This reminds me of when I tried to let Claude port an Android libgdx-based game to a WASM-based libgdx version, so I can play the game in the browser.
No matter how much I tried to force it to stick to a mostly line-by-line port, it kept trying to "improve" the code. At some point it had to undo everything as it introduced a number of bugs. I asked it: "What should I add to your prompt so you won't do this again?" and it gave me this:
### CRITICAL LESSON: Don't "Improve" During Porting
- **BIGGEST MISTAKE: Reorganizing working code**
- **What I did wrong:** Tried to "simplify" by splitting `createStartButton()` into separate creation and layout methods
- **Why it failed:** Introduced THREE bugs:
1. Layout overlap (getY() vs getY() - getHeight())
2. Children not sized (Group.setSize() doesn't affect children)
3. Origins not updated (scaling animations broken)
- **The fix:** Deleted my "improvements" and copied the original Android pattern faithfully
- **Root cause:** Arrogance - assuming I could improve production-tested code without understanding all the constraints
- **Solution:** **FOLLOW THE PORTING PRINCIPLES ABOVE** - copy first, don't reorganize
- **Time wasted:** ~1 hour debugging self-inflicted bugs that wouldn't exist if I'd just copied the original
- **Key insight:** The original Android code is correct and battle-tested. Your "improvements" are bugs waiting to happen.
I like the self-reflection of Claude, unfortunately even adding this to CLAUDE.md didn't fix it and it kept taking wrong turns so I had to abandon the effort.
At this point I only included accounts with >20,000 followers and the community page lists the 20 most 'central' users to each community even if there are more people included in the community.
"Internet Weirdos" sounds kind of negative, sorry about that, I'll see if the LLM can come up with something better. Or do you have a suggestion of what is a good name for your community?
Great to see so many good analytics tools pop up for bsky, I'm also working on one that primarily focuses on the fastest growing user accounts if you're interested:
https://blue.facts.dev/trending
Nice approach. It feels very similar to "tracer bullet" development (I think coined by the pragmatic programmer book), where you get something end-to-end as quickly as possible and then start iterating on the parts.
(https://www.swaroopch.com/tracer-bullet-development/ explains it too)
I used ChatGPT (because no access to bard :) ) to convert their 180 country names to 3-letter codes and generate a world map showing where it's available:
No matter how much I tried to force it to stick to a mostly line-by-line port, it kept trying to "improve" the code. At some point it had to undo everything as it introduced a number of bugs. I asked it: "What should I add to your prompt so you won't do this again?" and it gave me this:
I like the self-reflection of Claude, unfortunately even adding this to CLAUDE.md didn't fix it and it kept taking wrong turns so I had to abandon the effort.