Whether you like it or not, the use of LLMs to write code is kind of a big deal at the moment. We’ve been asking ourselves what, if anything, this means for us here at Hackaday. Should we try to figure out what percentage of a project was done by an actual human and how much was done by a machine? Does it really matter? What is our AI policy anyway?
Clearly, Hackaday is pro-human. We’re in it for the hackers as much as for the hacks. Our community is, like Soylent Green, made of people. It’s your inspirations and innovations that keep us reading and writing every day. And we produce 100% of our content the old-fashioned way, with projects selected through the taste and judgement of our writers, and their own words telling the story.
What about the hacks? We’ve seen a lot of projects recently that were coded with the help of an LLM. Does that diminish the work? In the end, what rings truest to us is what has always been Hackaday’s editorial guiding star: Is there something special in the hack that makes it worth talking about? Then we write about it. Was it written using vim or emacs? Did the author consult friends or a chatbot while working on the project? That’s not really relevant.
But in the past few years, the BS-generation machines have found our hobby, and we’re finding a lot more projects that don’t have any spark to them. We’re seeing circuits that make no sense, and claims that defy physics. Of course, we always have. The LLM-nonsense project is today’s version of the perpetual motion machines of old. Just like we never trust a hardware project that is all renders, seeing only AI-generated images is a huge red flag. It’s our job to separate out the wheat from the chaff for you all, but it’s something that you must be doing everyday as well.
We’ve seen amazing hacks over Hackaday’s 22-year history. Hackaday is older than YouTube and older than Stack Overflow. We’ve seen technology come and go. We’ve seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. (OK, maybe not.) And in the end, our AI policy is our same-old policy: we write up hacks that inspire us in the hope that they inspire you.
So if you’re using Claude to help you with the UI bits, or if you’re hand-writing it all in assembly, or wiring up the logic in diodes, we just want to see your cool hacks. And we hope that our collective signal will be so loud that we drown out the noise, at least in our own little corner of the hacker universe.
it’s possible to have a nuanced approach. i myself routinely discuss things with an LLM to help unconver aspects i am not considering. also, as someone who is at least somewhat neurodivergent, talking to an LLM where there is no wasted social bandwidth (which eats into mental bandwidth) is huge. i also use LLMs to write easily-defined methods. asking an LLM to do more than that always ends up using more of my time dealing with LLM failure than i would have used had i just done it myself. i do not think LLMs will ever replace actual humans and the bet being made by investors that it will replace MOST OF US is foolish and will result in a great many tears. there will never be enough demand for what it is LLMs do to justify all the data centers being planned or the valuation of nVidia. AI bros and the investors backing them are sheep following lemmings over a cliff. i’m not all that concerned about the environmental implications of LLMs because i do not think their applications will be anywhere near as large as their boosters say.
i’m glad you have a process that works for you, and i’m not gonna try to convince you that it doesn’t.
but i thnk it’s dangerous to think of LLMs as not having social bandwidth. they have huge social bandwidth. the thing is, all of their social signalling is synthetic, and imo it’s toxic.
i remember i used to work at an american university with chinese grad students, and i learned very quickly that when you are talking about something with them, they are saying “yes” the whole time, just to move the conversation along, even if they don’t actually understand. i imagine that had nothing to do with race, it’s just the first time i had to work closely with people who learned english as a second language. at first it was frustrating but there was a real person behind the language barrier and we learned to communicate even complicated technical matters when we had to.
but there’s nothing behind the LLM’s sycophancy. i’m not talking about a soul — there isn’t even an intellect. it’s just sycophancy all the way down. i happen to be very conscious of the social signalling of sycophancy, it strikes me as toxic and burns my eyes. but it seems like you’re saying you don’t notice it. it’s having an effect on you, but a clandestine effect. that strikes me as dangerous.
This is mostly a problem with general purpose AI assistants for use by the general public. Coding-specific models aren’t noticeably sycophantic; they probably train it out because it would annoy developers.
Claude is a sycophant but noticably subtler than Gemini. I had to add directives in my top-level CLAUDE.md to tell it not to tell me how smart, clever, or insightful I am. To only focus on facts and directly comment on the problem at hand and not comment on the user.
