Albert Skibinski

I've been using Claude Code exclusively for 6 months and I'm still not convinced on this whole AI thing. There are some *seriously* insidious problems that worry me, and I don't see them being fixed any time soon. Every release of a new model, I see hundreds of posts where people think because they one-shotted X or Y, software jobs are cooked (I've probably made one or two of these posts myself). But none of those examples are actually representative of real-world software. If I set it to work on an ambiguous or highly complex problem that has a lot of branching in the solution space, I've noticed the following: - It can often generate a working solution in one-shot, which gives me a false sense of confidence that the AI knows exactly what it's doing. - As I continue to work the problem, I've noticed the AI will start to narrow its focus more and more, not considering how a fix or solution plays into the big picture. - The quality of a solution depends on *how* I prompt it, which is really, really bad. Software engineering should be deterministic, not a dice roll. - It will often ignore instructions I have explicitly stated in the rules file, which removes any confidence I have in the code it generates. - It consistently overstates its confidence in a solution. I literally just got this response from Claude: "I overstated that. Honest answer: it depends on the scene and implementation; the 2–4× figure was too confident." If I had never pushed back, I would have been operating on incorrect information. - It is far too agreeable. If I'm not careful in my wording, the AI will blindly follow my instructions, even if they are suboptimal. I want a real coding partner that challenges my ideas, not an ass-kisser. Don't get me wrong—AI has helped me build some amazing things faster than I ever could without it. But the more I use it, the more I begin to question the direction things are headed. If the AI was more direct about what it (not) capable of, it'd be a lot easier to work with. But being gaslit every step of the way makes the process stressful as hell. Going back to manual coding isn't even an option since the value of having AI *potentially* generating the correct code in 1/10 or 1/100 of the time is literally too good to pass up on. Sorry for the rant, drank way too much cold brew this morning.