Claude Sonnet will ship in Xcode

3 days ago I saw another Claude praising submission on HN, and finally I signed up for it, to compare it with copilot.

I asked 2 things.

1. Create a boilerplate Zephyr project skeleton, for Pi Pico with st7789 spi display drivers configured. It generated garbage devicetree which didn't even compile. When I pointed it out, it apologized and generated another one that didn't compile. It configured also non-existent drivers, and for some reason it enabled monkey test support (but not test support).

2. I asked it to create 7x10 monochromatic pixelmaps, as C integer arrays, for numeric characters, 0-9. I also gave an example. It generated them, but number eight looked like zero. (There was no cross in ether 0 nor 8, so it wasn't that. Both were just a ring)

What am I doing wrong? Or is this really the state of the art?

It’s good at doing stuff like “host this all in Docker. Make a Postgres database with a Users table. Make a FastAPI CRUD endpoint for Users. Make a React site with a homepage, login page, and user dashboard”.

It’ll successfully produce _something_ like that, because there’s millions of examples of those technologies online. If you do anything remotely niche, you need to hold its hand far more.

The more complicated your requirements are, the closer you are to having “spicy autocomplete”. If you’re just making a crud react app, you can talk in high level natural language.

FWIW, I used Gemini to write an Objective-C app for Apple Rhapsody (!) that would enumerate drivers currently loaded by the operating systems (more or less save level of difficulty as the OP, I'd say?), using the PDF manual of NextStep's DriverKit as context.

It... sort of worked well? I had to have a few back-and-forth because it tried to use Objective-C features that did not exist back then (e.g. ARC), but all in all it was a success.

So yeah, niche things are harder, but on the other hand I didn't have to read 300 pages of stuff just to do this...