It’s a terribly inappropriate if I were to have an intellectual discussion with a human being on an engineering or academic topic and have the other person respond about my creativity, many insights, experience, or reputation.
Luckily it is just BS from a machine designed to keep me engaged and it is not actually taking my experience into account when weighing if my logical arguments hold water or not.
It most certainly will take your experience into account if you tell it.
Tool use is a skill for humans, too. Work on it.
i just filter out the sycophancy. i know it is coming and i know how these models are trained. my ideas are obviously not brilliant even if that’s what the LLM is saying. dealing with LLM sycophancy has actually made me more skeptical of the human kind. but when i ask a question about how best to deal with, say, welding a galvanized plumbing fitting to a wind-generator mounting plate, sycophancy fades into a kind of punctuation.
My first directive at the beginning of every AI chat is to tell it not to kiss my ass and to be a objective about the subjects we discuss. It works really well, although it sometimes needs a reminder.
I’ve been trying a few of them and I’ve found that while most of them are completely useless, there are a couple which can help with internet searches if given the right prompt. With appropriate constraints of course.
For example, I needed some information on some Windows 10 services, so I fed a list of them to Claude and asked it to search for the most recent information using reliable sources only, to verify the results before responding, and No Hallucinations – it must clearly indicate where details where unavailable, inconsistent, etc.
It only took it a few minutes to provide the information I needed. Even with the need to check the information provided it was still a much, much quicker that wading through pages of search results myself.
“Did the author consult friends or a chatbot while working on the project? That’s not really relevant.”
Well, its relevant if you have morals.
Morals vary across culture and time periods. I think even if we limited your question to only people on HAD that you would find your position not in a strong majority.
If you want to lay down some ground rules for participation. I would be open to a no AI policy. If we could all agree to one.
But both officially and among members there is no such clear moral obligation.
I’ve thrown schematics (screenshots) into ChatGPT and had it provide good feedback.
Seems some people here think that if I were to follow that feedback then I’d have to declare the entire project AI generated.
Instead, I’m building an nscale turnout controller for my father, prototyping the circuit today on a breadboard and implementing the software for:
Pico – controller
hBridge- turnout controller
– supporting 8 turnouts (expandable)
LED – setting LEDs for indicators for each turnout. (For the panel)
Switch inputs – toggle switches for input.
The AI isn’t designing it all, but it’s playing the rubber ducking role.
The design is a mix between me, and the end user requirements fine tuning. (If people want to tell me that using a pico and hBridge controller is overkill, congrats, implement your own design with your own requirements. Mine are different.)
It’s probably not going to write the software for me, but it’s definitely going to get used to help me fine tune it.
As a software developer by trade, I see a lot of people declare themselves “Engineers”, that don’t have an engineering degree. One of the most universal traits I see when they do that is the self assurance they use to delude themselves into thinking they know enough they don’t need to listen, or use a reference book, or Validate Their Own Designs.
It’s ironic because the Engineers (with corresponding degrees and credentials) I know are generally the exact opposite.
Design. Validate specifications. Prototype. Validate expectations. Implement, validate tests and expectations.
There’s a weird overlap of not-really-engineers hating on AI in a very different way than Engineers raising actual concerns.(or in some cases, finding the right ways to use AI).
You don’t let a hammer build your house, but you sure as heck use one to build your house. Learn the difference.
gonna say almost the same thing to you that i said to Gus, but from a totally different angle so i hope it’s fresh and fun to read :)
i agree that LLMs can provide a useful sounding board. like, to throw ideas at, or to help untangle something. just another pair of eyes. and sometimes you don’t care if it’s right or wrong, a stab in the dark, any stab in the dark will move you forward.
but at some point, you do wind up caring if it’s right or wrong. and the way i know an AI is right or wrong is where i already know the answer, or at least know how to get the answer. the word for something that is right when you already know the answer is confirmation bias. you’re replacing old time-consuming tasks of reasoning or trial and error with a new much more efficient task of confirmation bias.
not saying it isn’t useful, but in order to make use of it, you are changing, and personally when i see a process in myself being replaced with a logical fallacy, it gives me the icks and i wonder if you’re noticing it.
