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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I'm on the base plan, yet to hit any limits. The bottleneck is my ability to review the code it writes, and to write prompts detailed enough for the output to be useful to me.

I assume that the people hitting limits are just letting it cycle, but doesn't that just create garbage if you don't keep it on a tight leash? It's very eager but not always intelligent.

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Switching to Opus is an eye-opening experience. You hit limits often, and need to get creative to avoid burning through limits, but the difference is seriously impressive. You'll waste a lot less time with dead ends and bad code.

The issue (with Sonnet, I'm not using Opus), is not always that the code is bad per se, but merely that it doesn't solve the problem in the way I expected.

I have two problems with that. Firstly, I want my code to be written a particular way, so if it's doing something out of left field then I have to reject it on stylistic grounds. Secondly, if its solution is too far from my expectation, I have to put more work into review to check that its solution is actually correct.

So I give it a "where, what, how" prompt. For example, "In file X add feature Y by writing a function with signature f(x: t), and changing Z to do W..."

It's very good at following directions, if you give it the how hints to narrow the solution space.

I think this is it. They use it like a slot machine, and when something isn't quite what they wanted, they provide broad instructions to refine and do better. Progress is slow and questionable, but anticipation and (sometimes) reward is increased.

The issue could be, in part, that a lot of users don't care to be efficient with token usage and maintaining condensed, efficient, focused contexts to work with.

i wonder how many are negligent vs ignorant. negligence would be senior engineers that could scope and work with context properly but are lazy or don't care. ignorance would be vibe coders that genuinely can't express anything beyond plain english and superficial descriptions of issues and changes.

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