[libraryofbabel]

As an extension of this idea: for some tasks, rather than asking Claude Code to do a thing, you can often get better results from asking Claude Code to write and run a script to do the thing.

Example: read this log file and extract XYZ from it and show me a table of the results. Instead of having the agent read in the whole log file into the context and try to process it with raw LLM attention, you can get it to read in a sample and then write a script to process the whole thing. This works particularly well when you want to do something with math, like compute a mean or a median. LLMs are bad at doing math on their own, and good at writing scripts to do math for them.

A lot of interesting techniques become possible when you have an agent that can write quick scripts or CLI tools for you, on the fly, and run them as well.

[derefr]

It's a bit annoying that you have to tell it to do it, though. Humans (or at least programmers) "build the tools to solve the problem" so intuitively and automatically when the problem starts to "feel hard", that it doesn't often occur to the average programmer that LLMs don't think like this.

When you tell an LLM to check the code for errors, the LLM could simply "realize" that the problem is complex enough to warrant building [or finding+configuring] an appropriate tool to solve the problem, and so start doing that... but instead, even for the hardest problems, the LLM will try to brute-force a solution just by "staring at the code really hard."

(To quote a certain cartoon squirrel, "that trick never works!" And to paraphrase the LLM's predictable response, "this time for sure!")

[libraryofbabel]

As the other commenter said, these days Claude Code often does actually reach for a script on its own, or for simpler tasks it will do a bash incantation with grep and sed.

That is for tasks where a programmatic script solution is a good idea though. I don't think your example of "check the code for errors" really falls in that category - how would you write a script to do that? "Staring at the code really hard" to catch errors that could never have been caught with any static analysis tool is actually where an LLM really shines! Unless by "check for errors" you just meant "run a static analysis tool", in which case sure, it should run the linter or typechecker or whatever.

[derefr]

Running “the” existing configured linter (or what-have-you) is the easy problem. The interesting question is whether the LLM would decide of its own volition to add a linter to a project that doesn’t have one; and where the invoking user potentially doesn’t even know that linting is a thing, and certainly didn’t ask the LLM to do anything to the project workflow, only to solve the immediate problem of proving that a certain code file is syntactically valid / “not broken” / etc.

After all, solving an immediate problem that seems like it could come up again, by “taking the opportunity” to solve the problem from now on by introducing workflow automation to solve the problem, is what an experienced human engineer would likely do in such a situation (if they aren’t pressed for time.)

[theshrike79]

I've had multiple cases where it will rather write a script to test a thing than actually adding a damn unit test for it :)

[lloeki]

> Humans (or at least programmers) "build the tools to solve the problem" so intuitively and automatically when the problem starts to "feel hard", that it doesn't often occur to the average programmer that LLMs don't think like this.

Hmm. My experience of "the average programmer" doesn't look like yours and looks more like the LLM :/

I'm constantly flabbergasted as to how way too many devs fumble through digging into logs or extracting information or what have you because it simply doesn't occur to them that tools can be composed together.

[phito]

> Humans (or at least programmers) "build the tools to solve the problem" so intuitively and automatically

From my experience, only a few rare devs do this. Most will stick with (broken/wrong) GUI tools they know made by others, by convenience.

[kuboble]

I have the opposite experience.

I used claude to translate my application and I asked him to translate each text in the application to his best abilities.

That worked great for one view, but when I asked him to translate the rest of the application in the same fashion he got lazy and started to write a script to substitute some words instead of actually translating sentences.

[visarga]

Cursor likes to create one-off scripts, yesterday it filled a folder with 10 of them until it figured out a bug. All the while I was thinking - will it remember to delete the scripts or is it going to spam me like that?

[coldtea]

>It's a bit annoying that you have to tell it to do it, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4

[posix86]

Cursor does this for me already all the time though, give that another shot maybe. For refactoring tasks in particular; it uses regex to find interesting locations , and the other day after maybe 10 of slow "ok now let me update this file... ok now let me update this file..." it suddenly paused, looked at the pattern so far, and then decided to write a python script to do the refactoring & executed it. For some reason it considered its work done even though the files didn't even pass linters but thats' polish.

[alexchantavy]

+1, cursor and Claude code do this automatically for me. Take a big analysis task and they’ll write python scripts to find the needles in the haystacks that I’m looking through

[visarga]

Yeah, I had Cursor refactor a large TypeScript file today and it used a script to do it. I was impressed.

[miki123211]

Codex is a lot better at this. It will even try this on its own sometimes. It also has much better sandboxing (which means it needs approvals far less often), which makes this much faster.

[calgoo]

Same here, I have a SQLite db that I have let it look over and extract data. I let it build the scripts then I run them as they would timeout if not and I don't want Claude sitting waiting for 30 min. So I do all the data investigations with Claude as a expert who can traverse the data much faster then me.

[silisili]

I've noticed Claude doing this for most tasks without even asking it to. Maybe a recent thing?

[alecco]

Yes. But not always. It's better if you add a line somewhere reminding it.