[tymonPartyLate]

I just realized that Opus 4 is the first model that produced "beautiful" code for me. Code that is simple, easy to read, not polluted with comments, no unnecessary crap, just pretty, clean and functional. I had my first "wow" moment with it in a while. That being said it occasionally does something absolutely stupid. Like completely dumb. And when I ask it "why did you do this stupid thing", it replies "oh yeah, you're right, this is super wrong, here is an actual working, smart solution" (proceeds to create brilliant code)

I do not understand how those machines work.

[diggan]

> Code that is simple, easy to read, not polluted with comments, no unnecessary crap, just pretty, clean and functional

I get that with most of the better models I've tried, although I'd probably personally favor OpenAI's models overall. I think a good system prompt is probably the best way there, rather than relying in some "innate" "clean code" behavior of specific models. This is a snippet of what I use today for coding guidelines: https://gist.github.com/victorb/1fe62fe7b80a64fc5b446f82d313...

> That being said it occasionally does something absolutely stupid. Like completely dumb

That's a bit tougher, but you have to carefully read through exactly what you said, and try to figure out what might have led it down the wrong path, or what you could have said in the first place for it avoid that. Try to work it into your system prompt, then slowly build up your system prompt so every one-shot gets closer and closer to being perfect on every first try.

[tymonPartyLate]

Thanks for sharing, I'll copy your rules :)

[Tostino]

My issue is that every time i've attempted to use Opus 4 to solve any problem, I would burn through my usage cap within a few min and not have solved the problem yet because it misunderstood things about the context and I didn't get the prompt quite right yet.

With Sonnet, at least I don't run out of usage before I actually get it to understand my problem scope.

[simon1ltd]

I've also experienced the same, except it produced the same stupid code all over again. I usually use one model (doesn't matter which) until it starts chasing it's tail, then I feed it to a different model to have it fix the mistakes by the first model.