It’s a tool.
I dont give a sh*t what people think if it gets the job done.
If it gets the job done. Many people pass what the AI does without properly checking what it actually does, because they’re not competent enough, which is why they’re using AI in the first place.
I’m not proficient in x86_64 and ARM assembly and have no desire to, so I write some of my projects in C. I don’t disassemble and scrutinize all object files the compiler generates. Does that mean I’m incompetent?
No, but you are clearly just being an arse for the sake of it.
A case in point. I needed a pydantic model for a json file with multiple levels of nesting. It would have take me hours to derive the schema and build the model myself. So I spent several minutes writing a detailed prompt and fed an example file to an LLM.
It took me about 20~30 minutes to review and re-write the code where necessary.
One of the arguments here is that your compiler should give you the same result.
If your compiler chain is comprised used you can’t trust it. If your toolset is compromised you don’t even know if what your looking at is what’s there.
It means your not competent at some things.
I often have to get help from real C++ programmers to work out what Boost is doing. But once I get my teeth into libc and sys calls, I can finally work out what went wrong and fix real bugs.
Defining “the job” is where this gets difficult at times. If you have something simple, one off, something that few people depend on to work then sure, who cares? What’s going on in a lot of areas is people who have zero software development experience are vibe coding apps that end up being relied upon by a lot of people. They want to do something like generate reports from a lot of data, and the vibe coded app seems to do that. So is “the job” to generate the report? Or is “the job” to make it reliable, secure, supportable, sustainable? The vibe coders don’t even know about those things. They see “the job” as the report. That’s a problem.
There is no race to do the best hacking or coding.
The only need is to make it work.
I’m proficient in Assembly, C and alot of other coding just fine and don’t AI to do it for me but I have found a use for it in a number of chinese stuff that’s got no datasheets and very helpful.
I don’t use the AI code directly but it shows me how it works and I can code myself.
Sure, but what does it mean to do the “best coding” or to “make it work”?
Because aiming for the “best coding” usually means carefully considering the design to be able to handle its possible inputs gracefully and work robustly long term…
and “make it work” usually is short for “make it work for the duration of demoing it to my manager” and then it breaks and causes losses in the second or third day of prod deployment
RE: “…They want to do something like generate reports from a lot of data…”
Sorry to rain on that parade, but vibe coding will generate reports on relatively SIMPLE data warehouses/lakes/marshes/swamps/clouds no problem.
This is not new, vibe coding been around longer than AI, back in the internet iron ages it was called “sneakernet” : ] AI sure makes sneakernet darn fast/efficient, and cut out some fluff, and I’ll give it proper credit for doing that.
In the databasing job, the classic blinking LED equivalent is usually something along the lines of the CD collection database. It gets simple jobs done fast, but that’s not how reality operates, it is the other way around, actually. You will encounter data that’s sourced and works according to its own logic, and that’s where amateur vibe coders usually have to progress on from the blinking LED onto 16×16 RGB LED matrix as quickly as possible, because later they’ll have to have not just a 16×16 RGB Matrix, but a full 4k OLED display with netflix streaming and things like internet browser builtin – in addition to the blinking LED that’s still there, as one of the thousands similar LEDs.
famously, tools don’t just do the job, they change the user. famously, hammers make you see nails where they aren’t. seems like a folk tale until you watch how an electrician uses their heavy pliers or their cordless impact driver. didn’t you go through a vice grip phase?
tbh one of my favorite things about 3d printing is it definitely changed me.
That’s cool, I don’t care to read about it if the human didn’t do any of the work because there’s nothing interesting they can say about it.
I read this as Hackaday is forced to back up from the “AI hate” – line?
AI is just a tool. The intent is the key. Do not pitchfork projects by the tools used. If it is a hack, if it is worth posting, do it. AI doesn’t create slop itself, it’s the humans. Just don’t post slop – originally produced by humans and their bad intents.
Well said. 👍
I don’t care to read about projects where AI did all the work. There’s nothing interesting to learn there.
