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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

>With Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is generally my AI offering of choice given its superior coding ability, my “What personal preferences should Claude consider in responses?” profile setting includes the line “When writing code, use vanilla HTML/CSS/JS unless otherwise noted by me”. Despite this, Claude will frequently opt to generate new code with React, and in some occurrences even rewrite my existing code into React against my intent and without my consultation.

I noticed this too. Anyone found out how to make Claude work better?

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Claude is particularly bad about this, almost makes it unusable for my frontend use cases. I specify the exact tech stack in my prompt and it responds with a solution using whichever packages are available in its environment (Tailwind, shadcn/ui, etc.).

My request to model providers: the strength of your offering is its generality. Please let it be general-purpose and resist adding features (alignment, system prompts, custom stuff like Claude artifacts) that limit this.

Since the system prompt tied to the artifacts feature seems to be the reason for it having a preference for react, seems like the solution would be to use the API instead. Plenty of front ends available nowadays that let you use your own API key. I've been using typingmind since I paid for it over a year ago but I'd be interested to know if some good open source alternatives have popped up more recently.

The main blocker to using the API with an alternative frontend is the cost.

Daily API usage can easily go above the $20/month subscription cost since output tokens are expensive and each new message reuses the whole message chain as input tokens. Especially true if you often upload images or documents.

Third party providers work through the APIs and thus do not have these issues. I use Kagi but there are many options out there for a price similar to the normal subscription, and plus you get a wider choice of models.

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