Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

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I just asked Claude to plan out and implement syntactic improvements for my static site generator. I used plan mode with Opus 4.6 max effort. After over half an hour of thinking, it produced a very ad-hoc implementation with needless limitations instead of properly refactoring and rearchitecting things. I had to specifically prompt it in order to get it to do better. This executed at around 3 AM UTC, as far away from peak hours as it gets.

b9cd0319-0cc7-4548-bd8a-3219ede3393a

> You're right to push back. Let me be honest about both questions.

> The @() implementation is ad-hoc

> The current implementation manually emits synthetic tokens — tag, start-attributes, attribute, end-attributes, text, end-interpolation — in sequence.

> This works, but it duplicates what the child lexer already does for #[...], creating two divergent code paths for the same conceptual operation (inline element emission). It also means @() link text can't contain nested inline elements, while #[a(...) text with #[em emphasis]] can.

I just feel like I can't trust it anymore.

That's pretty much been my day - today was genuinely bad, and I've been putting up with a lot of this lately.

Now on Qwen3.5-27b, and it may not be quite as sharp as Opus was two months ago, but we're getting work done again.

Literally two weeks ago it was outputting excellent results while working with me on my programming language. I reviewed every line and tried to understand everything it did. It was good. I slowly started trusting it. Now I don't want to let it touch my project again.

It's extremely depressing because this is my hobby and I was having such a blast coding with Claude. I even started trying to use it to pivot to professional work. Now I'm not sure anymore. People who depend on this to make a living must be very angry indeed.

I can see how that works: this is like building a dependency, a habit if you wish. I think the tighter you couple your workflow to these tools the more dependent you will become and the greater the let-down if and when they fail. And they will always fail, it just depends on how long you work with them and how complex the stuff is you are doing, sooner or later you will run into the limitations of the tooling.

One way out of this is to always keep yourself in the loop. Never let the work product of the AI outpace your level of understanding because the moment you let that happen you're like one of those cartoon characters walking on air while gravity hasn't reasserted itself just yet.

Good advice about the dependency. This stuff is definitely addictive. I've been in something of a manic episode ever since I subscribed to this thing. I started getting anxious when I hit limits.

I wouldn't say that Claude is failing though. It's just that they're clearly messing with it. The real Opus is great.

Take good care of yourself and don't get sucked in too deep. I can see the danger just as clearly in programmers around me (and in myself). I keep a very strict separation between anything that can do AI and my main computer, no cutting-and-pasting and no agents. I write code because I understand what I'm doing and if I do not understand the interaction then I don't use it. I see every session with an AI chatbot as totally disposable. No long term attachment means I can stand alone any time I want to. It may not be as fast but I never have the feeling that I'm not 100% in control.

> People who depend on this to make a living must be very angry indeed.

Oh cry me a fucking river.

The people depending on this to make a living don't have the moral high ground here.

They jumped onboard so they could replace other people's living, and those other people were angry too.

They didn't care about that. It's hard to care about them when the thing they depend on to make a living got yanked, because that's what they proposed to do to others.

Since when am I responsible for other people's living?

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