[richardw]

It’s a $90k engineer that sometimes acts like a vandal, who never has thoughts like “this seems to be a bad way to go. Let me ask the boss” or “you know, I was thinking. Shouldn’t we try to extract this code into a reusable component?” The worst developers I’ve worked with have better instincts for what’s valuable. I wish it would stop with “the simplest way to resolve this is X little shortcut” -> boom.

It basically stumbles around generating tokens within the bounds (usually) of your prompt, and rarely stops to think. Goal is token generation, baby. Not careful evaluation. I have to keep forcing it to stop creating magic inline strings and rather use constants or config, even though those instructions are all over my Claude.md and I’m using the top model. It loves to take shortcuts that save GPU but cost me time and money to wrestle back to rational. “These issues weren’t created by me in this chat right now so I’ll ignore them and ship it.” No, fix all the bugs. That’s the job.

Still, I love it. I can hand code the bits I want to, let it fly with the bits I don’t. I can try something new in a separate CLI tab while others are spinning. Cost to experiment drops massively.

[latch]

Claude code has those "thoughts" you say it never will. In plan mode, it isn't uncommon that it'll ask you: do you want to do this the quick and simple way, or would you prefer to "extract this code into a reusable component". It also will back out and say "Actually, this is getting messy, 'boss' what do you think?"

I could just be lucky that I work in a field with a thorough specification and numerous reference implementations.

[devin]

I agree that Claude does this stuff. I also think the Chinese menus of options it provides are weak in their imagination, which means that for thoroughly specified problem spaces with reference implementations you're in good shape, but if you want to come up with a novel system, experience is required, otherwise you will end up in design hell. I think the danger is in juniors thinking the Chinese menu of options provided are "good" options in the first place. Simply because they are coherent does not mean they are good, and the combinations of "a little of this, a little of that" game of tradeoffs during design is lost.

[throwaway7783]

This has happened to me too. Claude has stopped and said on occasions "this is a big refactor, and will affect UI as well. Do you want me to do it?"

[fragmede]

> sometimes acts like a vandal

I see you don't have experience working with a large number of real life humans.