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LLMs are tool-shaped objects: https://minutes.substack.com/p/tool-shaped-objects
Without adequate real-world feedback, the simulation starts to feel real: https://alvinpane.com/essays/when-the-simulation-starts-to-f...
Shall I implement it? No
381–390 of 603 posts
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#382Just yesterday I had a moment Claude's code in a conversation said - “Yes. I just looked at tag names and sorted them by gut feeling into buckets. No systematic reasoning behind it.” It has gut feelings now? I confronted for a minute - but pulled out. I walked away from my desk for an hour to not get pulled into the AInsanity.
It has a lot. I find by challenging it often, getting it to explain it's assumptions, it's usually guessing. This can be overcome by continuously asking it to justify everything, but even then...
It's almost like an emergent feature of a tool that's literally built on best guesses is...guesswork. Not what you want out of a tool that's supposed to be replacing professionals!
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#383I asked gemini a few months ago if getopt shifts the argument list. It replied 'no, ...' with some detail and then asked at the end if I would like a code example. I replied simply 'yes'. It thought I was disagreeing with its original response and reiterated in BOLD that 'NO, the command getopt does not shift the argument list'.
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#384Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…
But that's one of the first things you fix in your CLAUDE.md:
- "Only do what is asked."
- "Understand when being asked for information versus being asked to execute a task."
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#385Codex has always been better at following agents.md and prompts more, but I would say in the last 3 months both Claude Code got worse (freestyling like we see here) and Codex got EVEN more strict. 80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition. I've resorted to append things like "THIS IS JUST A QUESTION. DO NOT EDIT COD…
But that's one of the first things you fix in your CLAUDE.md: - "Only do what is asked." - "Understand when being asked for information versus being asked to execute a task."
This - per extensive experiments - works about as well as when I tell my wife to calm down
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> enabling programmers around the world to be far more productive I know a lot of us feel this way, but why isn't there more evidence of it than our feelings? Where's the explosion of FOSS projects and businesses? And why do studies keep coming out showing decreased productivity? Why aren't there oodles of studies showing increases of productivity? I like kicking back and letting claude do my job but I've yet to see…
It's like everyone forgot that "lines of code" as a productivity metric was a running joke for a decade-plus. The real bottleneck in our work isn't producing boilerplate code, it's producing more or less the right kind of code for the problem at hand, and LLMs, having no real underlying ability to reason, are just not very good at it.
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#387Respect Claude Code and the output will be better. It's not your slave. Treat it as your teammate. Added benefit is that you will know it's limits, common mistakes etc, strenghts, etc, and steer it better next session. Being too vague is a problem, and most of the times being too specific doesn't help either.
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. It's far easier to undo the 1% of the time they fuck up in a serious way than it is to manually audit and allow an the routine stuff. The key is to only give them access to things you're willing to lose. This is also why giving them any kind of direct write access to production is a bad idea.
Talk about code smell If you arent manually auditing, you only notice the fuck ups when they’re instantaneous If you don’t trust it to interact with prod, but still trust it to write code that will run on prod… you’re still trusting it with write access to prod. The only thing I’m willing to let Claude write for me is a static site generator, because static files without JS aren’t going to do any damage, it either lo…
To be clear, I'm not saying you can't (or shouldn't) review the results, only that you can (and should) give the harness the ability to do everything it needs to function without hitting permission barriers that need to be manually approved.
The correct way to run these safely is to sandbox them so real lasting damage is impossible, not to micromanage individual access requests.
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#389Respect Claude Code and the output will be better. It's not your slave. Treat it as your teammate. Added benefit is that you will know it's limits, common mistakes etc, strenghts, etc, and steer it better next session. Being too vague is a problem, and most of the times being too specific doesn't help either.
Is this a troll comment? How could the dialogue in the OP possibly be unclear under any context?
Re: Shall I implement it? No
#390Just yesterday I had a moment Claude's code in a conversation said - “Yes. I just looked at tag names and sorted them by gut feeling into buckets. No systematic reasoning behind it.” It has gut feelings now? I confronted for a minute - but pulled out. I walked away from my desk for an hour to not get pulled into the AInsanity.
It has a lot. I find by challenging it often, getting it to explain it's assumptions, it's usually guessing. This can be overcome by continuously asking it to justify everything, but even then...
Trust shouldn't be inherent in our adoption of these models.
However, constant skepticism is an interesting habit to develop.
I agree, continually asking it to justify may seem tiresome, especially if there's a deadline. Though with less pressure, "slow is smooth...".
Just this evening, a model gave an example of 2 different things with a supposed syntax difference, with no discernible syntax difference to my eyes.
While prompting for a 'sanity check', the model relented: "oops, my bad; i copied the same line twice". smh