...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.
Also working on some 3d maths.
I've used the free versions a bit, but not really to the extent that I'd call it vibe coding. The chat bots often know where to find libraries or pre-existing functions that I don't know. It's also okay at algorithms for well defined problems, but it often says be careful not to do something I absolutely need to do or visea versa. It's very hit and miss on debugging. It'll point out obvious stuff (typos) reliably, and it can do some iteration stuff usually, but it usually doesn't pick up on other things. Once in a rare while it will impress me by suggesting I look at a particular thing, and I think it manages this better in new chats, but most complex issues fail for it. I use it as a faster stackoverflow, but you need to be able to work through the code yourself, understand what you're doing, and test that individual steps are doing what they need to do. The bots can't really do any sort of planning or breaking down a problem into sub-problems, and they really suck at thinking about 3d stuff.