[cladopa]

What you are trying to do is quite easy to do with Claude. I have done way more complex things than that in hours. But having programming, managing(with humans) and engineering experience is extremely useful.

It seems you try to tell the tool to do everything in one shot. That is a very wrong approach, not just with Claude but with everything(you ask a woman for a date and if you do not get laid in five minutes you failed?). When I program something manually and compiles, I expect it to be wrong. You have to iron it and debug it.

Instead of that:

1.Divide the work in independent units. I call this "steps"

2.Subdivide steps into "subsets" You work in an isolated manner on those subsets.

3.Use an inmediate gui interface like dear imgui to prototype your tool. Translating then into using something else once it works is quite easy of LLMs.

4.Visualize everything. You do not need to see the code but you need to visualise every single thing you ask it to do.

5.Tell Claude what you want and why you want it and update the documentation constantly.

6. Use git in order to make rock solid steps that Claude will not touch when it works and you can revert changes or ask the ia to explore a branch, explaining how you did something and want something similar.

7. Do not modify code that already works rock solid. Copy it into another step leaving the step as reference and modify it there.

5.Use logs. Lots of logs. For every step you create text logs and you debug the problems giving Claude the logs to read them.

6.Use screenshots. Claude can read screenshots. If you visualise everything, clause can see the errors too.

7.Use asserts, lots of asserts, just like with manual programming.

It is not that different from managing a real team of people...

[layer8]

> you ask a woman for a date and if you do not get laid in five minutes you failed?

If successfully using Claude Code is as difficult as successful dating, I'm not sure this tech will prevail. ;)

[kuschku]

That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.

[furyofantares]

No it's not?

Stuff like "divide the work up" is something you do when doing it yourself. Making a GUI prototype isn't really much work at all in the age of LLMs, akin to drawing up a few ideas on a notepad. Using git for small steps is something lots of people do for their own work and rebase later. Using extensive logging is mostly just something you have in your AGENTS.md for all your projects and forget about, similarly getting it setup to make and look at screenshots.

What part of this is more work than doing it yourself?

[cvwright]

It’s really not. For anything substantial, the things that you do to manage an LLM are the same things that you should be doing to manage a team of human devs, even if the team is just yourself.

Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.

[Jeremy1026]

Not even close. A friend and I are working on an iOS game (a tower defense style game). We are writing 0 code ourselves. We both have a history of iOS development, he is still actively involved and I've move away from it in recent years.

In about 2 weeks we have a functional game, 60 levels, 28 different types of enemies, a procedurally generated daily challenge mode, an infinity mode. Tower crafting and upgrades, an economy system in the game for pay for the upgrades.

This likely would have taken us months to get to the point that we are at, it was playable on Day 2.

[LennyHenrysNuts]

It's like managing a team of 6-8 year olds.

Put that down! What are you doing? Don't put that in your mouth. Where are you going? Stop that! Why are you sitting there alone, Johnny?

[amelius]

But that is ... a lot of work.

[deterministic]

... which is why it is usually faster for me to just write the code myself :-)

However ChatGPT is really helpful doing sysadmin style tasks on Linux.