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gengstrand | 4 months ago

The conversation here seems to be more focused on coding from scratch. What I have noticed when I was looking at this last year was that LLMs were bad at enhancing already existing code (e.g. unit tests) that used annotation (a.k.a. decorators) for dependency injection. Has anyone here attempted that with the more recent models? If so, then what were your findings?

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braebo|4 months ago

My experience is the opposite. The latest Claude seems to excel in my personal medium-sized (20-50k loc) codebases with strong existing patterns and a robust structure from which it can extrapolate new features or documentation. Claude Code is getting much better at navigating code paths across many large files in order to provide nuanced and context-aware suggestions or bug fixes.

When left to its own devices on tasks with little existing reference material to draw from, however, the quality and consistency suffers significantly and brittle, convoluted structures begin to emerge.

This is just my limited experience though, and I almost never attempt to, for example, vibe-code an entire greenfield mvp.