Same here. I’ve had limited success getting AIs to do very simple stuff. Every one I’ve tried invents APIs that don’t exist and eventually get stuck in a circle where it tells me to try A. When that doesn’t work, try B. No luck? Try C. Hmmm my apologies, try A. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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simonw 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you using a coding agent running in auto-approve mode?

If so then none of this matters, because it will run through that lather-rinse-repeat loop itself in less than a minute.

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criddell 10 hours ago | parent [-]

No, I haven’t tried that yet. I don’t really want to turn on auto mode when it’s iterating on my credit card and it looks like it’s in an infinite loop… Is that a silly thing to be worried about?

I work mostly in C++ (MFC applications on Windows) and assembly language (analyzing crash reports).

For the C++ work, the AIs do all kinds of unsafe things like casting away constness or doing hacks to expose private class internals. What they give me is sometimes enough to get unstuck though which is nice.

For crash reports (a disassembly around the crash site and a stack trace) they are pretty useless and that’s coming from someone who considers himself to be a total novice at assembly. (Looking to up my x64 / WinDbg game and any pointers to resources would be appreciated!)

I do prototyping in Python and Claude is excellent at that.

	▲	enraged_camel 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>> No, I haven’t tried that yet. I don’t really want to turn on auto mode when it’s iterating on my credit card and it looks like it’s in an infinite loop… Is that a silly thing to be worried about? Yeah. Most AIs today are pretty good at detecting that they're in a loop and aren't making progress. When that happens, they either take a different approach, or stop and say they are stuck. But, if you're really worried about it, you can cap monthly spend on the billing page of virtually every AI provider.