It's not unusual for my initial output (as a programmer) not to compile either. I wouldn't say I "failed" if I can then get it to compile. Which as people are saying, is what happens with Claude Code and Opus, either automatically or at most when I say "get it to compile".

But when it doesn’t compile for me, I don’t claim it’s finished.

Something is really wrong with your setup and I can't tell what it is from these high-level descriptions. Would you be willing to hop on a videochat and walk through this simple case? I'd be really curious to figure out what's going on, it's pretty atypical.

Hmm…if you’re giving only one prompt to Claude Code, and allowing it only one output, then I’m no longer baffled at why you’re not getting good results. That’s not how it works. (That’s not how it works when I write code myself, either!)

I mean, I don’t know how much less scope I can give it. The next step is writing the 5 lines of code I want it to write.

I also clearly said I didn’t allow it one output, I gave it the compile error message, it changed a different line, I told it it was at the affected line and to check the docs. Claude code then tried to query the DLL for the function, abandoned that and then did something else incorrect.

I’m literally asking it to install a package and copy the example from the readme

I understand (and don’t know what to say beyond “that’s weird”). I was just reacting to your equating “the first try sometimes doesn’t compile” with “it often fails”. That’s only a failure if you stop at that point.

In the first comment you’ll see that it didn’t compile, I prompted to fix it and eventually fixed it myself. When I asked it to proceed to the next task it blew away my fix and left it in a broken state.