zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I tried the agent thing on:

- Large C codebase (new feature and bugfix)

- Small rust codebase (new feature)

- Brand new greenfield frontend for an in-spec and documented openAPI API

- Small fixes to an existing frontend

It failed _dramatically_ in all cases. Maybe I'm using this thing wrong but it is devin-level fail. Gets diffs wrong. Passes phantom arguments to tools. Screws up basic features. Pulls in hundreds of line changes on unrelated files to refactor. Refactors again and again, over itself, partially, so that the uncompleted boneyard of an old refactor sits in the codebase like a skeleton (those tokens are also sent up to the model).

It genuinely makes an insane, horrible, spaghetti MESS of the codebase. Any codebase. I expected it to be good at svelte and solidJS since those are popular javascript frameworks with lots of training data. Nope, it's bad. This was a few days ago, Claude 4. Seriously, seriously people what am I missing here with this agents thing. They are such gluttonous eaters of tokens that I'm beginning to think these agent posts are paid advertising.

>>mlsu+ur
How are you writing your prompts? I usually break a feature down to smaller task level before I prompt an agent (claude code in my case) to do anything. Feature level is often too hard to prompt and specify in enough detail for it to get right.

So I'd say claude 4 agents today are at smart but fresh intern level of autonomy. You still have to do the high level planning and task break down, but it can execute on tasks (say requiring 10 - 200 lines of code excluding tests). Any asking it to write much more code (200+ lines) often require a lot of follow ups and disappointment.

>>chuckn+Hs
Coding agents should take you through a questionnaire before working. Break down what you are asking for into chunks, point me to key files that are important for this change, etc etc. I feel like a bit of extra prompting would help a lot of people get much better results rather than expecting people to know the arcane art of proompting just by looking at a chat input.

>>presen+cv
You can ask it to do this, in your initial prompt encourage it to ask questions before implementing if it is unsure. Certain models like o4 seem to do this more by default rather than Claude that tends to try to do everything without clarifying