Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

Posted by bblcla 2 days ago

Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them(www.approachwithalacrity.com)

297 points | 211 commentspage 3

joduplessis 12 hours ago|

Recently I've put Claude/others to use in some agentic workflows with easy menial/repetitive tasks. I just don't understand how people are using these agents in production. The automation is absolutely great, but it requires an insane amount of hand-holding and cleanup.

baq 12 hours ago||

Automate hand holding and cleanup obviously. (Also known as ‘harness’.)

iamacyborg 20 hours ago||

Here’s an example of a plan I’m working on in CC, it’s very thorough, albeit required a lot of handholding and fact checking on a number of points as it’s first few passes didn’t properly anonymise data.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1zo_VkQGQSuBHCP45DfO7...

EGreg 3 hours ago||

This is exactly what we found out a year ago for all AI builders. But what is the best way to convince early investors of this thesis? They seem to be all-in on just building everything from scratch end-to-end. Here is what we built:

https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf

doug_durham 22 hours ago||

Did the author ask it to make new abstractions? In my experience when I produces output that I don't like I ask it to refactor it. These models have and understanding of all modern design patterns. Just ask it to adopt one.

bblcla 21 hours ago|

(Author here)

I have! I agree it's very good at applying abstractions, if you know exactly what you want. What I notice is that Claude has almost no ability to surface those abstractions on its own.

When I started having it write React, Claude produced incredibly buggy spaghetti code. I had to spend 3 weeks learning the fundamentals of React (how to use hooks, providers, stores, etc.) before I knew how to prompt it to write better code. Now that I've done that, it's great. But it's meaningful that someone who doesn't know how to write well-abstracted React code can't get Claude to produce it on their own.

michalsustr 21 hours ago||

Same experience here! As an analogy, consider the model knows both about arabic or roman number representations. But in alternate universe, it has been trained so much on roman numbers ("Bad Code") that it won't give you the arabic ones ("Good Code") unless you prompt it directly, even when they are clearly superior.

I also believe that overall repository code quality is important for AI agents - the more "beautiful" it is, the more the agent can mimic the "beauty".

esafak 20 hours ago||

> Claude doesn’t have a soul. It doesn't want anything.

Ha! I don't know what that has to do with anything, but this is exactly what I thought while watching Pluribus.

jondwillis 15 hours ago||

Regardless, yet another path to the middle class is closing for a lot of people. RIP (probably me too)

lxe 16 hours ago||

Eh. This is yet another "I tried AI to do a thing, and it didn't do it the way I wanted it, therefore I'm convinced that's just how it is... here's a blog about it" article.

"Claude tries to write React, and fails"... how many times? what's the rate of failure? What have you tried to guide it to perform better.

These articles are similar to HN 15 years ago when people wrote "Node.JS is slow and bad"

mklyachman 22 hours ago|

[flagged]

falloutx 20 hours ago|

Spam bot?

mklyachman 2 hours ago|||

Nope, just someone who created a HN account purely to comment about a tool I liked :-)

ares623 18 hours ago|||

You’re absolutely right!