…and I still don’t get it. I paid for a month of Pro to try it out, and it is consistently and confidently producing subtly broken junk. I had tried doing this before in the past, but gave up because it didn’t work well. I thought that maybe this time it would be far along enough to be useful.
The task was relatively simple, and it involved doing some 3d math. The solutions it generated were almost write every time, but critically broken in subtle ways, and any attempt to fix the problems would either introduce new bugs, or regress with old bugs.
I spent nearly the whole day yesterday going back and forth with it, and felt like I was in a mental fog. It wasn’t until I had a full night’s sleep and reviewed the chat log this morning until I realized how much I was going in circles. I tried prompting a bit more today, but stopped when it kept doing the same crap.
The worst part of this is that, through out all of this, Claude was confidently responding. When I said there was a bug, it would “fix” the bug, and provide a confident explanation of what was wrong… Except it was clearly bullshit because it didn’t work.
I still want to keep an open mind. Is anyone having success with these tools? Is there a special way to prompt it? Would I get better results during certain hours of the day?
For reference, I used Opus 4.6 Extended.
Your experience with Junior devs has been quite different from mine.
I work with Junior devs because someday they will be senior devs who owe me a favon, even though they’ve always only costed me time.
Edit: I also work with junior devs because sometimes a tiny corner of my job is both mind-numbingly boring, and also weirdly difficult to automate away.
I assign that work to junior devs because I don’t want to do it.
In doing so, I am wasting the boss’s money, since I could do it faster.
But I consider it but just another part of the price of hiring me, because it keeps me happy.