> It has no sense of direction of its own maybe. Once you know what you are doing, you can ride it fine. If not, it makes a misstep so later things go haywire, and you are left guessing why.

This is a perfect description. Last week I asked claude opus to get AAC audio working in davinci resolve on linux. It managed to add aac in mov and mp4 containers very quickly. But mkv was another matter. For mkv files, resolve doesn't use ffmpeg. Instead, it has its own parser. Claude got totally lost down a weird rabbit hole trying to add aac support to resolve's mkv code. It was really struggling. Claude even knew it was lost - it kept telling me we should cut our losses and I should just release aac support without mkv.

Eventually I gave it the executable for davinci resolve on mac, which has aac support. Claude found the corresponding part of the code for the mac version and used it as a reference. Turns out, claude had made some much earlier mistake. Just like you said, it was going down a wrong path. Then it couldn't stop itself, and it kept making it worse.

Using the mac version of the binary as a reference, claude figured out how to get everything working very quickly. But - I'm left wondering. Maybe my real mistake was using Opus and not Fable. I wonder if fable would have been smart enough to figure out the mistake and course-correct.