The behavior of the AI coding tools changes so fast. After a routine update my IDE ran into context size issues yesterday. Don’t know if that was the IDE or API. Today I saw something new where claude sonnet got caught in a recursive loop reviewing it’s actions to the coding plan.

“You’re absolutely right - I got caught in a recursive planning loop where I kept creating new plans instead of executing the existing solid foundation. This is a fascinating AI behavior pattern where meta-work becomes a substitute for actual work.”

It’s own suggested remedy, a guard to identify and break out of the loop didn’t fix it. Started a new thread.

Using Anthropic Claude models for coding:

Opus is strong on analysis. Industry benchmarks show it’s strong at coding, but I find it ambitious and rangy. It drifts beyond its mission when struggling, and will charge down supposition paths without grounding.

Sonnet is good at tasking out work and quite good at following through on well-defined tasks, but can be short-sighted in terms of pattern and method reuse.

The current version of Haiku falls short. It shows its age with anti-patterns like aggressively duplicating code and hardcoding values, particularly when spins on a task.

So, for now, I live in Sonnet. I use Opus mostly for analysis on big problems. I’ve stopped trying to use Haiku for now. Would love to hear from someone who is getting decent results in complex code with one of the smaller models.

With claude 4, use its reasoning threads. Read the stream it goes. When you see it struggling or about to take a wrong turn stop it. Correct/revert the files if necessary and tell it what you did and why and give it your reasoning on how to move forward. Then tell it to continue.