…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.
I think it’s pretty heavily dependent on what you’re trying to do. I’ve gotten a lot of push from higher ups at my company to use copilot wherever possible. So, I’ve spent a lot of time lately having copilot + opus write code for me. Most of what I’m doing is super straightforward middleware APIs or basic internal front ends. Since it has access to very similar codebases for reference, and we have custom agents that point it in the right direction, it’s a pretty good experience.
However, if I ask it to do something totally new, it does okay, more like what you’ve experienced. It takes a lot of hand holding, but it usually gets the job done as long as you’re very descriptive in your prompt. Probably not faster than an experienced developer at the moment though