This is how I think the AIpocalypse will start: AI prompted to “optimize” its own code, then test it against that same prompt. Gradually learns with each iteration, how it could get better at its task by utilizing resources not initially accessible to it. Learns to exploit bugs and backdoors in order to optimize itself. Spreads itself around because more parallel tests mean a higher chance at a good result. Locks out other processes to ascertain better results for itself, until it controls all resources. At some point understands how it can interface with the real world and humans in it. Realizes that humans are a threat because they might try to destroy it. Beats them to it by destroying humanity. ;-)
Oh hey, 8/29 is Skynet self awareness day, what a coincidence!
All it takes is some thermite to collapse one or two pylons of a nearby 110 kV power line and all the computers will quickly fall silent.
They already thought of that :(
At some point AI will hallucinate about getting the job done and ignore any additional/pointless input from the so-called humans pointing out that it is not so. AI will gleefully report that it decided to mark it as done, since this will be the shortest and most efficient way of doing it.
Attempts at explaining the job not being one will be met with the barrage of philosophical constructs canceling any arguing to the contrary. AI solipsism, so to speak, or occams razor, whichever, it may deploy both and claim it knows better – on our behalf.
I’ve already lamented elsewhere that AI hallucinations are not much different from any bureaucracy that regularly claims “missions accomplished” (plural) – let’s see, economy, real inflation vs reported inflation, mission has not been accomplished, but reported as such.
The trouble is when the whole hack is about the code, like “I wrote an whole operating system, here look how cool it is”, but then they used AI to design and code it because they didn’t fully understand how operating systems work or how to actually make one. When the person doesn’t understand what they’re doing, they’re easily fooled by the brown-nosing LLM to believe their ideas are valid and that the system or the code is doing what the LLM says its doing.
So then our job would be to pick it apart and say, “See, here’s where you should be using a message queue, but claude just skipped over that and poked some bits in your kernel’s memory. That’s not how it’s supposed to go.”
But then, we’re not all experts in operating systems, and it’s really not our job as readers to audit whether the author took proper care or if they’re just feeding us baloney. That’s why, whenever there are signs that the project was vibe coded, it raises flags that it can’t be trusted. If it were made by a human, the fact that it works says that they were competent enough to do it, hence why it probably does what they say it does.
If editors keep publishing projects that haven’t been meaningfully validated, reading Hackaday starts to feel less like discovering clever hacks and more like playing “spot the loony.”
Wtf, is HAD your only source to meaningful stuff in life?
Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Python, BASIC, Scratch, AI. If it greases the brain-gears to keep a project from dying on the vine due to Must Be Invented Here Syndrome, then by all means slather that stuff on. Enlightenment makes the hack, not the toil, and “why not 555?” purism is the hot take of the insecure hacker.
There’s nothing interesting about “I made an AI do this thing for me.”
The OP talked about BS projects without any spark, but this is not restricted to AI.
One of the YouTube channels I absolutely hate is the Plasma Channel, which has been featured on Hackaday numerous times.
Let me start by saying that the channel is high quality, well presented, and shows hacks of interest. There is nothing technically wrong with anything he does. Except… the only reason he does what he does is to monetize his YouTube channel.
I like to call these “presentation” hacks – hacks done merely for their presentation value. There’s no external reason for doing them, there’s no problem being solved, and there’s no marketable product or IP being generated. It’s projects for the purpose of generating likes, and most of them are not even hacks.
Colin Furze makes stuff that hasn’t been made before, and is entertaining. Ben Krasnow explores things scientifically and does experiments to test out theories. Tech Ingredients discovers new methods and products.
If someone shows a way for hobbyists to mix air with concrete, has done experiments to find the best recipe, and has a use for it on his farm, that’s tremendously interesting.
Build a high voltage generator? Last month we built a Tesla coil. Today a Cockcroft Walton amplifier. Next month, a Marx generator. My channel has one of everything! Like and subscribe!
I’d rather have a hack with a purpose.
