I mostly write Go code (and have barely had to write any code myself in the past months), but today I had to do some work in a Java project and Claude Code was a terrible experience.

It really felt like using AI tooling of a year or two ago. It wasn’t understanding my prompts, going on tangents, not following the existing style and idioms. Maybe Claude was hungover or doesn’t like mondays, but the contrast with Go was surprising.

One example is that I wanted to add an extra prometheus metric to keep track of an edge case in some for loop. All it had to do was define a counter and increment it. For some reason it would define the counter the line before increment it, instead of defining it next to the other counters outside of the for loop. Technically not wrong (defining a counter is idempotent), but who does that? Especially when the other counters are defined elsewhere in the same function?

Anyway, n=1 but I feel it has an easier time with Go.

Well, there was a Claude outage today, maybe related :D

My n=1 is that it is pretty good with Java, on par with other popular languages like Python and JS, in line with these 3 probably being a good chunk if not the majority of training data.