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by multidude 84 days ago
I don't use ChatGPT, but i've been using an agent with Claude Sonnet 4. My answer may not be useful to you, but i'll talk about my experience with that and hope it may help you.

So this AI Agent... It is much faster at doing code when given specific instructions. But it keeps loosing context on architecture, and i cant really let it build complex things with interdependencies that build on each other. At times it feels like doing pair programming with a guy who is so crazy fast that im left behind with my head spinning, wondering how we just jumped from a hello world to a working thing that would have taken me ten iterations. And i get a bad feel when i then wonder how is this app doing what it does? because my agent cant explain it, and i would be stupid to believe what it hallucinated because it sounds really solid until you scratch the construction.

At the beginning i was almost euphoric about my new friend, now im sometimes disappointed, sometimes confused, but i am learning to give better, more concise instructions, to do smaller development jumps. It is tempting to set a long haul goal and let it do. But, i think for now, even if it is much faster at the small things, it would be also faster to build a catastrophic spaghetti code nightmare if not used with great care.

1 comments

> I don't use ChatGPT, but i've been using an agent with Claude Sonnet 4.

Are you using Sonnet 4.6?

> So this AI Agent... It is much faster at doing code when given specific instructions. But it keeps loosing context on architecture, and i cant really let it build complex things with interdependencies that build on each other.

I've only built small things (< 1000 lines) with the systems, so I might be missing this problem.

Is it better than you at building small self-contained things?

> And i get a bad feel when i then wonder how is this app doing what it does? because my agent cant explain it, and i would be stupid to believe what it hallucinated because it sounds really solid until you scratch the construction.

Do you ask it to generate test suites for the things that it builds?

> it would be also faster to build a catastrophic spaghetti code nightmare if not used with great care.

noted

i started working with this two weeks ago, so im learning as i go (or should i say stumble and fall). Weird as it may sound what i found so trustworthy at the beginning, it sounded so rational and logic as it really knew better and i liked letting it do. Obviously it dis not go so well, and i had to correct a lot. But i am learning, what can i say? And yes, i gave it many commandements like "thouh shalt always test before releasing" and it sounded so convincing when it confirmed what an excellent idea that was that i was surprised at least -imagine that- when something did not go as planned on prod because of , well you know...
Did you tell it that it should test, or did you have it generate actual tests that you could run if you wanted to?