Did the author ask it to make new abstractions? In my experience when I produces output that I don't like I ask it to refactor it. These models have and understanding of all modern design patterns. Just ask it to adopt one.

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bblcla 3 hours ago | parent [-]

(Author here)

I have! I agree it's very good at applying abstractions, if you know exactly what you want. What I notice is that Claude has almost no ability to surface those abstractions on its own.

When I started having it write React, Claude produced incredibly buggy spaghetti code. I had to spend 3 weeks learning the fundamentals of React (how to use hooks, providers, stores, etc.) before I knew how to prompt it to write better code. Now that I've done that, it's great. But it's meaningful that someone who doesn't know how to write well-abstracted React code can't get Claude to produce it on their own.

	▲	michalsustr 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Same experience here! As an analogy, consider the model knows both about arabic or roman number representations. But in alternate universe, it has been trained so much on roman numbers ("Bad Code") that it won't give you the arabic ones ("Good Code") unless you prompt it directly, even when they are clearly superior. I also believe that overall repository code quality is important for AI agents - the more "beautiful" it is, the more the agent can mimic the "beauty".