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%.

> 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.

I asked Claude Code to read a variable from a .env file.

It proceeded to write a .env parser from scratch.

I then asked it to just use Node's built in .env file parsing....

This was the 2nd time in the same session that it wrote a .env file parser from scratch. :/

Claude Code is amazing, but it'll goes off and does stupid even for simple requests.

Check your settings, they might be unable to read .env files as a guardrail.