Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Memory

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 326 posts

Re: Claude Memory

#111

Post by stingraycharles »

cainxinth wrote: post #23

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…

Yes, your last paragraph is absolutely the key to great output: instead of entering a discussion, refine the original prompt. It is much more token efficient, and gets rid of a lot of noise.

I often start out with “proceed by asking me 5 questions that reduce ambiguity” or something like that, and then refine the original prompt.

It seems like we’re all discovering similar patterns on how to interact with LLMs the best way.

Re: Claude Memory

#112

Post by dbbk »

ivape wrote: post #109
simonw wrote: post #105

It's not 100% clear to me if I can leave memory OFF for my regular chats but turn it ON for individual projects. I don't want any memories from my general chats leaking through to my projects - in fact I don't want memories recorded from my general chats at all. I don't want project memories leaking to other projects or to my general chats.

I suspect that’s probably what they’ve built. For example: all_memories: Topic1: [{}…] Topic2: [{}..] The only way topics would pollute each other would be if they didn’t set up this basic data structure. Claude Memory, and others like it, are not magic on any level. One can easily write a memory layer with simple clear thinking - what to bucket, what to consolidate and summarize, what to reference, and what to pull…

Watch out guys there's an engineer in the chat

Re: Claude Memory

#113

Post by dreamcompiler »

cainxinth wrote: post #23

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…

I think you're saying a functional LLM is easier to use than a stateful LLM.

Re: Claude Memory

#114

Post by ivape »

dbbk wrote: post #112
ivape wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that’s probably what they’ve built. For example: all_memories: Topic1: [{}…] Topic2: [{}..] The only way topics would pollute each other would be if they didn’t set up this basic data structure. Claude Memory, and others like it, are not magic on any level. One can easily write a memory layer with simple clear thinking - what to bucket, what to consolidate and summarize, what to reference, and what to pull…

Watch out guys there's an engineer in the chat

You’d never know sometimes. People sit around in amazement at coding agents or things like Claude memory, but really these are simple things to code :)

Re: Claude Memory

#115

Post by dcre »

dingnuts wrote: post #61
torben-friis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a curious wording. It mentions a process of improvement being attempted but not necessarily a result.

because all the safety stuff is bullshit. it's like asking a mirror company to make mirrors that modify the image to prevent the viewer from seeing anything they don't like good fucking luck. these things are mirrors and they are not controllable. "safety" is bullshit, ESPECIALLY if real superintelligence was invented. Yeah, we're going to have guardrails that outsmart something 100x smarter than us? how's that suppo…

I think you are severely underestimating the amount of really bad stuff these things would say if the labs put no effort in here. Plus they have to optimize for some definition of good output regardless.

Re: Claude Memory

#116

Post by cruffle_duffle »

cainxinth wrote: post #23

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…

I completely agree. ChatGPT put all kinds of nonsense into its memory. “Cruffle is trying to make bath bombs with baking soda and citric acid” or “Cruffle is deciding between a red colored bedsheet or a green colored bedsheet”. Like great both of those are “time bound” and have no relevance after I made the bath bomb or picked a white bedsheet…

All these LLM manufacturers lack ways to edit these memories either. It’s like they want you to treat their shit as “the truth” and you have to “convince” the model to update it rather than directly edit it yourself. I feel the same way about Claude’s implementation of artifacts too… they are read only and the only way to change them is via prompting (I forget if ChatGPT lets you edit its canvas artifacts). In fact the inability to “hand edit” LLM artifacts is pervasive… Claude code doesn’t let you directly edit its plans, nor does it let you edit the diffs. Cursor does! You can edit all of the artifacts it generates just fine, putting me in the drivers seat instead of being a passive observer. Claude code doesn’t even let you edit previous prompts, which is incredibly annoying because like you, editing your prompt is key to getting optimal output.

Anyway, enough rambling. I’ll conclude with a “yes this!!”. Because yeah, I find these memory features pretty worthless. They never give you much control over when the system uses them and little control over what gets stored. And honestly, if they did expose ways to manage the memory and edit it and stuff… the amount of micromanagement required would make it not worth it.

Re: Claude Memory

#117

Post by ivape »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #18
anonzzzies wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude code has had this for a while (seems old news anyway). In my limited world it really works well, Claude Code has made almost no mistakes for weeks now. It seems to 'get' our structure; we have our own framework which would be very badly received here because it's very opinionated; I am quite against freedom of tools because most people cannot actually really evaluate what is good and what is not for the proble…

Are you sure? As far as I am aware CC does not have a memory system built-in, other than .md files.

What do you think a memory system even is? Would you call writing things down on a piece of paper a memory system? Because it is. Claude Code stores some of its memory in someway and digests it, and that is enough to be called a memory system. It could be intermediary strings of context that it keeps around, we may not know the internals.

Re: Claude Memory

#118

Post by dreamcompiler »

heisenbit wrote: post #78
cainxinth wrote: post #23

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…

Basics of control theory: Use (energy storage), add some lag and maybe a bit of amplification and then the instability fun begins.

Or, IIR filters can blow up while FIR filters never do.

Re: Claude Memory

#119

Post by cubefox »

corry wrote: post #27
cainxinth wrote: post #23

I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…

Strong agree. For every time that I'd get a better answer if the LLM had a bit more context on me (that I didn't think to provide, but it 'knew') there seems to be a multiple of that where the 'memory' was either actually confounding or possibly confounding the best response. I'm sure OpenAI and Antropic look at the data, and I'm sure it says that for new / unsophisticated users who don't know how to prompt, that thi…

Anecdotally, LLMs also get less intelligent when the context is filled up with a lot of irrelevant information.

Re: Claude Memory

#120

Post by eterm »

amelius wrote: post #5

I'm not sure I would want this. Maybe it could work if the chatbot gives me a list of options before each chat, e.g. when I try to debug some ethernet issues: Please check below: [ ] you are using Ubuntu 18 [ ] your router is at 192.168.1.1 [ ] you prefer to use nmcli to configure your network [ ] your main ethernet interface is eth1 etc. Alternatively, it would be nice if I could say: Please remember that I prefer t…

claude-code will read from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md so you can have different memory files for different environments.
Post reply on HN