{"id":584,"date":"2026-01-11T19:22:46","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T19:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/?p=584"},"modified":"2026-01-12T06:53:05","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T06:53:05","slug":"coding-with-claude-week-2-end-of-the-honeymoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/01\/11\/coding-with-claude-week-2-end-of-the-honeymoon\/","title":{"rendered":"Coding With Claude Week 2: End of the Honeymoon?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week, Claude helped me bring my son onboard to collaborate on our contract whist scoreboard and that worked very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I began a new project – a link management system with rich categorizing, tagging and drag and drop support. I wanted to test Clause on more complex graphical interactions (and make something that I will use every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here I started to experience problems. I am not yet sure whether these are due to my prompting skills or Claude’s coding (or memory) skills …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI Amnesia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I started out being frustrated because Claude didn’t seem to know the database schema that it had itself created. I was anticipating that it would remember what it had done in previous sessions, but it doesn’t. It starts fresh each time, even though it is working on the same repository.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So we created the .claude directory. Then I asked if it would think to update it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Making Assumptions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So, I got into the habit of asking it to update the docs. But then I found that it wasn’t really thinking very hard about what it was doing and that it seemed to forget about context.md during the session<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We started trying to get the basic behavior of dragging and dropping categories onto each other or into empty space working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Incremental Guesses<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

And we went round and round in circles with fixing one bug causing another behavior to break until I wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Claude came back with a suggestion for a new component, but it spelt it wrong:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I asked how I could help:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I haven’t set up local testing (yet) but I am providing full testing info.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Re-Thinking<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When Claude started talking about overriding certain library behaviors for what I suspect is a solved problem, I suggested it revisit some of its assumptions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And I had to emphasize that everything should be draggable:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We agreed on this simpler architecture, but then it made an error in a call to the database schema that it had created in a previous session (and which it was now supposed to consult before proposing a solution):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“Honesty” and “Complete Honesty”!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Now it needs to be “honest”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And then “completely honest”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But by then we had reached our usage limit for the session:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When we were able to restart, we put in place a debug log which seemed to help a lot and I got into the habit of reminding it to check its solution before implementing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And finally it was my turn to forget something. I didn’t update the database!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Running Out of Time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We burned through three complete sessions on Sunday and have used up 71% of my weekly allocation in three days! And we have something a basic skeleton of a solution that is not yet usable. Let’s see if we can continue in a more efficient manner!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, Claude helped me bring my son onboard to collaborate on our contract whist scoreboard and that worked very well. Then I began a new project – a link management system with rich categorizing, tagging and drag and drop support. I wanted to test Clause on more complex graphical interactions (and make something that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,24],"class_list":["post-584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-ai","tag-computing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":602,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions\/602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}