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Please do not A/B test my workflow

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Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#131

Post by applfanboysbgon »

duskdozer wrote: post #119
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in no way standard practice for proprietary software, WTF is with you dystopian weirdos trying to gaslight people? Adobe's suite incl. Photoshop does not do this, Microsoft Office incl. Excel does not do this, professional video editing software does not do this, professional music production software does not do this, game engines do not do this. That short list probably covers 80-90% of professional softwar…

Maybe then, it's just my expectation of what they would be doing. What else is all the telemetry for? As a side note, my impression is that this is less of a photoshop and more of a website situation in that most of the functionality is input and response to/from their servers.

Telemetry is, ideally, collected with the intention of improving software, but that doesn't necessitate doing live A/B tests. A typical example: report hardware specs whenever the software crashes. Use that to identify some model of GPU or driver version that is incompatible with your software and figure out why. Ship a fix in the next update. What you don't do with telemetry is randomly do live experiments on your user's machines and possibly induce more crashing.

Regarding the latter point, the Claude Code software controls what is being injected into your own prompt before it is sent to their servers. That is indeed the only reason the OP could discover it -- if the prompt injection was happening on their servers, it would not be visible to you. To be clear, the prompt injection is fine and part of what makes the software useful; it's natural the company does research into what prompts get desirable output for their users without making users experiment[1]. But that should really not be changing without warning as part of experiments, and I think this does fall closer to a professional tool like Photoshop than a website given how it is marketed and the fact that people are being charged $20~200/mo or more for the privilege of using it. API users especially are paying for every prompt, so being sabotaged by a live experiment is incredibly unethical.

[1] That said, I think it's an extremely bad product. A reasonable product would allow power users to config their own prompt injections, so they have control over it and can tune it for their own circumstances. Having worked for an LLM startup, our software allowed exactly that. But our software was crafted with care by human devs, while by all accounts Claude Code is vibe coded slop.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#132

Post by rahimnathwani »

If you want your coding harness to be predictable, then use something open source, like Pi:

https://pi.dev/

https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...

But if you want to use it with Claude models you will have to pay per token (Claude subscriptions are only for use with Claude's own harnesses like claude code, the Claude desktop app, and the Claude Excel/Powerpoint extensions).

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#134

Post by vova_hn2 »

dijit wrote: post #128
vova_hn2 wrote: post #112

Two thoughts: 1. Open source tools solve the problem of "critical functions of the application changing without notice, or being signed up for disruptive testing without opt-in". 2. This makes me afraid that it is absolutely impossible for open source tools to ever reach the level of proprietary tools like Claude Code precisely because they cannot do A/B tests like this which means that their design decisions are usu…

Regarding point 1 specifically, there were so many people seriously miffed at the “man after midnight ”[0] time-based easter egg that I would be careful with that reasoning. Open source doesn’t always mean reproducible. People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it; and its made somewhat worse with our penchant to pull in half the universe as dependencies (Rust, Go and Javascript tend to le…

> People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it

I think that with modern LLMs auditing a big project personally, instead of relying on someone else to do it, actually became more realistic.

You can ask an LLM to walk you through the code, highlight parts that seem unusual or suspicious, etc.

On the other hand, LLMs also made producing code cheaper then ever, so you can argue, that big projects will just become even bigger wich will put them out of reach even for a reviewer who is also armed with an LLM.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#135

Post by PlasmaPower »

rusakov-field wrote: post #67
Mc_Big_G wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those who think they will take over are clueless. You're underestimating where it's headed.

Do you think it will reach "understanding of semantics", true cognition, within our lifetimes ? Or performance indistinguishable from that even if not truly that. Not sure. I am not so optimistic. People got intoxicated with nuclear powered cars , flying cars , bases on the moon ,etc all that technological euphoria from the 50's and 60's that never panned out. This might be like that. I think we definitely stumbled o…

Why do you think it doesn't have understanding of semantics? I think that was one of the first things to fall to LLMs, as even early models interpreted the word "crashed" differently in "I crashed my car" and "I crashed my computer", and were able to easily conquer the Winograd schema challenge.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#136

Post by [deleted] »

everdrive wrote: post #88
krisbolton wrote: post #37

The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much. I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.

>I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, Evil might be a stretch, but I really hate A/B testing. Some feature or UI component you relied on is now different, with no warning, and you ask a coworker about it, and they have no idea what you're talking about. Usually, the change is for the worse, but gets implemented anyway. I'm sure the teams responsible have "objective" "data" which "proves" it's the right di…

[deleted]

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#137

Post by simianwords »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #56
krisbolton wrote: post #37

The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much. I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.

> I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. I disagree in the case of LLMs. AI already has a massive problem in reproducibility and reliability, and AI firms gleefully kick this problem down to the users. "Never trust it's output". It's already enough of a pain in the ass to constrain these systems without the companies s…

Strange! You benefitted from all the previous a/b experiments to give you a somewhat optimal model now. But now it’s too inconvenient for you?

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#138

Post by Cyphase »

ralferoo wrote: post #130

It seems a bit odd to complain "I need transparency into how it works and the ability to configure it" when his workflow is already relying on a black box with zero transparency into how it works.

There's a difference between "LLMs are inherently black boxes that require lots of work to attempt to understand" and explicitly changing how a piece of software works.

Should people not complain about unannounced changes to the contents of their food or medicine because we don't understand everything about how the human body works?

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#139

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

Havoc wrote: post #18

Moved from CC to opencode a couple months ago because the vibes were not for me. Not bad per se but a bit too locked in and when I was looking at the raw prompts it was sending down the wire it was also quite lets call it "opinionated". Plus things like not being able to control where the websearches go. That said I have the luxury of being a hobbyist so I can accept 95% of cutting edge results for something more ope…

Can you share a setup that works for you? I found vanilla opencode vastly inferior to CC, I use it only for little toys like 3 small files that's all.

Re: Please do not A/B test my workflow

#140

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #92
sunaookami wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world is 200$ per month cheap?

The last time I did contract work when I was between jobs I made $100/hour. And I won’t say how much my employer charges for me. But you can see how much the major consulting companies charge here https://ceriusexecutives.com/management-consultants-whats-th...

Claude will happily generate tons of useless code and you will be charged appropriately. the output of LLMs has nothing to do with payment rates, otherwise you end up with absurdities like valuating useless CCC that was very expensive to build using LOCs as a metrics whereas in reality is a toy product nobody in their right mind would ever use.
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