It takes many months to figure this out, much longer than learning a new programming language.

Read through anthropics knowledge share, check out their system prompts extracted on github, write more words in AGENTS/CLAUDE.md, you need to give them some warmup to do better at tasks.

What model are you using? Size matters and Gemini is far better at UI design work. At the same time, pairing gemini-3-flash with claude-code derived prompts makes it nearly as good as Pro

Words matter, the way you phrase something can have disproportionate effect. They are fragile at times, yet surprisingly resilient at others. They will deeply frustrate you and amaze you on a daily basis. The key is to get better at recognizing this earlier and adjusting

You can find many more anecdotes and recommendations by looking through HN stories and social media (Bluesky has a growing Ai crowd, coming over from X, good community bump recently, there are an anti-ai labelers/block lists to keep the flak down)

You aren't telling us anything about how you're using it. So how can we tell you what you're doing wrong? You're just reporting what happened.

You haven't even said what programming language you're trying to use, or even what platform.

It sounds to me like you didn't do much planning, you just gave it a prompt to build away.

My preferred method of building things, and I've built a lot of things using Claude, is to have a discussion with it in the chatbot. The back and forth of exploring the idea gives you a more solid idea of what you're looking for. Once we've established the idea I get it to write a spec and a plan.

I have this as an instruction in my profile.

> When we're discussing a coding project, don't produce code unless asked to. We discuss projects here, Claude Code does the actual coding. When we're ready, put all the documents in a zip file for easy transfer (downloading files one at a time and uploading them is not fun on a phone). Include a CONTENTS.md describing the contents and where to start.

So I'll give you this one as an example. It's a Qwen driven System monitor.

https://github.com/lawless-m/Marvinous

here are the documents generated in chat before trying to build anything

https://github.com/lawless-m/Marvinous/tree/master/ai-monito...

At this point I can usually say "The instructions are in the zip, read the contents and make a start." and the first pass mostly works.

It seems to me you expect Claude to be able to one-shot your tool based on a single prompt. Potentially "vibe-coding" as in the sense: you don't know how to develop this yourself (perhaps you are not a software developer?)

While this may be possible, it likely requires a very detailed prompt and/or spec document.

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Here is an example of something I successfully built with Claude: https://rift-transcription.vercel.app

Apparently I have had over 150 chat sessions related to the research and development of this tool.

- First, we wrote a spec together: https://github.com/Leftium/rift-transcription/blob/main/spec...

- The spec broke down development into major phases. I reviewed detailed plans for each phase before Claude started. I often asked Claude to update these detailed plans before starting. And after implementation, I often had to have Claude fix bugs in the implementation.

- I tried to share the chat session where Claude got the first functional MVP working: https://opncd.ai/share/fXsPn1t1 (unfortunately the shared session is truncated)

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"AI mistakes you're probably making": https://youtu.be/Jcuig8vhmx4

I think the most relevant point is: AI is best for accelerating development tasks you could do on your own; not new tasks you don't know how to do.

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Finally: Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/44159166