Not only you understanding the how, but you not understanding the goal.

I often use AI successfully, but in a few cases I had, it was bad. That was when I didn't even know the end goal and regularly switched the fundamental assumptions that the LLM tried to build up.

One case was a simulation where I wanted to see some specific property in the convergence behavior, but I had no idea how it would get there in the dynamics of the simulation or how it should behave when perturbed.

So the LLM tried many fundamentally different approaches and when I had something that specifically did not work it immediately switched approaches.

Next time I get to work on this (toy) problem I will let it implement some of them, fully parametrize them and let me have a go with it. There is a concrete goal and I can play around myself to see if my specific convergence criterium is even possible.

LLMs massively reduce the cost of "let's just try this". I think trying to migrate your entire repo is usually a fool's errand. Figure out a way to break the load-bearing part of the problem out into a sub-project, solve it there, iterate as much as you like. Claude can give you a test gui in one or two minutes, as often as you like. When you have it reliably working there, make Claude write up a detailed spec and bring that back to the main project.

Claude is surprisingly good at GUI work I've been learning, not just getting stuff working but also creating reasonably tasteful and practical designs. Asking claude in the browser to mock up a GUI and then having claude code implement it is a surprisingly powerful workflow.

I’m far away from a web developer or a web designer. But I think I intuitively understand how to put myself in the shoes of the end user when it comes to UX.

I noticed that Claude is awful at understanding what makes good UX even as simple as something as if you have a one line input box and button that lets you submit the line of text, you should wire it up so a user can press return instead of pressing the button or thinking about them being able to tab through inputs in a decent order

yeah as it's not using its own flow you have to give it a bit of feedback. so it goes with any dev work... I think you underestimate how bad programmer uis are.

Yup, same sort of experience. If I'm fishing for something based on vibes that I can't really visualize or explain, it's going to be a slog. That said, telling the LLM the nature of my dilemma up front, warning it that I'll be waffling, seems to help a little.