Sunday 03/29/2026
Sunday morning stuff. Plants, puzzle, mess around on the Internet. Finally time for lunch and the fancy Sunday Brunch service let me down. I took several things and all of them displeased me. The pork loin was near-raw, the French toast was soggy and tasted funny. I poked at things on my plate and got up and walked out. Walked down Hamilton ave. and had a slice at New York Pizza.
Then I had a personal failure. I returned to Claude Code for another try. Mind you, I like Claude, the interactive chat you find on the web at Claude.ai . I use it often, although for quick factual questions, I like Perplexity.ai better. Anyway I have used Claude.ai for many things.
What is all the rage among programmers is Claude Code, which is basically the same AI, except reorganized as a coding companion. I used to think of myself as a programmer, a coder. I mean, I got paid to do it for IBM for a decade. And documented other people’s code longer than that. And wrote a couple of quite sizable apps, thousands of lines of Python code, just for fun, after I retired. So I know my way ar und a command line, I know about program structure and program design and functional specifications, and how to use Github to store and manage code.
So the way Claude Code works is, you set up a directory with some files containing basic information about the app, functional spec, rules about what libraries and platforms you want to use. (Which I still haven’t decided, see a few days back; all the web pages about the different platforms and libraries that I was trying to learn? Are on my good computer which is away getting its screen replaced.)
You set up these files, Claude.md and so on, and you invoke the claude app from the command line. It reads your stuff and it takes over the terminal session and prompts you, What do you want to do? In effect, it becomes your command shell. You can still give a UNIX command by prefixing it with an @sign, but other input is received and acted on by Claude.
I had already read about this stuff, and there is a lot I need to add to the setup files in the directory. But today I just wanted to start with a basic issue. “I have set up a GitHub repo for this project, how do I give you access to it?” It mulls for a second, then it runs a couple of commands which produce errors, then it tells me I need to get either a new private token or a new SSH key. For which it gives abbreviated directions, Go to GitHub.com, go to settings, do this, do that. Which I do, and all that gets me is an error message I don’t understand. At which point I am feeling defeated. Again. The details just go on and on.
I may go back to beat my head on it yet again, but every time it seems like a whole new rabbit hole opens up that I need to go down to get back to the previous rabbit hole.
Codgerville 