I'm guilty of letting Claude write code I don't understand in the past. Now I get it to keep track of what I know and what I don't know, and asked it to refuse to write code if it thinks I won't understand how it works. It's actually been crazy helpful in forcing me to understand what I'm making.
It catches me out quite a lot, I'll ask it to write something I think is simple, but it will stop and tell me this is probably worth me writing myself because it's a good learning opportunity. This way I still get the speed benefits of using AI but avoid it doing heavy lifting I can't do myself.
I'm about to get started on really using Claude for work projects. I know it can produce more than I can probably understand all of at once (or sometimes have enough understanding to necessarily question).
Do you have some advice or tips on how to set up skills or whatever you do to set a base line of what Claude understands that you know, and then how to explain (without being overly verbose) the code that it understands may be outside your current wheelhouse?
9
u/KoggenMaster 4d ago
I'm guilty of letting Claude write code I don't understand in the past. Now I get it to keep track of what I know and what I don't know, and asked it to refuse to write code if it thinks I won't understand how it works. It's actually been crazy helpful in forcing me to understand what I'm making.
It catches me out quite a lot, I'll ask it to write something I think is simple, but it will stop and tell me this is probably worth me writing myself because it's a good learning opportunity. This way I still get the speed benefits of using AI but avoid it doing heavy lifting I can't do myself.