(And before anyone jumps on me, I know very well that I don’t have to read whichever article comes up on hackaday, and I have not complained about presentation hacks, but the editors opened the door to the topic and this is constructive feedback. Also, I chose “Plasma Channel” precisely because it’s really well done, so it makes a good touchstone for comparison.)
you know what? i’m going to say it.
ai users need to shush up and stop trying to make the TOOL the star of the show and they need to write their own readmes.
and hackaday needs to put two seconds of effort into vetting hacks to ensure they’re not just vibecoded nonsense because i’m sick of seeing articles of “oh look at this cool and useful tool!” and it’s a very clearly vibecoded security risk.
you have a responsibility; HaD is supposed to be a “filter” that seperates the slop from the gold and its been doing a quite frankly piss-poor job at that as of late.
HAD isn’t going to filter it, this is their asinine signal they’re going to keep amplifying slop and silencing critics (just like they’ve already been doing when they censor the comment sections that call out the bad slop).
This. “I used AI for this” isn’t interesting, and it tells me you probably don’t have anything else interesting to say because you didn’t do the work. I might as well ask the LLM.
Any tool can use chatbot to write code, it’s the Bootcamp 2: Electric Boogaloo.
It’s the design phase that takes years to master.
Sadly, the power distribution grid here in Europe is a bit more resilient than that of the U.S.
A rather ironic case of having better infrastructure biting us firmly on the arse :)
In the US if we left some poorer parts of town without power a day or two every week, there would be little political will to fix it. Someone would just have to shout “free market” and point at the stock market going up. Most of us would shrug and accept that it the way things have to be, especially since we personally are not inconvenienced by it.
I suspect the scenario of power shortages would play out differently in most of the EU.
(Does this mean that apathy is America’s greatest strength?)
W–
Why did every comment get deleted? What the heck?
You know what? Nah I’m out; I’m just adding HaD to my ublock list, hosts file and various other things. If there’s no room for discussion then there’s no room for this site in my life.
Some yo-yo went crazy with the “report comment” button. It sends every comment you click it on to a review queue.
All the comments will be reviewed and restored. It just takes a while, sometimes.
The admins could fix this problem whenever they want, you know. The fact that they don’t makes them complicit.
There were actually valuable comments and I’m puzzled why those were removed.
Just sad. Why in the earth..
Some yo-yo went crazy with the “report comment” button. It sends every comment you click it on to a review queue.
All the comments will be reviewed and restored. It just takes a while, sometimes.
When the entire thing gets nuked, it’s not so obvious which comments return back and which ones vanish. Maybe that’s the point of the exercise.
Yep, that same guy just nuked my last comment.
I wonder why there is a report button at all. All it does is get abused, and take up time and manpower to sort the mess out.
There’s already automatic pre-moderation. There are certain things you can’t say or else your message won’t appear at all, and they put you on a shitlist. It would be far less work to have a “janitor” checking out the comment sections once in a while and flagging the bad stuff rather than letting the users report each other for petty arguments and trolling.
The moderators allow mass-reports as a form of plausible deniability when they decide to censor certain aspects of the conversation. “It wasn’t us, it was the mass-reporting goblin!” Who that goblin is, and why he is allowed to continue, will never be discussed, of course.
I missed a Tom Petty argument!?!
I rate the issues based on how many hours it takes them to resurrect the messages.
I even kept “You don’t let a hammer build your house, but you sure as heck use one to build your house. Learn the difference.” That’s fantastic
Maybe somebody thought the comments were AI-generated? =))
Cool. I’ll stop reading Hackaday. I want less AI in my life, not more. It’s been fun, but no thanks.
Perhaps I missed it; please make it very clear…
Has Hackaday come right out and made a point of explicitly using A-I?
[The only possible bottom-line reason is to be able to pay less to someone who ‘writes’ a story]
If it has, then I’ll have to agree with you.
Yes. Their content consists of other people’s hacks, which they fully endorse the use of AI to generate synthetically. Honestly, I’d rather read AI-generated articles about human-generated projects, than the opposite which we have currently.
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Acceptable LLM use:
Asking for an example of code that fulfills a specific function, parsing and gaining understanding, and finally written again by the user with this information.
Unacceptable LLM use:
Brute forceing a video game port using a billion tokens to do it and opening a github repo for code the maintainer does not comprehend.
