[HN Gopher] Building Personal Software with Claude
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Building Personal Software with Claude
        
       Author : Philpax
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2025-02-09 18:39 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.nelhage.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.nelhage.com)
        
       | UncleEntity wrote:
       | I've been experimenting with Claude pretty heavily the last week
       | or so and the most frustrating thing is no matter how many time
       | you tell it to produce 'a full and complete' <whatever you're
       | working on> it just can't resist chopping out sections of code
       | and replacing with a placeholder comment.
       | 
       | It also hits its 'maximum limit allowed at this time' quite often
       | due to it's inability to understand its own environment and just
       | modify an existing software artifact rather than regenerating the
       | entire thing. I know it can do it, it knows it can do it because
       | it will tell you why it failed but it just wont do it for some
       | reason. Of course this comes after you manage to convince it to
       | quit removing sections of code so its context window is already
       | polluted from past failures.
       | 
       | I spent a solid three days trying to get it to successfully do a
       | somewhat simple thing (something that would've taken me an
       | afternoon if I dedicated myself to the task) just to see if it
       | could manage to do it and it failed horribly, multiple times,
       | even after it was able to say why it was failing, no matter how
       | many tries I gave it. And it's not like it is some impossible
       | task either, it was able to successfully (might I even say
       | impressively) accomplish the exact same task with no problems at
       | a smaller scale.
       | 
       | It's also pretty horrible at debugging, even if you tell it
       | exactly the problem, but that's just me testing the limits of
       | what it can do.
       | 
       | So, like TFA states, it is pretty amazing at smaller tasks but
       | utterly and completely fails at anything larger than a couple
       | hundred lines of code.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-02-09 23:01 UTC)