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Comment by cevn | Hacker News Reader

I had a lot of fun making 'tools' like this, but once I settled into a complicated problem (networking in a multiplayer game), it has become frustrating to watch Claude give back control to me without accomplishing anything, over and over again. I think I need to start using the SDK in order to force it to its job.

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I've found that in those cases, I likely am better off doing it myself. The LLMs I've used will frequently overfit the code when it gets complicated. I am working on a language learning app and it so often will add special-casing for words occurring in the tests. In general, as soon as you leave boiler-plate territory, I found it will start writing dirtier and dirtier code.

This kind of stuff is where my anxiety rises a bit. Another example like this is audio code - it compiles and “works” but there could be subtle timing bugs or things that cause pops and clicks that are very hard to track down without tracing through the code and building that whole mental model yourself.

There’s a great sweet spot though around stuff like “make me this CRUD endpoint and a migration and a model with these fields and an admin dashboard”.

It’s still better letting Claude slog through all that boilerplate and skeletal code for you so that you can take the wheel when things start getting interesting. I’ve avoided working on stuff in the past just because I knew I wouldn’t be motivated enough to write the foundation and all the uninteresting stuff that has to come first.

I've enjoyed using it for coming up with the structure of a project. I'll ask in search mode for structures of other similar projects if I'm not sure. I also enjoy making human-readable .md or .txt documentation files for myself very quickly with it.

Try giving codex IDE a go, now included with ChatGPT. Had equal frustrations with Claude making bad decisions, in contrast gpt5 codex high is extremely good!

I mean, yes. This is what Claude is good for: helping solve problems that aren't difficult or complex, just time consuming.

The thing is a lot of software jobs boil down to not difficult but time consuming.

I've got it using dbus, doing funky stuff with Xlib, working with pipewire using the pulseaudio protocol which it implemented itself (after I told it to quit using libraries for it.) You can't one-shot complicated problems, at least not without extensive careful prompting, but at this point I believe I can walk it through pretty much anything I can imagine wanting done.

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