Polite AI

[NotAllThere]

I use Claude. Today I used Claude Code to finish off organising my photos. I'd start a few years back, putting them into folders of YYYY-MM, but never got back to it. Claude Code did the entire job within about half an hour.

I used the Claude desktop to build a 3D model of the theatre were using for the Panto this year. I fed it details of the lighting set up, 2D plans of various parts of the auditorium and stage. It created the necessary data in various formats to import into ETC/EOS.

It's done a pretty good job given the information at hand. Very much usable.

For work I use Claude Code for programming, like when I had 20 reports of similar but sufficiently different formats and needed to parse them into JSON. It went away and created the parsing classes. It spotted some bugs that had been lurking for a few years. It's also build a few prototypes using Power Automate/Teams/Sharepoint.

Using an MCP for ABAP (ARC-1), it's pretty good at analysing issues on our code base as they come in. Sometimes needs a few pointers.

If you create good prompts, then you get good output. The problem is to create good prompts you need to be an experienced senior dev. If AI is doing the junior dev roles where do we get senior devs from?

Copilot (free consumer version) assured me five times yesterday it could creat a docx file of the information I'd asked it to find. Before finally admitting that it can't. "I definitely can create a DOCX, but I just need to know one last thing", it said about three times...

[jamesbrown]

Claude is definitely usable and very useful, not least because it has a VM/sandbox where it can run code and hence perform unit/integration test, so it doesn't delivers code that is broken - might not deliver what you intended, which may be because the prompts were poor/ambiguous or because it made flawed choices - but it won't deliver code that is broken in elementary ways, unlike all the free AIs, which don't test anything before delivering it. They are all still over-confident, but the free AIs are miles behind the latest subscription models - 6 months is a long time in AI dev.

[sadkingbilly]

well its cool for code monkeys and document faffing, but no use to me.

[WooHooNomad]

I use Claude. Today I used Claude Code to finish off organising my photos. I'd start a few years back, putting them into folders of YYYY-MM, but never got back to it. Claude Code did the entire job within about half an hour.

I use Codex with the GPT-6 Astra model set to high reasoning for coding tasks. I bump it up to ULTRA when I’m planning development work. Just like before AI, the more thought you put into the planning, the better the end result. So, I guess that is providing a better prompt in the end.

I haven’t properly tried Claude yet, but I might give it a go now that OpenAI has reduced my token usage on the £200 plan.