Overthinking it

I’ve been experimenting with various agentic agents for programming for a little while now. But I’ve haven’t tried using it for any analysis work. Until today.

What I found was impressive. With a few prompts and a little back-and-forth, I was able to quickly produce a relatively attractive choropleth map showing state level cost of living data.

I started with a simple setup prompt just to see if everything was working.

> create a git repo for this project and add folders for code, data, and output

It was, and it did, also creating .gitkeep files in each of the empty directories and a .gitignore file. I noticed during the planning that I hadn’t specified that I’d be using R as my language, so I added some additional context so it could make the .gitignore more relevant.

> add commong R patterns to the .gitignore

It figured it out despite my typo.

Once that was all executed, it was time for the main prompt on the task. I’ve heard that the best way to talk to claude code is to just treat it like a experienced engineer. So that’s what I did

> Our goal is to create a state-level chloropleth map of the United States showing the relative cost of living for each state.  We will be using R as our language with the tidyverse library. For the map shape file we will use the usmap library. The data is in a csv file at data/cost_of_living.csv. Break the states into quintiles based on the cost_of_living score and pick an attractive diverging color scheme for plotting.  Make sure to use ggplot for the graph and to give the final version a title and meaningful legend labels.  Save the output and a .png to the output directory with dimensions of 10x6 inches.

I submitted that and sat back and watched it work. It took a couple minutes to grind through it and I noticed that at least once it tried to execute the code and got an error. But it recognized the error and corrected the code and reran without my intervention.

The results were fine and I could have stopped there, but I wanted to see how well it did with changes and edits. So, first, I asked it to change the color scheme. I told it exactly what palette I wanted.

> instead of the RdYlGn palette, use the diverging type pallete #1  

Again, it figured it out despite my typo. Looking at the code itself, It didn’t exactly follow my directions/expectations (I expected it to specify the palette by number; it instead figured out the palette by I meant and used the name). But, technically, it was exactly correct.

Finally I gave it a slightly hard challenge.

> It's hard in the map to see DC because it's so small.  Make it larger and move it slightly off the coast of Maryland        

This took a while for Code to think through and required a larger refactor of the existing code along with the additional sf code to move DC. Again, watching it worked, it seemed to fail a few times along the way. But it kept at it and ultimately succeeded.

The final map is below. I thinks its pretty good. It took me about an hour, which is probably about what it would have taken me to do by hand (I would have had to research how to move DC for a while). But hour was significant time on my end checking up on Claude as it went. If I hadn’t been learning myself, I’ve no doubt this would have been significantly quicker than I could do alone. Like I said at the top, I’m impressed.