I was doing a somewhat elaborate form/graph in Google Worksheets, had to translate a bunch of cells from English to Spanish, and said "Why not use Gemini for this easy, grunt work? They tend to output good translations".

I spent 20 minutes between guiding it because it was putting the translation in the wrong cells, asking it not to convert the cells to a fancy table, and finally, convincing it that it really had access to alter the document, because at some point it denied it. I wasn't being rude, but it seems I somehow made it evasive.

I had to ask it to translate in the chat, and manually copy-pasted the translations in the proper cells myself. Bonus points because it only translated like ten cells at a time, and truncated the reply with a "More cells translated" message.

I can't imagine how hard it would be to handhold an LLM while working in a complex code base. I guess they are a godsend for prototypes and proofs of concept, but they can't beat a competent engineer yet. It's like that joke where a student answers that 2+2=5, and when questioned, he replies that his strength is speed, not accuracy.

This is one of those places I feel like they're trying to do too much with the LLMs and I think this is one of those places where there's "a bubble". I feel like the LLMs are text tools, so trying to take them out of their domain and force them somewhere else you're going to have problems.

Anyways, I replied because I had something else I wanted to say.

I was using Gemini in a google worksheet a while back. I had to cross reference a website and input stuff into a cell. I got Gemini to do it, had it do the first row, then the second, then I told it to do a batch of 10, then 20. It had a hiccup at 20, would take too long I guess. So I had it go back to 10. But then Gemini tells me it can't read my worksheet. I convince it that it can, but then it tells me it can't edit my worksheet. I argue with it, "you've been changing the worksheet wtf?" I convinced it that it could and it started again, but then after doing a couple it told me it couldn't again. We went back and forth a bit, I'd get it working, it would break, repeat. I think it was after the third time I just couldn't get it to do it again.

I looked up the docs, searched online, and I was concerned that I found Google didn't allow Gemini to do a lot of stuff to worksheets/docs/other google workspace stuff. They said they didn't allow it to do a ton of stuff that I definitely had Gemini doing.

Then a week or two went by and google announced they're allowing gemini to directly edit worksheets.

So wtf how did I get it to do it before it could do it???

I added a bunch of lines telling it to never do that in CLAUDE.md and it worked flawlessly.

So I have a different experience with Claude Code, but I'm not trying to say you're holding it wrong, just adding a data point, and then, maybe I got lucky.

I'm curious how many of those directives you'll have in that file at the end of the year.

I think it won't be bigger than the giant set of rules people are supposed to read through (they never do) when onboarding.

At least with AGENTS/CLAUDE.md file, you know the agent will re-read those rules on every new session.

Why are you guys having LLMs use git at all???

Manage that yourself! If you have hooks throwing errors then feed the error back into the llm.