Stepping Back

The other day I was playing around with Claude Code, experimenting with porting some C code to Rust - not for any particular reason, just because I was curious how well it could do. As these things happen, I got more and more invested in the process, instead of just letting Claude do something and noting what happened, I kept poking in and adjusting the behavior, "no you can't pretend the result is 0, try again" - the usual stuff when you're trying to get an LLM to do something large or novel. But I got so invested in seeing the port of the module work that I forgot that my original goal was to see how well the LLM could do on its own. Instead of testing a potentially interesting hypothesis, I was poorly porting a module of a project that I had no interest in continuing. I was only rescued in this case from my pains by the LLM itself: Claude hit some kind of rate-limiting error, forcing me to take a break from the project. Once I was forced away, I found myself posessed with a sudden ... Read full article.