On using Claude 22nd October 2024

I have been using Claude for the past couple of months and ChatGPT for a few months before that. Both are obviously very good tools but I’d rank Claude as better than ChatGPT. My first few weeks of using these tools felt like magic. It felt like they could respond to anything. The next couple of weeks I’d get frustrated with them, trying to test their limits. I’d become so lazy that I completely stopped using my brain. Even when I had enough to code up whatever I was doing myself, I’d become so accustomed to asking them for answers that I’d hurl abuses at them (lol) and tell them they were wrong in frustration. It took some time, but once you use these tools for a bit, you can gauge whether you’re going to get an answer or not. After that point, there’s no use in trying to get an answer from them (and to use your brain instead) because they are going to go around in circles and you are going to waste your time.

I’ve found Claude extremely useful for CSS, Webpack, TSConfig related questions. For example, I was recently stuck on loading an ESM file of a library for a specific microfrontend in a Single Spa React Setup. If I placed it in the index.ejs section of app-root, it would get loaded for all the microfrontends. I wanted to load the ESM file only for the specific microfrontend that used it. And after a bit of prompting it gave me the answer.

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import('path/to/esm/file')
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.then((library) => {
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    window['library'] = library;
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})
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.catch((error) => {
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    console.error('Error loading ESM file:', error);
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});
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  ...
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  alias: {
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        library: path.resolve(__dirname, 'path/to/esm/file'),
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    },
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  ...

There were several other TSConfig related questions where it saved me a lot of time in figuring out the correct option to use. I also found it extremely useful when I had to write a Jira Plugin for work (it was hard to find the relevant information for the specific version I was using online).

But recently I’ve been doing a lot of Reactive programming in Quarkus, and it’s been a disappointment. Maybe my own limited understanding during my initial days of reactive programming added to me not being able to articulate myself better to these chat tools. But it brought me to the conclusion that it’s much better to stay away from Claude/ChatGPT and their ilk in the beginner stages of learning something. Only once you’ve gained some sort of fluency with the new tool you’re learning and can’t find anything in the documentation, it’s better to resort to using Claude/ChatGPT.

I don’t pay for any of these tools, and having a limit on the number of questions that I can ask Claude has been a blessing in that I don’t resort to using it for every small issue that I get stuck on. There were times when, in the amount of time I spent trying to correctly prompt ChatGPT into answering my question, I could’ve solved it myself.