Initially I loved it, overtime I agree with people that call it a slot machine, unless you’re very deliberate with it, it’d just that. Gambling.

This isn’t a fair representation at all.

I’ve been delighting all of my tedious tasks with as much context as I would give a person, and my personal win rate at this is substantially higher than I expected.

If you give it trash and expect gold, sure, gambling.

Which is what I meant by, "you need to be very deliberate with it", you have to spend a lot of time on the inputs to get good outputs. Which makes it feel a fair bit less like "Intelligence" and a lot more like a calculator.

Context is everything. Whether they were talking to your junior employee, or to an LLM, if you don’t say what it is, you want don’t be surprised when it’s left to interpretation and comes out wrong.

Specifically, Claude coat is really good at making markdown files of plans and if you review them add in context, you can let it run a little more free than you would otherwise.

If you don’t feel like giving it, the right amount of context, make the job smaller, where there’s just less of it to begin with.

I wouldn’t tell my interns to change the formatting of these printf statements, because I don’t feel like it, but Claude does that stuff pretty great and doesn’t complain as much.

I asked it to implement a C++ backend for an audio plug-in API (CLAP) for the DAW I'm developing and it got it right in maybe less than ten interactions. Implementing other plug-in APIs such as VST3 took me weeks to get to the same level of support.

You're probably in an obscure niche domain, or asking it to do something creative.

Try like upgrading JS package dependencies, or translating between languages, limited tedious things, and you will be surprised how much better it does.

Hmmmm.. I am working in a niche domain (Confidential Computing) and the work is fairly creative, although I wouldn't say I asked it domain-specific things. I didn't ask it to come up with encryption schemes or security protocols, I learned very quickly that it cannot even start on those problems. "Design discussions" were just sycophantic affirmations of whatever I wrote. What I mostly tried were "add this function" or "refactor this based on XY" or "analyze this piece of code for race conditions".

(Un?)fortunately my work doesn't involve a lot of "drone coding". With personal projects I let it do whatever it wanted including picking the language and libraries. With one of them it ended up so confused with the Redis API(!!!) that it kept going back and forth between different versions to "fix" the issues until it literally removed the functionality it was supposed to add. Problem solved, eh?

Oh I've definitely seen that too, even with common front-end stuff.

I think people might be exaggerating how much they are out of the loop. Claude often needs to be guided away from stupid decisions, and it will absolutely delete code in order to "fix" a problem.

Still, it saves me work on tedious stuff, and makes it more pleasant. I wouldn't ask it to do anything I don't understand, unless I don't care about the result.

I'd add, ask it to ask you questions! That way you can make sure it understands the problem.