alt Hacker NewsIf you don’t have a very strong mental model for what you are working on Claude can very easily guide in you into building the wrong thing.
For example I’m working on a huge data migration right now. The data has to be migrated correctly. If there are any issues I want to fail fast and loud.
Claude hates that philosophy. No matter how many different ways I add my reasons and instructions to stop it to the context, it will constantly push me towards removing crashes and replacing them with “graceful error handling”.
If I didn’t have a strong idea about what I wanted, I would have let it talk me into building the wrong thing.
Claude has no taste and its opinions are mostly those of the most prolific bloggers. Treating Claude like a peer is a terrible idea unless you are very inexperienced. And even then I don’t know if that’s a good idea.
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That’s interesting to hear as for me Claude has been quite good about writing code that fails fast and loud and has specifically called it out more than once. It has also called out code that does not fail early in reviews.
Have you created a plan where the requisite is not to bother you with x and y, and to use some predetermined approach? What you describe sometimes happens to me, but it happens less when its part of the spec.
> it will constantly push me towards removing crashes and replacing them with “graceful error handling”.
Is it generating JS code for that?
You're right, data migration is a specific case where you have a very strong set of constraints.
I, on the other hand, am doing a new UI for an existing system, which is exactly where you want more freedom and experimentation. It's great for that!
> Claude has no taste and its opinions are mostly those of the most prolific bloggers.
I often think that LLMs are like a reddit that can talk. The more I use them, the more I find this impression to be true - they have encyclopedic knowledge at a superficial level, the approximate judgement and maturity of a teenager, and the short-term memory of a parakeet. If I ask for something, I get the statistical average opinion of a bunch of goons, unconstrained by context or common sense or taste.
That’s amazing and incredible, and probably more knowledgeable than the median person, but would you outsource your thinking to reddit? If not, then why would you do it with an LLM?