In my corporate day job I was using ChatGPT and cut pasting a lot...(AI policies and privacy concerns, etc)......for my own stuff Claude is the go...100x better....firlandsfarm wrote: ↑Sun Oct 26, 2025 9:12 pmThe problem I've found with using it for coding is stopping it running away with itself. l guess it thinks it's being helpful by designing something from scratch through to finished product without asking you if it's on the right track and more worrying without checking not just that it's good but making sure you understand what it doing and how. I find I have to keep asking it to explain what its doing and dragging it back to what I want. Yeah, it's ideas may be right or they may not and I want to be able to check which is which. I think getting it to code without explanation is very dangerous.
Thanks for the Claude tip, maybe I should check it out.
Claude WILL run away from you also if you let it....it's solution to that is plan mode...you switch in and out of it it...in plan mode it won't do anything but plan and tell you what it's going to do.... then at the end you tell it yay or ney.......you could if you desired, just stay in plan mode and learn all day long.......but yeah...my experience is the same....the challenge is keeping it consistent, keeping it on track........
The way I get around that is document coding styles and architecture examples and EVERY PROMPT, I tell it about the relevant important ones.....because it does forget... even when you setup pre/post command hooks, etc......it's too much info for it to cope....
Anyway that's how I will be using Claude in the future ... copy a related previous convo and add it into the new convo. maybe as a file rather than pasting thinking pasting will use more of the 'tokens'.
