100% agree. I have so much trouble squaring my experience with the hype and the grandparent post here.

The types of tasks I have been putting Claude Code to work on are iterative changes on a medium complexity code base. I have an extensive Claude.md. I write detailed PRDs. I use planning mode to plan the implementation with Claude. After a bunch of iteration I end up with nicely detailed checklists that take quite a lot of time to develop but look like a decent plan for implementation. I turn Claude (Opus) loose and religiously babysit it as it goes through the implementation.

Less than 50% of the time I end up with something that compiles. Despite spending hundreds of thousands of tokens while Claude desperately throws stuff against the wall trying to make it work.

I end up spending as much time as it would have taken just to write it to get through this process AND then do a meticulous line by line review where I typically find quite a lot to fix. I really can't form a strong opinion about the efficiency of this whole thing. It's possible this is faster. It's possible that it's not. It's definitely very high variance.

I am getting better at pattern matching on things AI will do competently. But it's not a long list and it's not much of the work I actually do in a day. Really the biggest benefit is that I end up with better documentation because I generated all of that to try and make the whole thing actually work in the first place.

Either I am doing something wrong, the work that AI excels at looks very different than mine, or people are just lying.

1. What are your typical failures? 2. What language and domain are you working in?

I'm kind of surprised, certainly there is a locality bias and an action bias to the model by default, which can partially be mitigated by claude.md instructions (though it isn't great at following if you have too much instruction there). This can lead to hacky solutions without additional meta-process.

I've been experimenting with different ways for the model to get the necessary context to understand where the code should live and the patterns it should use.

I have used planning mode only a little (I was just out of the country for 3 weeks and not coding, so it has only just become available before I left, but it wasn't a requirement in my past experience)

The only BIG thing I want from Claude Code right now is a "Yes, and.." for accepting code edits where I can steer the next step while accepting the code.