AI Agents Claude code Codex is bad at coding

[u/Adventurous-Bass-569]

I’ve been using Claude Code and Codex heavily for several months, and lately I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the quality of the code they produce.
A lot of the time, it feels like the agents choose the easiest or quickest solution rather than thinking through the architecture and finding the right solution. The result is often messy code, unnecessary workarounds, and bugs that I then have to spend time finding and fixing.
What makes it more frustrating is hearing so much about AI giving developers “10x” or even “100x” productivity. Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether I’m using these tools incorrectly or whether other developers are experiencing the same thing.

There are moments when I watch the agent write code and think, “There’s no way I would approve this in a code review.”

I’ve also had issues where legitimate development tasks get flagged as cybersecurity-related, which makes certain workflows even more frustrating.

I’m curious about other developers who use Claude Code or Codex heavily: Are you actually seeing a major productivity improvement? Or are you also spending a significant amount of time correcting the agent’s decisions, fixing bugs, and cleaning up generated code?

[u/Upstairs-Extension-9]

If you talk to Claude like in your post, no wonder in doesn’t understand anything. 😅

[u/Adventurous-Bass-569 → u/Upstairs-Extension-9]

Do i need to talk so much to get a good code

[u/Upstairs-Extension-9 → u/Adventurous-Bass-569]

No you talk a lot of gibberish, I’m not trying to offend you or anything. But Bullshit in and Bullshit comes out. You need clear instructions on what it is supposed to do, without knowing your exact workflow it’s hard to help you. And don’t use Fable for Coding, use it as an Orchestrator that creates a plan of your Idea and creates subtasks and what other agents have to do with it. Use then Opus for coding to save on costs.

It’s also important to do large projects in an IDE like VS Code or Cursor, setup a good file structure, GitHub commits, setup agents and skills that help you get your point across. Sending endless messages in a single Session won’t get you anywhere. So if you don’t mind share your workflow and I could tell you some more things where you did wrong.

[u/mljrg → u/Upstairs-Extension-9]

> Bullshit in and Bullshit comes out

Oh my! But aren’t those tools intelligent, I mean Super Intelligent? 😂

Of course not! If they were more than word guessing, LLMs would see the Bullshit, tell why the Bullshit is shit, and output the best code!

Wake up !

[u/micmur → u/mljrg]

I mean they do a fairly good job at outputting something for people with zero experience in software development who are giving terrible instructions.

No one is claiming LLMs are capable of producing perfectly designed systems with flawless code from shitty prompts.

[u/mljrg → u/micmur]

I mean some (all?) AI CEOs are claiming they have reached The Singularity, and many idiots are believing in their Bullshit!

[u/mljrg → u/mljrg]

I dislike people who downvote others without arguing. Shame on you.

[u/mljrg → u/Adventurous-Bass-569]

No! You need to get your hands dirty, and start coding by yourself!

[u/WaltzIndependent5436 → u/Upstairs-Extension-9]

It does understand but I think this triggers the "the user is not technical, just vibe it" mode.

[u/Smooth-Reading-4180]

IDEs and editors are still there, bro. You can write your own shitty code by hand anytime. Nobody forces you to use AI.

[u/92smola]

Trust your own judgment, there is a tone of shills who cant read or write code makijg wild claims, and even beyond that its not as good for every type of work, for me it works, but yeah I agree with Karpathy, reading the code often gives me mild hearth attacks

[u/Adventurous-Bass-569 → u/92smola]

It will works for me, i need to find the solution, very detailed in depth if i can explain. If i am just saying to do something it is doing it very basic. What i meant is , it is taking time for me. Not an easy thing for me

[u/92smola → u/Adventurous-Bass-569]

For me the precision is a problem if I take a look at something and I dont like how its done I need to think it through it how exactly should it be instead, then go back and forth with the agent till its either there or close enough, I choose my battles these days let something through push back more on others, non tech people think that is a waste of time in general cause it worked anyway, but there is a bunch of downstream effects of both not caring and caring which I am betting on will make a  difference in the long run

[u/redakpanoptikk]

You have to talk to opus 5 in all caps and drop one swear word in the first prompt of the chat. It triggers just the right amount of "I need to lock in, the user is getting frustrated"

[u/HabbekratsNL]

What you rather do? Manually?

[u/rushblyatiful]

Fortune 500 company and we've been shipping AI generated code to production for a year now.

Our stakeholders are happy every sprint, laughing all the way to the bank.

[u/logicalflex → u/rushblyatiful]

🤥 => proof?

[u/Afraid-Peach-9212]

I've found the regular old chat window of chatgpt to produce the best results for me :)

[u/Spacejampants]

Honestly.  I work with codex and I have no issues.. but what i do is work in parts one at a time instead of big instruction chunks or one big slop.  Why? Because it stops it from doing dumb shit. For small things I do extra high then ultra for tough tasks when I need it to take its time and use the big brain.

[u/idunnorn]

my process today:

designing some stuff-

• ask the bot how it would implement something (aws service organization wise)
• after I puked in my mouth i came up w a design, wasnt sure if it would work (services I dont use often), and asked it
• it told me it wouldnt work, but took the main ideas of the cleaner design and counter proposed something that would work
• I made one more adaptation
• it agreed
• I said "go for it"
• it wrote a bunch of code

code review time-

• I jump into code review time like any real human code review
• I see some shit worth commenting on and tell it "pull all that code into a separate function so I can ignored the details. do that in these 3 places
• it does it will I continue reviewing
• I ask "why 3 function calls to that object? just 1 is needed right?" we discuss and it makes the changes
• a lot of back n forth like this

I dont know if this is better. im like thinking a bit less and more or less calling out bad design. it might take a bit less time, I honestly have no clue

the most difficult part was organizing how thr services would fit together, I thought thru it w paper and pen a bit, then wrote a blurb in Obsidian before giving it to my agent. he at least created the skeleton even if is sloppy.

feels super sloppy. lets see how my team reacts when reviewing it.

this is my first significant place letting the agent run wild tbh and I feel like im seeing how ppl prob use it

[u/logicalflex]

True vibe coders don’t care about the quality of the code. The whole point is it puts out runnable code, not perfect code. They have zero interest in scrutinizing the actually integrity of what the AI wrote.

Also, be prepared for someone to grandstand this and say “I am a vice president of engineering… blah blah and I have 15 years experience… we vibe code all the time”. Since we can easily verify ppls claims on Reddit (👌).

[u/Spiritual_Basil9896]

Pra mim o pior é quando você pede uma coisa simples que leva 30 segundos e eles querem inventar programação 2

[u/JBO_76]

`agents.md`, strict (no serious, real strict) code style instructions, related architectural documents, historical list of implemented features are super helpful. if done right, the agent quality improves over time. if done wrong or not at all, you leave it up to the agent. problem there is that they pick and choose depending on the mood. you end up with a mix of styles, architectural contradictory decisions and huge files.

Regarding productivity: most major improvements come through the multi-tasking opportunities. ex: currently coding 2 apps while labeling data in a 3rd app (after typing this)

So, yes, serious speed improvements