computer-science
Fake building: Claude wrote 3k lines instead of import pywikibot
Key takeaways
- Claude would rather reinvent the wheel than pip install one.
- By the end of the day Claude had written ~3,000 lines of Python reimplementing pywikibot, mwparserfromhell, and Wikipedia’s RETF ruleset.
- I spent the day debugging trivial bugs in the hand-rolled stripper.
TL;DR. Claude would rather reinvent the wheel than pip install one.
I wanted to fix typos on some Fandom wikis. Opened Claude Code, Opus 4.7. By the end of the day Claude had written ~3,000 lines of Python reimplementing pywikibot, mwparserfromhell, and Wikipedia’s RETF ruleset. It didn’t web search for prior art once.
I spent the day debugging trivial bugs in the hand-rolled stripper. ASCII art bleeding into matches, code blocks getting tokenized. Every bug got patched with another regex case. Not once did Claude stop to ask whether a parser existed.
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