Another thing is that before, you were in a greenfield project, so Claude didn't need any context to do new things. Now, your codebase is larger, so you need to point out to Claude where it should find more information. You need to spoon-feed the relevant files with "@" where you want it to look up things and make changes.
If you feel Claude is lazy, force it to use more thinking budget "think" < "think hard" < "think harder" < "ultrathink.". Sometimes I like to throw "ultrathink" and do something else while it codes. [1]
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...
Give programming a try, you might like it.
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In my case it was exactly the kind of situation where I would also run into trouble on my own - trying to change too many things at once.
It was doing superbly for smaller, more contained tasks.
I may have to revert and approach each task on its own.
I find I need to know better than Claude what is going on, and guide it every step. It will figure out the right code if I show it where it should go, that kind of thing.
I think people may be underestimating / underreporting how much they have to be in the loop, guiding it.
It’s not really autonomous or responsible. But it can still be very useful!
I’m in the middle of some refactoring/bug fixing/optimization but it’s constantly running into issues, making half baked changes, not able to fix regressions etc. Still trying to figure out how to make do a better job. Might have to break it into smaller chunks or something. Been pretty frustrating couple of weeks.
If anyone has pointers, I’m all ears!!