I purchased Max a week ago and have been using it a lot. Few experiences so far:
- It generates slop in high volume if not carefully managed. It's still working, tested code, but easily illogical. This tool scares me if put in the hands of someone who "just wants it to work".
- It has proven to be a great mental block remover for me. A tactic i've often had in my career is just to build the most obvious, worst implementation i can if i'm stuck, because i find it easier to find flaw in something and iterate than it is to build a perfect impl right away. Claude makes it easy to straw man a build and iterate it.
- All the low stakes projects i want to work on but i'm too tired to after real work have gotten new life. It's updated library usage (Bevy updates were always a slog for me), cleaned up tooling and system configs, etc.
- It seems incapable of seeing the larger picture on why classes of bugs happen. Eg on a project i'm Claude Code "vibing" on, it's made a handful of design issues that started to cause bugs. It will happily try and fix individual issues all day rather than re-architect to make a less error prone API. Despite being capable to actually fix the API woes if prompted to. I'm still toying with the memory though, so perhaps i can get it to reconsider this behavior.
- Robust linting, formatting and testing tools for the language seem necessary. My pet peeve is how many spaces the LLM will add in. Thankfully cargo-fmt clears up most LLM gunk there.
- It generates slop in high volume if not carefully managed. It's still working, tested code, but easily illogical. This tool scares me if put in the hands of someone who "just wants it to work".
- It has proven to be a great mental block remover for me. A tactic i've often had in my career is just to build the most obvious, worst implementation i can if i'm stuck, because i find it easier to find flaw in something and iterate than it is to build a perfect impl right away. Claude makes it easy to straw man a build and iterate it.
- All the low stakes projects i want to work on but i'm too tired to after real work have gotten new life. It's updated library usage (Bevy updates were always a slog for me), cleaned up tooling and system configs, etc.
- It seems incapable of seeing the larger picture on why classes of bugs happen. Eg on a project i'm Claude Code "vibing" on, it's made a handful of design issues that started to cause bugs. It will happily try and fix individual issues all day rather than re-architect to make a less error prone API. Despite being capable to actually fix the API woes if prompted to. I'm still toying with the memory though, so perhaps i can get it to reconsider this behavior.
- Robust linting, formatting and testing tools for the language seem necessary. My pet peeve is how many spaces the LLM will add in. Thankfully cargo-fmt clears up most LLM gunk there.