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Comment by bayarearefugee | Hacker News Reader

As another person that cancelled my Claude and switched to Gemini, I agree that Claude Code is very nice, but beyond some initial exploration I never felt comfortable using it for real work because Claude 3.7 is far too eager to overengineer half-baked solutions that extend far beyond what you asked it to do in the first place.

Paying real API money for Claude to jump the gun on solutions invalidated the advantage of having a tool as nice as Claude Code, at least for me, I admit everyone's mileage will vary.

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Exactly my experience as well. Started out loving it but it almost moves too fast - building in functionality that i might want eventually but isn't yet appropriate for where the project is in terms of testing, or is just in completely the wrong place in the architecture. I try to give very direct and specific prompts but it still has the tendency to overreach. Of course it's likely that with more use i will learn better how to rein it in.

I've experienced this a lot as well. I also just yesterday had an interesting argument with claude.

It put an expensive API call inside a useEffect hook. I wanted the call elsewhere and it fought me on it pretty aggressively. Instead of removing the call, it started changing comments and function names to say that the call was just loading already fetched data from a cache (which was not true). I could not find a way to tell it to remove that API call from the useEffect hook, It just wrote more and more motivated excuses in the surrounding comments. It would have been very funny if it weren't so expensive.

Geez, I'm not one of the people who think AI is going to wake up and wipe us out, but experiences like yours do give me pause. Right now the AI isn't in the drivers seat and can only assert itself through verbal expression, but I know it's only a matter of time. We already saw Cursor themselves get a taste of this. To be clear I'm not suggesting the AI is sentient and malicious - I don't believe that at all. I think it's been trained/programmed/tuned to do this, though not intentionally, but the nature of these tools is they will surprise us

> We already saw Cursor themselves get a taste of this.

Sorry what do you mean by this?

Earlier this week a Cursor AI support agent told a user they could only use Cursor on one machine at a time, causing the user to cancel their subscription.

> but the nature of these tools is they will surprise us

Models used to do this much much more than now, so what it did doesn't surprise us.

The nature of these tools is to copy what we have already written. It has seen many threads where developers argue and dig in, they try to train the AI not to do that but sometimes it still happens and then it just roleplays as the developer that refuses to listen to anything you say.

I almost fear more that we'll create Bender from Futurama than some superintelligent enlightened AGI. It'll probably happen after Grok AI gets snuck some beer into its core cluster or something absurd.

agreed, no matter what prompt I try, including asking Claude to promise not to implement code unless we agree on requirements and design, and to repeat that promise regularly, it jumps the gun, and implements (actually hallucinates) solutions way to soon. I changed to Gemini as a result.

I wanted some powershell code to do some sharepoint uploading. It created a 1000 line logging module that allowed me to log things at different levels like info, debug, error etc. Not really what I wanted.

Open Codex (A codex fork) that supports gemini and openrouter providers https://github.com/ymichael/open-codex

google models on cli are great.

+1 Open Codex is very nice. Yesterday I was using it with Gemini APIs and also using a local model using Ollama running on my laptop.

I added a very short chapter on setting this up (direct link to my book online): https://leanpub.com/ollama/read#using-the-open-codex-command...

This morning I tweaked my Open Codex config to also try gemma3:27b-it-qat - and Google’s olen source small is excellent: runs fast enough for a good dev experience, with very good functionality.

"Don't be a keener. Do not do anything I did not ask you to do" are def part of my prompts when using Claude

Whats your setup/workflow then?

Any ide integration?

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