[sarchertech]

If you don’t have a very strong mental model for what you are working on Claude can very easily guide in you into building the wrong thing.

For example I’m working on a huge data migration right now. The data has to be migrated correctly. If there are any issues I want to fail fast and loud.

Claude hates that philosophy. No matter how many different ways I add my reasons and instructions to stop it to the context, it will constantly push me towards removing crashes and replacing them with “graceful error handling”.

If I didn’t have a strong idea about what I wanted, I would have let it talk me into building the wrong thing.

Claude has no taste and its opinions are mostly those of the most prolific bloggers. Treating Claude like a peer is a terrible idea unless you are very inexperienced. And even then I don’t know if that’s a good idea.

[timr]

> Claude has no taste and its opinions are mostly those of the most prolific bloggers.

I often think that LLMs are like a reddit that can talk. The more I use them, the more I find this impression to be true - they have encyclopedic knowledge at a superficial level, the approximate judgement and maturity of a teenager, and the short-term memory of a parakeet. If I ask for something, I get the statistical average opinion of a bunch of goons, unconstrained by context or common sense or taste.

That’s amazing and incredible, and probably more knowledgeable than the median person, but would you outsource your thinking to reddit? If not, then why would you do it with an LLM?

[prmph]

> they have encyclopedic knowledge at a superficial level, the approximate judgement and maturity of a teenager, and the short-term memory of a parakeet. If I ask for something, I get the statistical average opinion of a bunch of goons, unconstrained by context or common sense or taste.

Love this paragraph; it's exactly how I feel about the LLMs. Unless you really know what you are doing, they will produce very sub-optimal code, architecturally speaking. I feel like a strong acumen for proper software architecture is one of the main things that defines the most competent engineers, along with naming things properly. LLMs are a long, long way from having architectural taste

[flyinglizard]

Try asking to review your code as if it were Linus Torvalds. No, really.

[sarchertech]

I’ve tried that. I’ve experimented with a whole council of 13 personas including many famous developers. It’s definitely different. But it’s hasn’t performed significantly better in my tests.

[datavirtue]

Holding it wrong.

[oops]

That’s interesting to hear as for me Claude has been quite good about writing code that fails fast and loud and has specifically called it out more than once. It has also called out code that does not fail early in reviews.

[sarchertech]

If you add a single space to a prompt, you’ll get a completely different output, so it’s no surprise that feeding entirely different programs into the prompt produces radically different output.

My guess is that there must be something about the language(go) or the domain (a data migration tool that uses Kafka) that triggers this.

[flyinglizard]

You're right, data migration is a specific case where you have a very strong set of constraints.

I, on the other hand, am doing a new UI for an existing system, which is exactly where you want more freedom and experimentation. It's great for that!

[aforwardslash]

Have you created a plan where the requisite is not to bother you with x and y, and to use some predetermined approach? What you describe sometimes happens to me, but it happens less when its part of the spec.

[sarchertech]

Yes. That’s one of the things included in this.

> No matter how many different ways I add my reasons and instructions to stop it to the context

[justinclift]

> it will constantly push me towards removing crashes and replacing them with “graceful error handling”.

Is it generating JS code for that?

[sarchertech]

No this is a kafka consumer written in go.