Honest, good-faith question.

Is CC getting better, or are you getting better at using it? And how do you know the difference?

I'm an occasional user, and I can definitely see improvements in my prompts over the past couple of months.

I agree with you, it's personally hard to tell.

For me I've noticed it getting nothing but better over the past couple months, but I've been working on my workflows and tooling.

For example, I used to use plan mode and would put everything in a single file and then ask it to implement it in a new session.

Switching to the 'superpowers' plugin with its own skills to brainstorm and write plans and execute plans with batches and tasks seems to have made a big improvement and help catch things I wouldn't have before. There's a "get shit done" plugin that's similar that I want to explore as well.

The code output always looks good to me for the most part though and I've never thought that it's getting dumber anything, so I feel like a lot of the improvements I see are because of a skill issue on my part trying to use everything. Obviously it doesn't help there's a new way to do things every two weeks though.

Good-faith answer: I can't be certain. But I've been using CC since its release, and Cursor before that (and actually going all the way back to GPT3 to do codegen in the Playground). After getting used to the CC workflow, the way that I use it has been pretty consistent. To be specific, I use basically the same AGENTS.md with small modifications for each project, and I live almost exclusively in Plan mode and the best model (currently Opus 4.5).

My initial prompting is boilerplate at this point, and looks like this:

(Explain overall objective / problem without jumping to a solution)

(Provide all the detail / file references / past work I can think of)

(Ask it "what questions do you have for me before we build a plan?")

And then go back and forth until we have a plan.

Compared to my work with CC six months ago, it's just much more capable, able to solve more nuanced bugs, and less likely to generate spaghetti code.