[inetknght]

On the other hand, I've been using Claude Code for the past several months at work in several C++ projects. It's been fine at understanding C++. It just generates a lot of boilerplate, doesn't follow DRY, and gets persnickety with tests.

I've started adding this to all of my new conversations and it seems to help:

    You are a principal software engineer. I report to you. Do not modify files. Do not write prose. Only provide observations and suggestions so that I can learn from you.

My question to the LLM then follows in the next paragraph. Foregoing most of the LLM's code-writing capabilities in favor of giving observations and ideas seems to be a much better choice for productivity. It can still lead me down rabbit holes or wrong directions, but at least I don't have to deal with 10 pages of prose in its output or 50 pages of ineffectual code.

[tarnith]

Yeah, it's a decent rubber duck.

As soon as it starts trying to write actual code or generate a bunch of files it's less than helpful very quickly.

Perhaps I haven't tried enough, but I'm entirely unsold on this for anything lower level.

[dustbunny]

Gemini & ChatGPT have not done well at writing or analyzing OpenGL like rendering code for me, as well. And for many algorithms, it's not good at explaining them as well. And for some of the classical algorithms, like cascading shadow mapping, even articles written by people and example source code that I found is wrong or incomplete.

Learning "the old ways" is certainly valuable, because the AIs and the resources available are bad at these old ways.