…and I still don’t get it. I paid for a month of Pro to try it out, and it is consistently and confidently producing subtly broken junk. I had tried doing this before in the past, but gave up because it didn’t work well. I thought that maybe this time it would be far along enough to be useful.
The task was relatively simple, and it involved doing some 3d math. The solutions it generated were almost write every time, but critically broken in subtle ways, and any attempt to fix the problems would either introduce new bugs, or regress with old bugs.
I spent nearly the whole day yesterday going back and forth with it, and felt like I was in a mental fog. It wasn’t until I had a full night’s sleep and reviewed the chat log this morning until I realized how much I was going in circles. I tried prompting a bit more today, but stopped when it kept doing the same crap.
The worst part of this is that, through out all of this, Claude was confidently responding. When I said there was a bug, it would “fix” the bug, and provide a confident explanation of what was wrong… Except it was clearly bullshit because it didn’t work.
I still want to keep an open mind. Is anyone having success with these tools? Is there a special way to prompt it? Would I get better results during certain hours of the day?
For reference, I used Opus 4.6 Extended.
I haven’t tried any Anthropic models personally.
So far, between the free online chats by OpenAI and DeepSeek, and the smaller models I’ve run on my own machine, the most useful things I have gotten from it were to treat it as an overeager student that lacks the first-hand experience needed to see the big picture, asking it questions that I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to and seeing if 1) it “understands” what I’m getting at and 2) it can surprise me with a viewpoint I hadn’t thought of before.
Using them to double-check my own ideas seems to be marginally useful, especially when there’s no qualified human being whose attention I can borrow. Using them as a sort of semantic web search can sometimes get me what I’m looking for faster than Google. If anything, they’re an opportunity to exercise critical thinking; if I can tell where it’s getting things wrong I can be fairly confident that my own understanding of the problem/subject is pretty solid.
Vibe coding, though? I have yet to see it work out. Maybe as some starting slop so that I can get to work refactoring code (and get the ideas flowing) instead of staring at a blank file.