Mark RiedlDoes it help to curse at Claude Code, because oh my god does it make some questionable choices. So far I am holding my tongue because I've also heard that it can spiral.
"I want each sentence on a separate line."
*writes code to concatenate all sentences, which is then repeated on n lines where n is the number of sentences*
"No really I want each sentence on a line by itself"
*generates 5 pages deliberating on what I mean by that, considering the possibility that I am confused and don't actually want that at all, then going back to deliberating on what I mean it for 5 more pages*
Also my laptop crashed recently, and upon restore, I am unclear whether it remembers anything. Claude's personality also appears to be completely different. It used to speak in short sentences and a lot of bullet points, now it is writing very long paragraphs with no bullet points.
Yeah I know, someone will tell me that I should have forced it to write down everything in a .md file. I'll go ahead and do it for you: #skillissues
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to mock coding assistants. I'm using Claude Code to explore some initial hypotheses through visualization. I am not very sophisticated when it comes to creating visualizations, and I've done in a few days what would have taken me a very long time.
(it would take me a very long time because I don't have a lot of time to do coding myself)
I am able to explore these hypotheses before I send my research team down a rabbit hole. So that is good. Any my hypotheses are mostly panning out. Net positive, net win.
It comes at the cost of the most frustrating things that I feel like no student would ever misunderstand. And students don't "compress" every few hours and forget important stuff. But I can iterate quickly, so it is probably still a win.
I've gained a lot of clarity on what parts of computing science are likely to remain valuable for the foreseeable future. E.g. I helped Claude work through some issues it was having with computational complexity because it was making some poor choices. I knew what to ask and where to point it.