this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Not OP, but I was pretty disappointed trying Claude 4.6
Prompted
It did a breadth first search for the longest path, then checked if that longest path was a word, rather than checking each step, so it never found any words
When I asked it to fix that, it then opened and reread the entire dictionary for each character
Once I got it to fix that, I asked it to read the input array from a file, and after 30 minutes of asking it in different ways, it never managed to successfully read that file in
All in all, it took longer than just writing it myself, even for what I would call an interview question
In a single prompt I would not expect that specific exercise to produce efficient code, but within a few prompts it should. Certainly less time than it would take someone to write it themselves.
There are always creative ways to squeeze extra performance out of code if you spend enough time on it.
I mean, sure - for you and I, who aren't qualified to write that specific code, maybe we can prompt the electronic idiot to get there. Of course, neither we nor the electroic idiot knows where there is, and at best we will copy in exisitng better code that we should have imported from a library. So we gave up automated updates to avoid reading the manual pages.
In contrast, for domains I'm an expert in, babysitting the electric idiot is always a complete waste of time. I can just call the correct library, the correct way, on the first attempt.
Today's AI really highlights exisitng technical debt. If there's already a mountain of it, I can see how the learning model may help wrangle it, and how it may be hard to see the added costs.
Aren’t qualified? I mean… I’m qualified. You aren’t?
What “domains” are you an expert in?
If it can't output ~50 lines of code that is reasonably common from textbooks with one minor modification, I'm not clear what the benefit is
It's certainly not faster
I already stated I kept prompting it for over 30 minutes and it still hadn't fully completed the problem
Well, if it took you 30 minutes, it’s not the AI’s fault.
So, it's the same answer as every other time I've tried to talk to people supporting AI...
If it didn't work, I just I didn't guide it enough, and if I did guide it, it's a skill issue...
It is pretty hard to come up with an easier problem for it to solve for an example case
Mine worked fine. I didn’t use your prompt cut and paste though. It was inefficient on the first prompt, but it worked, and by the third it was pretty speedy. I used codex 5.5, which imo is better than Claude for the time being.
Claude 4.6 was doing shit like
extern char grid[5][5]...
fgets(grid[i], 6, fp); grid[i][6] = '\0';Yeah codex does some stuff where I’m pretty disappointed. It never really gets me 100% to where I need to be without human interaction. But I’m aware it won’t (probably ever) do that and I’m fine with it. It got me 70% there, while I play with my cat… and charge for it. 🤷♂️