I absolutely have the hang of Claude and I still find that it can make those ridiculous mistakes, like replicating logic into a test rather than testing a function directly, talking to a local pg that was stale/ running, etc. I have a ton of skills and pre-written prompts for testing practices but, over longer contexts, it will forget and do these things, or get confused, etc.

You can minimize these problems with TLC but ultimately it just will keep fucking up.

With the back and forth refining I find it very useful to tell Claude to 'ask questions when uncertain' and/or to 'suggest a few options on how to solve this and let me choose / discuss'

This has made my planning / research phase so much better.

Yes pretty much my workflow. I also keep all my task.md files around as part of the repo, and they get filled up with work details as the agent closes the gates. At the end of each one I update the project memory file, this ensures I can always resume any task in a few tokens (memory file + task file == full info to work on it).

Pretty good workflow. But you need to change the order of the tests and have it write the tests first. (TDD)

I mean I’ve been using AI close to 4 years now and I’ve been using agents off and on for over a year now. What you’re describing is exactly what I’m doing.

I’m not seeing anyone at work either out of hundreds of devs who is regularly cranking out several thousand lines of pretty good working code in 30-45 minutes.

What’s an example of something you built today like this?