[jazzyjackson]

Step 1: deposit money into an Anthropic API account

Step 2: download Zed and paste in your API Key

Step 3: Give detailed instructions to the assistant, including writing ReadMe files on the goal of the project and the current state of the project

Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision

Step 5: keep an eye on context size and start a new conversation every time you're half full. The more stuff in the context the dumber it gets.

I spent about 500 dollars and 16 hours of conversation to get an MVP static marketplace [0], a ruby app that can be crawled into static (and js-free!) files, without writing a single line of code myself, because I don't know ruby. This included a rather convoluted data import process, loading the database from XML files of a couple different schemas.

Only thing I had to figure out on my own was how to upload the 140,000 pages to cloudflare free tier.

[0] https://motorcycledealer.com/

[ErroneousBosh]

> Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision

Yeah I can't stop myself when I'm about to make a dumb decision, just look at my github repo. I ported Forth to a 1980s sampler and wrote DSP code on an 8-bit Arduino.

How am I going to stop a robot making dumb decisions?

Also, this all sounds like I'm doing a lot of skivvy work typing stuff in (which I hate) and not actually writing much code (which is the bit I like).

[hyperadvanced]

The robot will output text like “Oh, I see, the user wants me to make a Lovecraftian horror with asynchronous subprocess calls instead of HTTP endpoints, so I better suggest we reinstall the dependencies that are already installed so we can sacrifice this project to Mammoth”

It is at this point where you can say “NONONO YOU ABSOLUTE DONKEY stop that we just want a FastAPI endpoint!!” And it will go “You’re absolutely right, I was over complicating this!”

[jazzyjackson]

Correct.

I did waste about 20 minutes trying to do a recursive link following crawl (to write each rendered page to file), because Opus wanted to write a ruby task to do it. It wasn’t working so I googled it and found out link following is a built in feature of cURL…

[hyperadvanced]

I catch enough of these weird things where I don’t fully understand why it chose to do something, but understand that there’s a simpler way, where I tend to be skeptical of using it for anything I couldn’t do myself but am just too lazy to go in and punch the keys for. On that front, it’s great

[verdverm]

Step 1 is where Anthropic lost me.

1. If you don't use it soon enough, they keep it (shame on them, do the things you need to in order to be a money transmitter, you have billions of dollars)

2. Pay-go with billing warning and limits. You can use Claude like this through Google VertexAI

[littlestymaar]

> I spent about 500 dollars and 16 hours of conversation to get an MVP static marketplace

If I wasn't already convinced that agentic tools were slot machines, here's a very strong argument in favor of that theory…