Disclaimer: this is a rushed angry rant with F-bombs all over. I had a rough day alright. If explicit language is an issue, please skip the read.
Also for context - I'm a heavy AI user and my productivity has genuinely gone up 10x thanks to these tools. But fuuuuuuu....
Big parts of our app still use jQuery and we're migrating away from it. Nothing ambitious, just replacing DOM manipulation and event handling with vanilla JS. Our complex interactive screens already use Vue.js, but dozens of simple admin pages still have little jQuery sprinkled around.
So I thought: hey, perfect job for an AI agent. Repetitive, mechanical, well-defined, long and boring. Enought with my small local rewrites, let's try the autonomous agent, I wanna be like those youtubers.
So I pointed my MAX priced Claude Code (Opus 4.6) at the codebase. Poured some coffee.
It failed fucking miserably.
OK I didn't just yolo it, I did my homework. Wrote a comprehensive CLAUDE.md with detailed instructions. Prepared helper functions - like const _id = id => document.getElementById(id); . Described edge cases, like, Jquery being forgiving for non-exsiting elements, while plain JS is not, so we have to use optional-chaining. I even wrote my custom fadeIn and fadeOut replacements on HTMLElement.prototype using CSS transitions, so $(#something).fadeIn() just becomes _id(something).fadeIn() . Then I went through "plan mode" and set up two parallel agents - one writing code, one reviewing it.
Overall the task was to edit 67 files, about 5-10 lines to rewrite in each. Simple AI-enhanced find and replace.
Not exactly rewriting a fucking C compiler in Rust from scratch or whatever they claimed it did.
... continue reading