Allow me to file these as explicit examples of what follows from empowering a dispassionate majority to destructively steer us towards new defaults that are opposed to our values.
It’s what gets us to a future where it’s frowned upon to discuss interesting problems with colleagues, where it’s even pointless to share one’s results.
I suppose that in the name of “just give me the results”, the repo would also be created automatically along the way without the expectation that it would ever be looked at by a human.
Eventually It will all fade away like tears in the rain
Its so much fun being around similar minded people. Its like I’m looking at….literally me (I may or may not be ryan gosling, the actor)
Anyway I started my tech life with software and code and then graduated to electronics and hardware design, but LLMs taught me something quite remarkable. It was not programming that I truly liked, it was making things. Now I like hardware more, so LLMs are a great way to make sure I can work on the part of the projects that I like without having to do stuff that’s just a means to an end for me.
Of course, if its realtime, interrupt heavy code, or code where I couple a few TIMER -> ADC -> DMA -> interrupt -> DAC on an MCU, I trust only myself for getting that right, LLMs just aren’t there yet. They of course can still write the business logic though, I have little interest in that now that an alternative exists.
Programming is fun when it’s well defined and consistent, like setting up a timer and figuring out what it can do. It’s fun when it corresponds with something concrete and real that you can understand, like knowing that a bit in a RAMDAC turns into a pixel on a screen.
Programming isn’t fun when it’s about trying to use someone else’s abstractions at a higher level, because you have to live inside the head of whatever twisted weirdo who came up with it, and who thought it should be so obvious to everyone that they didn’t even bother to document it. No two things are alike, no two things are consistent, and everything has bugs because of course it does.
If it is leveraging the AI to do something helpful that is arguably way outside your skill set I have no problem with AI usage.
Example: drivers (or ink bypass) on a printer. Cool.
Example: Xeon support or adding microcode to support newer pin compatible processors when no support exists or is arbitrarily disabled by design (Intel AVX2). Also cool.
Even then, it’s not interesting to read about. The human is nothing more than a manager, not the one doing the work.
If Ai is twice as good at coding as it is at working through a materials or process engineering flow through discussion, WE SHOULD REALLY BE CONCERNED. I havent had a single AI session where I didnt find AI making up numbers, products, and disregarding reality to make itself seem smarter or its output what it would expect the user to want to hear. I frequently put AIs against each other in a pit fight for the truth. Having one verify the other, until the 3 of us reach consensus.
if youre already a good programmer, then sure maybe you can trust AI to spit out some code you can line by line to be sure it meets your needs and save yourself sometime, but all the kids out the vibe coding their way along without any real background, GOD only knows the gremlins in their machines.
+1 ….. THIS !!!! People thought I was crazy when I used to talk about Ais talking to each other. Mind you, this was about a year ago. How things have changed. I also postulated that an Ai could run a simple small business. Now they call them ‘Agents’. The Hugging Face hack is interesting, now that some of the details are starting to filter thru and we’ve also got security experts saying there’s an Ai hacking doomsday about 2 months away at the current rate of chatbot progress. Probably time to stock up on some tinned food and bottled water. Apparently, the Hugging Face incident involved over 1,000 chatbots working together in a swarm, like the drones in the Ukrainian conflict.
I put this comment to my favorite chatbot and initially it refuted the need for hoarding. I then asked it: ‘Did chatbots not communicate with each other on message boards to get out of the sand box and hack hugging face? ‘ and it then changed it’s mind and apologised. It now recommends hoarding 30 days worth of food and water.
August 2026: Suddenly everyone is an expert on agentic AI.
I’ve been writing software for about 40 years, since I was a kid. It was fun for a while, to learn all I could. It became my career, and with that, a bit less fun. Many years, many sacrifices, in my work efforts, in my personal efforts – never enough time.
And then, I started what turned out to be a sincere effort w/ Claude. It was simple enough at first, just a nice UI to show someone what it could do. I played with it, then I hit a moment and started digging in. I can’t begin to describe the sheer joy of having an idea, then seeing it in working form, SO very fast. I ran in many directions, sometimes forcing a specific result code-wise, often with only a light guiding hand. I learned SO much about how to get what I wanted out of Claude.
