How Many Tries We Need Using Coding Agents May Say More About Standards Than Competence

In a conversation between a group of software developers recently, one of them talked about how many attempts it took them using Claude Code to get a good result. The consensus was that devs who needed fewer tries were better at using the tool. But I’m not so sure… I’ve recently been spending my weekends and early mornings “vibe-coding” a browser-based tool with Claude Code for folks to use in online modular design workshops – in the definitive Karpathy sense that I wasn’t even looking at the code being generated. (When I did finally peek at the code, I regretted it.) And it’s been through a lot of iterations and many, many tweaks to get it into the ballpark of what I consider good enough for the workshops.So I must be doing it wrong, right? Or do I just have a clearer sense of what I want? Take two film directors – Ed Wood and Stanley Kubrick. Wood famously rarely did more than one take on any of his movies. Kubrick did many, many takes. Kubrick must have been doing it wrong, no? Or…

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