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

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:

Well played Claude, well played.