...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.
I've just started recently using Claude after being very unimpressed with Copilot, but my current theory is that you should treat everything it writes like a PoC that you found in some obscure github repo. Use it as a reference that you can generate quickly, take out only the good parts, adapt them to your context. It's harder to delete code than to write it, so it's easier to just take what you like from its output, rather than try to clean up all the nonsense it generates.
How accurate that is and how useful it is compared to just writing it from scratch varies a lot based on your particular project. You still need a good understanding of the output it produces, otherwise those subtle bugs and low quality adds up. The times it's the most useful are when it writes a lot of stuff that I would've written myself, but I can point to some detail and say "that's wrong, I'll write it myself".