Speed of Light
My Experiences with Claude
These are strange times. After three-quarters of a year with Anthropics Claude, I see how things I couldn’t have imagined a year or two ago are suddenly becoming a reality. You build a slideshow builder that can output PDFs as well as PowerPoint presentations—and do it in less than two days.
When I think back to my days as a programmer, I would have been thrilled if I’d managed to do that in a month. In fact, this path that Martin Burckhardt has taken me down is by no means straightforward—and it’s definitely helpful to have a clear understanding of how a human would go about building certain things. So it took several months to program Claude to follow a specific set of programming rules. The main problem was short-term memory. Here’s an example: You’re working with Claude—in a long session—to develop a program that ends up being fully functional. But then the chat goes on too long, and when you want to start over, everything is forgotten; if you didn’t intervene, Claude would start all over again from scratch. Consequently, we ask the AI to generate a log of what was worked out at the end of such a session. And we establish certain basic principles (K.I.S.S.—Keep it simple, stupid), or that problems should be solved step by step and in a dialog format. The results of these measures were breathtaking: an incredible acceleration of work and the courage to tackle even complex issues from then on.
Here’s a little sample:
