> With the latest models if you're clear enough with your requirements you'll usually find it does the right thing on the first try

That's great that this is your experience, but it's not a lot of people's. There are projects where it's just not going to know what to do.

I'm working in a web framework that is a Frankenstein-ing of Laravel and October CMS. It's so easy for the agent to get confused because, even when I tell it this is a different framework, it sees things that look like Laravel or October CMS and suggests solutions that are only for those frameworks. So there's constant made up methods and getting stuck in loops.

The documentation is terrible, you just have to read the code. Which, despite what people say, Cursor is terrible at, because embeddings are not a real way to read a codebase.

I'm working mostly in a web framework that's used by me and almost nobody else (the weird little ASGI wrapper buried in Datasette) and I find the coding agents pick it up pretty fast.

One trick I use that might work for you as well:

  Clone GitHub.com/simonw/datasette to /tmp
  then look at /tmp/docs/datasette for
  documentation and search the code
  if you need to

If your framework is missing documentation tell Claude Code to write itself some documentation based on what it learns from reading the code!