When I give it the requirements I'd give an engineer and so "do it" it just writes garbage that doesn't make sense
bluGill on Hacker News
In the thread “A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks”, replying to this comment
Helped: Forcing tiny steps and TDD improved output quality.
Got in the way: Writing garbage on large requirements; high time cost to fix code.
I've been trying Claude on my large code base today. When I give it the requirements I'd give an engineer and so "do it" it just writes garbage that doesn't make sense and doesn't seem to even meet the requirements (if it does I can't follow how - though I'll admit to giving up before I understood what it did, and I didn't try it on a real system). When I forced it to step back and do tiny steps - in TDD write one test of the full feature - it did much better - but then I spent the next 5 hours adjusting the code it …