Of course there are those icks I have with its writing being oddly unnatural, forced, uncanny. It’s a machine after all. That’s fine. But then when it comes to things I actually need it to do, like discuss an architectural decision, help formulate a plan, figure out what problems something could have based on other decisions made in the past, it has just been increasingly falling apart as complexity goes up. Being a human myself (lol), it frustrates me a lot how its memory, the way it looks for links, any connections it makes, are almost always “almost there”. Something is always missing, which if I’m not there to argue against because I do remember (vaguely or clearly), would snowball into a complete mess. On the other hand, if it were another human (given that they are well versed in the codebase, project, or whatever themselves), they would actually be able to understand the gravity of the decision being made, think narrowly and widely about the vision and where the project needs to be taken, and other things I can’t exactly put into words right now. And then actually point out if something even feels a tiny bit off. And before anyone says it, yes, I do all of it. ADRs, READMEs, manifests, handoffs, checklists, auto memory on, whatever else. It reads them, it quotes them back (sometimes incorrectly), and it still doesn’t use them the way a person would, and this doesn’t change much if I give it less instructions or more. Another human you wouldn’t have to do any of this for, you’d say “but iirc the config for the other transport also needed the coordinators? where did those go?” and that would be the end of it. Tbh for the most part you wouldn’t have to say that even. When claude confidently says something wrong while I’m trying to plan something, I usually always vaguely remember like, “hmmm, this doesn’t seem entirely right”. It’s that questioning I’m talking about. Because right now it’s claude making an incorrect assumption off whatever shortcut reading it did and me having to correct and handhold it so so often, whereas if there were even one other human who had been working on the project, they’d ALSO be able to do what I’m doing, sharing the load. Which I think is the actual thing. The info is all there, it’s not like it can’t go find it, it just doesn’t mean anything to it. Whereas I remember why we didn’t do it the other way, that it was a whole thing at the time, whatever, so the relevant bit just comes up on its own without me going looking for it. It’s not that it remembers worse than me, it’s that it’s doing an impression or imitation of remembering. And the impression is genuinely good enough for when there isn’t a lot to remember. But now, given how much there is, man idk. The amount of times it’s confidently mis-reading and mis-remembering things despite having everything right in front of it becomes a massive waste of time and effort. Probably none of this applies if you’re mostly just giving it a task and going to sleep as that’s a completely different way of using it. This is specifically working hand in hand with claude for months on end. And like, ok. So that’s the problem. At the same time, what I’ve completed in the project in the past, say 4 months, would have easily taken me a year or more if I were to write it all myself. But it probably would have been less frustrating. Two sides of the same coin :(. You can do so much more, but being the only one checking gets very very draining. This isn’t burnout from the amount of work, but from constantly having to correct things I shouldn’t/wouldn’t have to with a team. Holy yap… submitted by /u/SmartyPantsDJ
Originally posted by u/SmartyPantsDJ on r/ClaudeCode