nihohit.bsky.social

I tried playing with Amazon Q & Claude 4 today. It worked reasonably well (that is, made slow progress over the code, requiring repeated prompt explaining my goals and why the changes it made were incorrect), until it hit a wall and couldn't make any more progress.

On the journey, it deleted the whole test suite of one class, and as mentioned, got completely stuck once, which required a manual edit of the code. On the other hand, after 2 hours the change was complete - I just need to review the change.

After reviewing, feedback, and more review, I gave up. It was frustrating to harangue claude to REPLACE ALL THE STRINGS, YES THAT ONE TOO, and also to ensure that it should keep `Result`s, instead of finding "clever" ways to avoid returning errors. Claude just wants to have strings, I guess.

The change isn't very complex - the code splits addresses to host + port, but then saves those addresses as `format!("{host}:{port}")`, only to split them again when the address is used. I just wanted to save the split value, instead of combining and splitting again.

Claude just moved the logic around, but still used the combined string throughout the code, until I explicitly told it to delete / change the inputs on every function that takes a string.

Claude added this change, but couldn't trace back the open quotes to the offending line.

well, this is going to slow me down

The code didn't compile, with the error ``` error[E0765]: unterminated double quote string --> path/to/file.rs:464:57 ``` and Claude just couldn't fix the issue, probably because it originated on the other side of the file, in line 130: `if let Some(bracket_end) = addr.find("]:') {`