It feels to me like I'm stuck doing code reviews for a junior dev all day so I use it as little as possible and mostly to look for things I may have missed.
For example, yesterday I came across some unit tests that didn't have error messages in their assertions. Normally, it takes me ~10 minutes to fix a handful of tests in this situation. In this case, I gave a 2-3 sentence prompt, went to the bathroom, and reviewed the result after I washed my hands. Saved me a bunch of time!
I encourage you to accept a feeling of "imposter syndrome" when using it, and keep trying new things with it. Don't feel like you have to be hands off, except when you're confident that you can be. (IE, if you think you need to spend 30+ minutes on mindless refactoring, see if you can explain it to an agent and then look at HN while it runs. You might get a good result, otherwise, it probably was time for a break anyway.)
BTW: It's important to try different models. The Claude 5.0 models are slow and give me bad results, so I'm sticking with 4.x for now.
Yes it's so useful for mechanical changes, refactors, and creating similar but slightly different components etc. It turns out that when you feed the word prediction machine a bunch of examples of what you want, and then some text that it can use to predict more text, it can do a good job!
The hard part is what text you feed it and how to judge the output.
For example, yesterday I came across some unit tests that didn't have error messages in their assertions. Normally, it takes me ~10 minutes to fix a handful of tests in this situation. In this case, I gave a 2-3 sentence prompt, went to the bathroom, and reviewed the result after I washed my hands. Saved me a bunch of time!
I encourage you to accept a feeling of "imposter syndrome" when using it, and keep trying new things with it. Don't feel like you have to be hands off, except when you're confident that you can be. (IE, if you think you need to spend 30+ minutes on mindless refactoring, see if you can explain it to an agent and then look at HN while it runs. You might get a good result, otherwise, it probably was time for a break anyway.)
BTW: It's important to try different models. The Claude 5.0 models are slow and give me bad results, so I'm sticking with 4.x for now.