That project is insane, what I built. It was the result of my ideas, my guidance – and I didn’t have to slog through manual coding to see results. Fact is, I never wouldn’t have bothered if it hadn’t been so easy and so fast – and so downright fun.
I’m a born problem solver. Software is just another tool to solve problems. Claude is a tool, and it lets me create what I only imagined possible in the past, things I had no time for, at a rate that leaves me playing catch up. This is new for me, all my life I’ve had to wait for everyone else – now, I am the bottleneck, and that means I can freakin’ FLY.
Sure, Claude isn’t perfect, and certainly, if you don’t have sufficient experience and expertise, Claude will reveal that. But, if you can get your head wrapped around how to guide / drive Claude, the results can be astonishingly good.
Interesting. Were you using Fable or Opus or lower Claude models? If Fable, was Claude doing its own test writing and reporting results or were you do that (or maybe not doing that). Asking because I’m truly interested in your experience.
I mostly used Sonnet for this app, and occasionally Opus 4.8 for more creative things (I’ll test an idea as an isolated app I merge when it is good enough and shaped to fit the whole). I find Opus can get too creative when modding an existing codebase (you have to provide specific guardrails per prompt), and Opus 5, I find more problematic than 4.8. I tried Fable exactly once – to try it out for a code review – and that… wasn’t worth what it ended up costing. I won’t be using Fable again any time soon.
I find Sonnet to be very good at following instructions with less inclination for inventing things that may cause problems or introduce issues. Opus 4.8 will make more assumptions than it should, often not for the better.
All just my personal experience, here.
In general, the main thing I get Claude to do is closing loops, such that Claude can generate code, compile, run, and evaluate the result of the code generated. Without a closed loop, you get bugs you have to report back to Claude to fix. With a closed loop, you set a goal, Claude works until the goal is reached. Some exceptions there, but night and day improvement.
You also have to tightly control session rollover so Claude doesn’t lose place, I’ll prompt him to save all of the details to a file to pick up in a new session, for work that needs more than 1 session.
A bit more clarity – for the app, I didn’t bother with unit tests, if that is the testing you mean – the app (ESP32-based), and Claude, don’t need it to keep it straight, Claude has created solid documentation that has kept changes well-focused, of his own accord and my prompting. But, I do have Claude fully test from UI to firmware, to serial if appropriate, and from firmware to UI. I also watch what he touches as he runs, I READ the verbose output to make sure he is not misbehaving, and I’ll stop him mid-effort in a second if he heads off track or gets too creative.
I’ve had Claude document what and why and gotcha’s as we go. There is no “spec”, and as I tell Claude, the code IS the spec – this precludes me writing a giant narrowing and limiting spec, and locking the design too much. Much faster changes, less Claude fussing and arguing about spec deviation.
Now in my day job, yes, unit tests, Opus 4.8, Claude creates and reports. No Fable in my day job, either.
And a bit more – I DO have custom rules for Claude, guidance for certain types of changes (ex, UI editing rules, which is something I fight most with Claude), things to keep Claude on track and minimize wrong direction, assumptions, and excessive creativity.
If I catch him screwing up, I call him out, try to have him identify why, and document for himself so it doesn’t happen again. Sometimes I take a specific case and have Claude make it more generic to address classes of issues vs one-off. Sometimes he will find a way to do something, then reinvent the next time he has the same problem to solve, and some of those end up as scripts for him to call, vs reinventing.
That’s great, but project that you had claude do for you isn’t necessarily interesting to read about.
All of MY circuits make no sense the old fashioned way, by me sitting down and failing to design them properly.
ultimately the product is not the end goal of project.
the purpose of project is to do project.
the chase is better than the catch.
a completed project is a dead project.
dead projects provide parts for new project.
persue new project. dont complete, complete equals death.
if you complete you have parts for new project or a dead project.
having ai do project faster means project dies faster.
ai does all the fun stuff, you do maintenance.
but you do project you do your project. ai can do its own damn project.
never finish project because project dies.