> I have noticed some people I work with have more trouble, and my vague intuition is it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy

What’s giving too much autonomy about

“Please load settings.toml using a library and print out the name key from the application table”? Even if it’s under specified, surely it should at least leave it _compiling_?

I’ve been posting comments like this monthly here, my experience has been consistently this with Claude, opencode, antigravity, cursor, and using gpt/opus/sonnet/gemini models (latest at time of testing). This morning was opus 4.6

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linsomniac 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Even if it’s under specified, surely it should at least leave it _compiling_?

Are you using Claude Code? Do yo have it configured so that you are not allowing it to run the build? Because I've observed that Claude Code is extremely good at making sure the code compiles, because it'll run a compile and address any compile errors as part of the work.

I just asked it to build a TOML example program in DotNet using Tomlyn, and when it was done I was able to run "./bin/Debug/net8.0/dotnettoml example.toml", it had already built it for me (I watched it run the build step as part of its work, as I mentioned it would do above).

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maccard an hour ago | parent [-]

I am using Claude code. I didn’t explicitly tell it what the build command was (it’s dotnet build), and it didn’t ask. Thats not my fault.

> I’ve observed Claude code is extremely good at making sure the code compiles

My observation is that it’s fine until it’s absolutely not, and the agentic loop fails.

	▲	linsomniac 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>Thats not my fault. I don't know that it's useful to assign blame here. It probably is to your benefit, if you are a coding professional, to understand why your results are so drastically different from what others are seeing. You started this thread saying "I keep getting told I'll be amazed at what it can do, but the tools keep failing at the first hurdle." I'm telling you that something is wrong, that is why you are getting poor results. I don't know what is wrong, but I've given you an example prompt and an example output showing that Claude Code is able to produce the exact output you were looking for. This is why a lot of people are saying "you'll be amazed at what it can do", and it points to you having some issue. I don't know if you are running an ancient version of Claude Code, if you are not using Opus 4.6, you are not using "high" effort (those are what I'm using to get the results I posted elsewhere in reply to your comment), but something is definitely wrong. Some of what may be wrong is that you don't have enough experience with the tooling, which I'd understand if you are getting poor results; you have little (immediate) incentive to get more proficient. As I said, I was able to tell Claude Code to do something like the example you gave, and it did it and it built, without me asking, and produced a working program on the first try.

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Kiro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not even the worst possible prompt would explain your unusual experience, so I don't think that's it either.

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wrs 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There’s nothing wrong with it that I can see. Like I said, I’m a bit baffled at your experience. I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, but usually one short iteration later that’s fixed. Claude Code will usually even do that iteration by itself.

	▲	maccard an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> I will say, it’s not unusual for the initial output not to compile, We’ve gone from “I’m baffled at your experience” to well yeah it often fails” in two sentences here…