How can a person reconcile this comment with the one at the root of this thread? One person says Claude struggles to even meet the strict requirements of a spec sheet, another says Claude is doing a great job and doesn’t even need specific specs?

I have my own anecdata but my comment is more about the dissonance here.

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aforwardslash 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It boils down to scope. I use CC in both very specific one-language systems and broad backend-frontend-db-cache systems. You can guess where the difficulty lies. (Hint: its the stuff with at least 3 distinct languages)

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sarchertech 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One person is rigorously checking to see if Claude is actually following the spec and one person isn’t?

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flyinglizard 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

... or one person has a very strong mental model of what he expects to do, but the LLM has other ideas. FWIW I'm very happy with CC and Opus, but I don't treat it as a subordinate but as a peer; I leave it enough room to express what it thinks is best and guide later as needed. This may not work for all cases.

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sarchertech 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you don’t have a very strong mental model for what you are working on Claude can very easily guide in you into building the wrong thing.

For example I’m working on a huge data migration right now. The data has to be migrated correctly. If there are any issues I want to fail fast and loud.

Claude hates that philosophy. No matter how many different ways I add my reasons and instructions to stop it to the context, it will constantly push me towards removing crashes and replacing them with “graceful error handling”.

If I didn’t have a strong idea about what I wanted, I would have let it talk me into building the wrong thing.

Claude has no taste and its opinions are mostly those of the most prolific bloggers. Treating Claude like a peer is a terrible idea unless you are very inexperienced. And even then I don’t know if that’s a good idea.

	▲	aforwardslash a few seconds ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Have you created a plan where the requisite is not to bother you with x and y, and to use some predetermined approach? What you describe sometimes happens to me, but it happens less when its part of the spec.
	▲	oops an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That’s interesting to hear as for me Claude has been quite good about writing code that fails fast and loud and has specifically called it out more than once. It has also called out code that does not fail early in reviews.

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hunterpayne 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	riquito 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Then you should expect any positive comment to be replied negatively by a competition's puppet or bot too