Omar Abid

Claude 4 - From Hallucination to Creation?

There are two kinds of AI mistakes: the ones that annoy you, and the ones that make you stop and stare at your screen. Today, Claude 4 surprised me with the latter.

I've been working on CodeInput (very early stage) using IBM's Carbon Design System, and my workflow with Claude has become predictable. I describe what I want, Claude generates hundreds of lines of code, and then begins the familiar dance: I remove the hallucinated components that don't exist, ask Claude to regenerate with real ones, and fix whatever remains broken. It works well enough that I can't imagine going back to the old way.

But icons have always been a challenge and an area where Claude's hallucinations were particularly frustrating. To the point that I don't rely much on Claude for that and pick my icon names beforehand.

Today I was working on a multi-credential signin page. Since I need icons for GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket, I went into this knowing that Carbon Icons only has the first two. I planned to either find a workaround for BitBucket or just skip it for now. I expected Claude to botch this icon as usual.

See. Carbon Icons has a GitHub icon. It has a GitLab icon. But I know for certain it doesn't have a BitBucket icon.

So I was surprised, after the first code generation, when I opened my browser to see this

Signin Options

Wait a minute, is that a BitBucket icon? I was a bit puzzled for a moment. Did I miss the Bitbucket icon in the Carbon Library for all this time? Why wasn't I able to find it? What was its name?

I checked the code, expecting to find some obscure Carbon icon name I'd overlooked. Instead, I found this:

<Button
kind="tertiary"
size="lg"
style={{ width: '100%', justifyContent: 'flex-start', gap: '0.75rem' }}
onClick={() => handleOAuthSignin('bitbucket')}
>
<svg width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="currentColor">
	<path d="M.778 1.213a.768.768 0 00-.768.892l3.263 19.81c.084.5.515.868 1.022.873H19.95a.772.772 0 00.77-.618l3.27-20.062a.768.768 0 00-.768-.895zM14.52 15.53H9.522L8.17 8.466h7.561z"/>
</svg>
Continue with Bitbucket
</Button>

Well played Claude, well played.

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