The code it generated was reasonably simple. Some of the API calls were deprecated but they were easily fixed. The expected structure of the object returned by the *load_dataset* method was also incorrect. I manually fixed that too. However, the major problem was that there was another error while loading the dataset.

I shared the error with Claude and it reworked the code by adding some logging output to debug.

A reasonable strategy

Essentially the problem was that when loading the dataset, some of the images were returned as paths, while others were returned as image objects. Claude’s code was only expecting the former.

I wanted to test Claude’s reasoning capabilities so I shared the debug output with Claude. It tried reworking the code but the changes it was making made no sense and did not address the actual problem.

In the end it was a simple fix to get the code working. But at least to me it’s quite clear that what Claude is doing is not actual reasoning but simply mimicking common solutions to common problems.

This is not to say it’s not useful. It did save me the trouble of looking up most of the API calls myself. But it is definitely not ready to be autonomous. Oversight by a reasonably skilled programmer is still required and recommended.