not be optimal, but at least it's testable.

[bcrosby95]

My thoughts on scripts are: the output is pretty bad too, but it doesn't matter as much in a script, because its just a short script, and all that really matters is that it kinda works.

[utyop22]

What you're describing is a glorified mirror.

Doesn't that sound ridiculous to you?

[interstice]

That's what rubber ducking is

[utyop22]

It sounds better when you get more specific about what it is. Many people have fallen prey to this and gone a tad loopy.

[jprokay13]

I am still working on tweaking how I work and design with Claude to hopefully unlock a level of output that I’m happy with.

Admittedly, part of it is my own desire for code that looks a certain way, not just that which solves the problem.