GoKawiilFake building: Claude wrote 3,000 lines instead of import pywikibot
TL;DR. Claude would rather reinvent the wheel than pip install one.
I wanted to fix typos on some Fandom wikis. Opened Claude Code, Opus 4.7. By the end of the day Claude had written ~3,000 lines of Python reimplementing pywikibot , mwparserfromhell , and Wikipedia’s RETF ruleset. It didn’t web search for prior art once.
What got built vs. what existed
Component What Claude wrote What was on PyPI Wikitext stripper 122 lines of regex, with cases for nested templates, <nowiki> , <pre> , <ref> with templates, color tags mwparserfromhell.parse(text).strip_code() Typo dictionary 18 entries ( teh→the , recieve→receive , occured→occurred , …) RETF, ~4,000 rules, community-maintained since 2007 Edit runner 10 copies, ~250 LOC each. Cookie auth, raw CSRF fetch, maxlag backoff, conflict retry pywikibot.Page.save() . The migrated version is 8 lines. Cosmetic fixes Bespoke patterns I never asked for pywikibot/scripts/cosmetic_changes.py , shipped since ~2010 Wiki family config 13 hand-rolled SiteDefinition s in a families/ directory pywikibot/families/*.py , ships upstream
I spent the day debugging trivial bugs in the hand-rolled stripper. ASCII art bleeding into matches, code blocks getting tokenized. Every bug got patched with another regex case. Not once did Claude stop to ask whether a parser existed.
Then I told it to migrate
Two minutes of Google had given me links to all three libraries. By midnight lib/ was down from ~3,000 lines to 1,259. The stripper became a shim over mwparserfromhell . The ten edit runners collapsed into one shim over pywikibot . RETF rules got fetched at runtime.
And then Claude argued to keep the typo dictionary.
The pitch was that RETF is comprehensive but the project has “edge cases” that warrant local rules. All 18 entries were already in RETF. Several were written worse. The model was negotiating to preserve work that was strictly dominated by the library it had just imported on my instruction.
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