I like this approach. After some months of gamely trying to involve Claude in my coding process, I find it's much more enjoyable and efficient for me to just write the code myself, rather than babysitting it and going over and over something it wrote finding errors and logical flaws. I was about to cancel my subscription.

This month, however, I had to start upgrading a very large db from MySQL 8 to 9, on a codebase that involves a few hundred long and complex queries. I wrote this code, so I know what they do and I understand the schema, but I'm also aware that some of them may violate ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY, and a few (but can't remember which) had historical oddities unless DERIVED_MERGE was turned off. I was girding myself to run tests on dozens of suspects, but as a lark I handed Claude the whole codebase and the schema and asked it to identify any queries that might break if those two default options were enabled. Astonishingly, it did. It identified 15 queries and explained what they violated. It was wrong about 7 of them... those seven were actually fine, and it acknowledged that it had farmed this out in some way and that whatever it used for evaluation had been overly conservative and had returned false positives. But the other 8 queries were fixable. It was also a bit off about how to rewrite them - it created a lot of slow and inefficient workarounds. It neglected the idea of lateral joins, it didn't write SQL optimized for the indexes, etc. But it saved me hours and hours of locating these queries myself.

To me, this idea of letting the LLM render down a lot of code into potential pain points seems like a much more valuable use of it than asking it to write code itself. I kept my subscription for that reason.