…and I still don’t get it. I paid for a month of Pro to try it out, and it is consistently and confidently producing subtly broken junk. I had tried doing this before in the past, but gave up because it didn’t work well. I thought that maybe this time it would be far along enough to be useful.
The task was relatively simple, and it involved doing some 3d math. The solutions it generated were almost write every time, but critically broken in subtle ways, and any attempt to fix the problems would either introduce new bugs, or regress with old bugs.
I spent nearly the whole day yesterday going back and forth with it, and felt like I was in a mental fog. It wasn’t until I had a full night’s sleep and reviewed the chat log this morning until I realized how much I was going in circles. I tried prompting a bit more today, but stopped when it kept doing the same crap.
The worst part of this is that, through out all of this, Claude was confidently responding. When I said there was a bug, it would “fix” the bug, and provide a confident explanation of what was wrong… Except it was clearly bullshit because it didn’t work.
I still want to keep an open mind. Is anyone having success with these tools? Is there a special way to prompt it? Would I get better results during certain hours of the day?
For reference, I used Opus 4.6 Extended.
my experience with LLM’s and numerical computations like with MATLAB or GNU octave, has been poor. I assume its more of an issue that the data isn’t there, MATLAB has it’s own proprietary AI (which I don’t believe is trained on users code) and Octave has no AI associated on it’s end so the major LLM’s only get trained by the data it is prompted by users online or otherwise. Which is why if you prompt it to do a 3D plot, it will almost always pull something out of it’s ass.
your feeling of a “mental-fog” is my experience with AI in general, the language model explains the ideas well, but then the code editor does some obscure move that makes no fucking sense. also, because you’re not programming it and learning from your mistakes it makes you uncertain of your code. its unfortunate to see search engines are going to shit because of AI, because AI is not ready.