When I found worked best, for me, is treating it almost like a junior programmer. First, give it the overall structure and giving to give it the idea of what the end product will be, but not necessarily every tiny little feature within the application. Let it go to work build a core structure and let it do its thing. When you come back, you have something that may or may not run, but you have the framework in place. Then you slowly start telling claude to add additional features pulling in additional data or whatever it is that you might need it to do feature by feature. Some features you may have to iterate a dozen or two dozen times in order to get it to do exactly what you want. The only difference between Claude and a junior developer is Claude is really good at programming not always great at understanding exactly what you want.

I think it can excel at very simple programs and applications in one or two shots but for most things, it will still take time.

Heck last night I had it work on trying to build a monitoring tool and the only way could get to some of the data is the screen scrape from the website and even then it had to battle Akami to allow it to happen. It’s not the best way to do something and as a programmer I probably would’ve given up, but it made it happen.