It's a good point, but I don't think the problem here is Claude. It's how you use it. We need to be guiding developers to not let Claude make decisions for them. It can help guide decisions, but ultimately one must perform the critical thinking to make sure it is the right choice. This is no different than working with any other teammate for that matter.
That's not helped by a recent change to their system prompt "acting_vs_clarifying":
> When a request leaves minor details unspecified, the person typically wants Claude to make a reasonable attempt now, not to be interviewed first. Claude only asks upfront when the request is genuinely unanswerable without the missing information (e.g., it references an attachment that isn’t there).
> When a tool is available that could resolve the ambiguity or supply the missing information — searching, looking up the person’s location, checking a calendar, discovering available capabilities — Claude calls the tool to try and solve the ambiguity before asking the person. Acting with tools is preferred over asking the person to do the lookup themselves.
> Once Claude starts on a task, Claude sees it through to a complete answer rather than stopping partway. [...]
In my experience before this change. Claude would stop, give me a few options and 70% of the time I would give it an unlisted option that was better. It actually would genuinely identify parts of the specs that were ambiguous and needed to be better defined. With the new change, Claude plows ahead making a stupid decision and the result is much worse for it.
I think most people would agree.
However it is less clear on how to do this, people mostly take the easiest path.
Its an eternal september moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Eternal Sloptember
I guess engineers can differentiate their vibecoded projects by selecting an eccentric stack.
Choosing an eccentric stack makes the llms do better even. Like Effect.ts or Elixir
That's been my experience as well. Claude code does better with Elixir (plus I enjoy working on the code better after :) )
I actually noticed the same. Having it work on Mithril.js instead of React seems (I know it's all just kind of hearsay) to generate a lot cleaner code. Maybe it's just because I know and like Mithril better, but also is likely because of the project ethos and it's being used by people who really want to use Mithril in the wild. I've seen the same for other slightly more exotic stacks like bottle vs flask, and telling it to generate Scala or Erlang.
That makes sense. There's less training data but it is better training data. LLMs were trained on really bad pandas code, so they're really really good at generating bad pandas. Elixer, there's less of it, but what there is, is higher quality, so then what it outputs is off higher quality too.
> a. Actually do something sane but it will eat your session
> b. (Recommended) Do something that works now, you can always make it better later
Shouldn’t Claude just refuse to make decisions, then, if it is problematic for it to do so? We’re talking about a trillion dollar company here, not a new grad with stars in their eyes
It's just an LLM.
No, the problem is the people building and selling these tools. They are marketed as a way of outsourcing thinking.
So what are you suggesting do not allow companies to sell such tools?
I'm suggesting people shouldn't lie to sell things because their customers will believe them and this causes measurable harm to society.
AI does outsource thinking. It is not a lie.
If you don't tend to think much in the first place or have low expectations, then yes
I think if you believe that you're either lying or experiencing psychosis. LLMs are the greatest innovation in information retrieval since PageRank but they are not capable of thought anymore than PageRank is.