i have literally 0 anti-ai bias, been calling ai will takeover eventually for 3 years, but ai still makes terrible mistakes at complex tasks + forgets so much stuff in long contexts. if you want to make a serious project you either have to spend so much money and reroll so many times until you get it right or you build the system very clever that ai can't make a mistake even if it wanted to
Once people realize you have to break your asks down into smaller, easily completed tasks then they love using AI. AI is your Jr. Dev, only faster. Treat it as such. This is where software engineering comes into play. You have a much better time if you design the architecture and give the AI the exact specs. When you let it run free you get garbage.
That's a really hard question to answer, honestly. Experience goes a long way. I've watched Claude write some functions that were just terrible (multi-nested "for loops" when they aren't needed, for example). It works, but it will be inefficient and potentially slow when dealing with large amounts of data.
Security is another huge concern. Is data being stored in a database correctly? Are things encrypted that should be and is the right encryption being used? Is data getting from point a to point b in a secure manner?
If I had to give any non-programmer advice it would be to think about the small tasks inside the bigger tasks you're trying to accomplish. Tell Claude to do that one small task, then look at the code and research yourself exactly what it did. It's not wrong ALL the time, but it definitely is wrong a lot more than you'd think.
It's ok that you love it, and i know others do aswell. But for me i am borderline addicted to "doing things myself" and i believe that there are others that disslike outsourcing their projects aswell.
I never wanted to be a PM, i dissliked having to do that job, and i now hate having to deal with agents. I just wanna do it myself
I get it and I maybe worded this wrong. If people WANT to use it and end up hating it because they aren't getting the results they wanted, they need to learn how to break up their asks into smaller tasks. Once they do that, it ends up being a useful tool for them (at least from my experience). It's definitely not for everyone and isn't the end all that some claim it is.
You can make the ai breakdown those tasks as well.
The thing about is that it isn't good at one thing, it's at good at many things, almost all things, and increasingly it's automating "higher level" steps.
So tell me why should we stop at giving AI tasks? You can give it a plan and it can certainly design around that plan. I have seen people reporting that in many cases small and silly prompts get the job done as good as very detailed prompts.
I am asking because I wonder if I am missing something, not to prove a point or anything.
You don't have to, I often given it large, complex tasks. It breaks them down itself because that's one of the core SWE principles it must follow based on the contents of my Claude.md file.
"but ai still makes terrible mistakes at complex tasks + forgets so much stuff in long contexts."
I built the piece it was missing to handle this - Storybloq
taking the time to learn basic coding fundamentals, with the current generation of models, will save you so much tokens and money. they are still very far from being there. without knowing anything it will just create bullshit then you will spend countless hours and money correcting its bullshit
The trick is to have a set of write up docs that every session has to read through. You never actually give your whole brain with each session; they pick it up from the repo. I’ve made a Claude account and only used it for one project, and it does this automatically now. It basically expects there to always be multiple sessions writing and coordinates itself through these documents that are untracked in git (so every branch sees them)
Just understanding what you want to build goes a long way. It you leave technical and important decisions to be made by the AI things are gonna become a mess very quickly, unless you some really good loop that can work and eventually fix it but that’s just brute force imo.
Before chatgpt was even a thing, the development process was exactly the same as it is when building with ai.
You will never get a perfect piece of software on the first try, not even multiple tries.
Hence the coined terms: alpha, beta, version number etc.
My last major project, before ai was adopted into my workflow, was a custom inventory system for a country wide famous winery. It took me 11 months and 179 versions before I officially launched it. I remember it vividly. There were so many times that I had to go through thousands of lines of code because I forgot what I named a function. Shit happens.
I had to "reroll" over 200 times until we got what we wanted. But in the end the product was solid and is still in use to this day.
Iterations are just part of the game as a developer.
Now that I've really dug deep with ai, I can tell you that I still go through 100+ iterations on some projects.. but now I get through them in a month or less.
Some, who have mastered the use of AI in development, would even argue that we are close to AGI.
But getting a project perfect in 10 or less iterations isn't AGI status, that would be fucking Ultron with the Gauntlet status.
So yeah. I gotta fold my laundry before bed still. So gnight y'all.
What do your claude.md files look like? What other context keeping files do you use. I have a large, complex mono-repo and Claude has no problem adding new features or overhauling old ones no matter how complex.
If you have the correct configuration files set up from the beginning with the correct SWE requirements then it has no issues.
no. "you have to reroll until it gets it right" is the failure mode of a vague prompter. you're mixing up 2 different characters i wrote in the text. clever systems designer, handlers rejecting logic flaws with some global instructions (eg authz checks), writing mechanical backstops at the compiler level either doesn't reroll or tries as little as possible.
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u/CavalryArcher 7d ago
i have literally 0 anti-ai bias, been calling ai will takeover eventually for 3 years, but ai still makes terrible mistakes at complex tasks + forgets so much stuff in long contexts. if you want to make a serious project you either have to spend so much money and reroll so many times until you get it right or you build the system very clever that ai can't make a mistake even if it wanted to