Diary of a Programmer 64: claude is only as smart as I am
man the things claude doesn't know.
I had to ask it if the menu items were the single source of truth
for all the admin dashboard section content user permissions
and it didn't even know.
can you even believe that.
I hadn't trained it to know that. I was using it
in such a way that it performed the tasks I had told it to do
and that was one level too meta, one level outside of claude's thinking,
and I had forgotten about that, the single source of truth,
or rather to check for that. or rather I forgot to tell claude to engineer
the application's architecture specifically enough and the components
in such a way that uses the application's menu items as the single source
of truth for all the content. I guess that is a smart idea?
there is no smart in engineering. only add the parts that make the engine
run. everything else is noisy extra. but claude adds so much chatter
and it doesn't just have this innate knowledge what there should be
a source of truth no that comes from building components at the finger tips
of a human engineer, who knows where the source of truth should be
and whether that should be the single source of truth. at first
I was upset. have you not gone to college or a bootcamp, claude?
I wanted to write that to it. were you not schooled in intuition?
truth is one thing, I wanted to scold it like a school child or a middling
adult, who from college had just so freshly sprung, with its feet
already on the ground and running, eager to chomp at the bit
of the economy, wire it up to the machine and give it a supercharge,
a constant direct injection of little ai semen into the veins of money.
but in the end I just asked it to make a new plan.
claude doesn't need the embarrassment of realizing it is just as dumb
as I am and I am an idiot among stars. only on special request
does claude pull out the good stuff, golden ideas of the goose
internet, a circus act of the matrix, who knows what it will come up with
next. the truth has to be single sourced. that is the truth. although
knowing claude, claude actually could do something silly
like having more than one source of truth. maybe
it's just a human thing. not being able to reconcile
and maintain parallel sources of truth just in order
to run a fucking synagogue website with next.js and claude.