...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.
This is our new bottleneck too. Developers roles are shifting to spec writers and code reviewers more and more. I don't think I'd call this wasted effort though (unless the code produced is worse than what developers would have produced otherwise). I'd think of it as a good problem to have.
We're doing several things to alleviate this, and I'm genuinely curious how other teams are handling this too.
thanks for the response. for what its worth, most people I ask this question to are attempting some form of your first bulletpoint. I think we're on the right track there, it only makes sense.
speaking for myself, your second point is the silver lining of all this, to me. ive never had this kind of pressure before, but I hope that its the kind of pressure that makes me a better dev instead of burning me out.
cheers!