I've been using Claude to help write a complex prototype for game dev. Overall it's been a big productivity boost. However as the project has grown Claude has gotten much worse. I'm nearing 15k lines and it's borderline more trouble than it's worth. Even when it was helpful, it needed a _lot_ of guidance from me. Almost more helpful as a "rubber ducky" and for the fact that it kept me from deadlocking on analysis. That said, discussing problems and solutions with Claude often does keep things moving and sometimes reveals unexpected solutions.

If Claude could write the code directly unsupervised, it would go wild and produce a ton of garbage. At least if the code it writes in the browser is any indication. It's not that it's all bad, but it's like a very eager junior dev -- potentially dangerous!

Imagining a codebase that is one or two orders of magnitude larger, I think Claude would be useless. Imagining a non-expert driving the process, I think Claude would generate a very rickety proof of concept then fall over. All that said, I wish I had this tool when developing my previous game. Especially for a green field project, it feels like having access to the internet versus pulling reference manuals -- a big force multiplier.