One thing I may try this week is typing in all the code myself. With the level of back and forth that I've been happy with so far, Claude Pro seems to only be able to produce about 1000 lines of code a day in two or three five-hour sessions. I can totally type 1000 lines of code in a couple of hours if no problem-solving is needed. So maybe I'll look at Claude's code, switch screens to my editor, and type until I don't know what to type, and repeat.

Obviously there are higher-level design issues that I might not notice while engaging with the code at the byte-by-byte level, but I won't have the embarrassing problem I had a couple of weeks ago where duck.ai wrote me a CPU in Verilog, and after I tested it, I tried to write something in Verilog myself and couldn't even figure out how to write a syntactically correct XOR-gate module. (Verilator's parse errors are not designed as a Verilog tutorial, it turns out.)

An interesting idea, like crib notes. Forces me to pay attention, and exercises the mechanical memory of programming. I'll try it.

This hasn't worked out that well for me. I have to try to do it myself, do something wrong, and ask for an explanation of what i broke. Just typing doesn't leave me with any retention.