this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
153 points (89.6% liked)

Programming

26473 readers
492 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

...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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] something183786@lemmy.world 7 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

My preferred way of using LLM coders is:

  • plan only
  • read the spec file I just wrote
  • optionally ask me questions in ‘qa.md’, I’ll reply inline Repeat until it stops asking me questions, then switch to a different model and ask again. I usually use both gpt5.3-codex AND Claude Sonnet

Then I have it update the spec. I start a new session to have it implement. Finally review the code. If I don’t like it, undo and revisit the spec. Usually it’s because I’m trying to do too much at once. And I need to break it down into multiple specs.

Adversarial reviews are also great ways to prune bad ideas and assumptions from plans. Have helped me out greatly and made the better LLMs often go "plan said do X, but doing that is a unknown huge risk that may take longer then the rest of the plan".

The superpowers plugin does the brainstorm, qa, design plan, implementation plan, implement, review quite well. It should aid the process of actually doing feature type work. I also add adversarial reviews into the process, saves a lot of time debugging what went wrong after implementation.