A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code

Preventing garbage just requires that you take into account the cognitive limits of the agent. For example ...

1) Don't ask for large / complex change. Ask for a plan but ask it to implement the plan in small steps and ask the model to test each step before starting the next.

2) For really complex steps, ask the model to write code to visualize the problem and solution.

3) If the model fails on a given step, ask it to add logging to the code, save the logs, run the tests and the review the logs to determine what went wrong. Do this repeatedly until the step works well.

4) Ask the model to look at your existing code and determine how it was designed to implement a task. Some times the model will put all of the changes in one file but your code has a cleaner design the model doesn't take into account.

I've seen other people blog about their tricks and tips. I do still see garbage results but not as high as 95%.

I feel like I do all of this stuff and still end up with unusable code in most cases, and the cases where I don't I still usually have to hand massage it into something usable. Sometimes it gets it right and it's really cool when it does, but anecdotally for me it doesn't seem to be making me any more efficient.

> it doesn't seem to be making me any more efficient

That's been my experience.

I've been working on a 100% vibe-coded app for a few weeks. API, React-Native frontend, marketing website, CMS, CI/CD - all of it without changing a single line of code myself. Overall, the resulting codebase has been better than I expected before I started. But I would have accomplished everything it has (except for the detailed specs, detailed commit log, and thousands of tests), in about 1/3 of the time.

How long would it have taken if you had written “the detailed specs, detailed commit log, and thousands of tests”?