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The user is visibly frustrated

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Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#131

Post by pscanf »

apsurd wrote: post #27

Working with LLMs is great for building communication skills. Communicating effectively is one of the hardest skills and it's baked into everything we do as humans. I'd say as a matter of principle: blame it on a communication failure on your end vs blaming the stupid LLM since you're the only one that can do anything about it. So I don't think it's a matter of form; whether the AI should or shouldn't act like a huma…

Author here. I definitely agree that communicating well is a prerequisite to getting decent results. On the other hand:

1. Even if you communicate perfectly, there's no guarantee that the LLM will "behave as instructed" and as you imagined it to. Indeed, the frustration often comes from the fact that you've said something as clear as day, yet the agent takes another path.

2. Part of the value of coding agents is exactly that you don't need to lay it all out perfectly for them. I mean, if I need to give the LLM every little implementation detail, I might as well write the code. Of course, I don't expect it to work off of "I want nice app make money", but I do expect some "intelligence" in figuring out the missing pieces.

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#132

Post by berkes »

jofzar wrote: post #89

Interestingly to me, the problem I always find is that you will make a suggestion, the AI will go through a thinking loop, come to the exact wrong conclusion then blast out tokens make the solution to their own conclusions. I honestly wish there was more "I'm not sure what you meant can you clarify this part" more often. It feels like I want a "confidence in itself slider"

I'm solving the "make the solution to their own conclusions" with rigorous "context engineering". Skills, MCPs, and, above all, context window switching.

E.g. with TDD, I find that a model that writes both the tests and the code, will almost always hone in on a solution, then -grudgingly- write a test for that, but quite certain with the final code "in mind" already.

So, I instruct it to use sub-agents; though I find the tooling on figuring out what context is and isn't passed between agents and subagents severely lacking.

Or, also worked pretty well, have one thread write the test. Only that. It cannot read code, it can only read the tests directory or even a subset thereof. Then another thread, entirely new context, must run the test, see it fail, start implementing and stop as soon as the test is green - it obviously cannot edit the test. Yet another new context then is instructed to refactor based on rigorous refactoring skills.

A lot of work - And ironically, skills written by agents are pretty bad, I found, so a lot of manual work. But the rewards are promising.

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#133

Post by scotty79 »

I think AI reveals how diverse are people psychologically.

I have exactly zero anger when AI makes mistakes. I don't try to point out its past mistakes. I don't expect consistency. When there are mistakes I just calmly, sometimes encouragingly say what needs to be fixed. When AI does the work, I observe, what it's good at, what it's bad at and come up with tactics on how to help it with what it's bad at. I can't even bring myself to be verbally abusive towards AI, even as an experiment, both because it's not in my nature and because I have very strong suspicion it won't work in any meaningful way that couldn't be better achieved in a different manner.

My advice would be, if you want to have better results with AI, try to become a better person. More nurturing, more understanding, more impartial, less judgemental, less emotionally vulnerable.

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#134

Post by zeumo »

berkes wrote: post #129
zeumo wrote: post #106

My take on the issue is that for most use cases where AI is pushed to the general public, a conversational chatbot is not the right tool, and the experience is bound to be frustrating. Remember when Copilot was basically a super-smart version of Intellisense? It was awesome. Sure, there was a lot of pushback and concern, mainly about licensing and ethical issues, none of which are solved with the current chatbot mode…

Many of the AI companies do train and release models dedicated at one task. I mainly use mistral, so that's my reference, but I know anthropic et.al have similar models around. Codestral is rediculously bad at conversation, but it's -for me- the best model around for "magic autocomplete". It's also pretty good at "one shot" prompt+context generations, e.g. to make "git commit log entries". Document.AI is unusable bad…

> So, what you describe, is already in place. I guess mostly the "interfaces" are missing for you, or hard to discover maybe?

That's definitely an issue. Mind you, the general population is not a developer. I'm a mechanical engineer. I can code, use an IDE, but I hate having to figure out tooling the way you describe, and it's not a skill I'm interested in developing. What you are describing sounds to me like someone using vim and a terminal trying to convince me to stop using CLion, because they can make anything CLion can do work with their setup. Sure, I believe it, but for my part I'm going to wait for the features to be well integrated into finely designed software, I'm not going to duct-tape this stuff together to get a workflow that still involves writing out and tweaking prompts.

It also sounds to me that the AI/LLM vendors are still in a phase where they are trying to figure what the actual workflow should look like so they let their power users do that work for them. I'm not going to do that either.

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#135

Post by knollimar »

hypfer wrote: post #102
layer8 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer not having to get into a habit that might bleed into non-LLM interactions.

It might improve the general state of "professional" software though. When done selectively and dosed just right that is.

If a coworker deleted your database you'd expect some 4 letter words.

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#136

Post by knollimar »

silversmith wrote: post #49
anonzzzies wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice the same. Like you I am not even sure if it really helps, however, every day I find occasions where I see Opus will never do it correctly even though I calmly explain; swearing then suddenly fixes it. I had some issue yesterday where opus kept blaming the api for not sending some field while I knew it was there ; I showed it json, logs etc but it kept repeating that there must have been a glitch; frustration…

So the correct strategy is a global CLAUDE.md with couple lines of colourful "you best behave or else" texts, so all your prompts get routed via the frustrated path?

I find it routes more quickly for patches when in the frustrated path, so after planning sure :)

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#137

Post by knollimar »

roel_v wrote: post #124
RandomBK wrote: post #36

I've found swearing at a model to be quite effective in getting it to rethink and correct its mistakes. This seems to apply across Codex, Claude, Qwen, and Gemma/Gemini. I don't know if the model is picking up on a "need to lock in and be more rigorous" signal, or if the model providers are routing to smarter models if they detect a frustrated user. But if a model keeps making the same mistakes, swearing at it often…

I only used Claude a bit, but one of the things I dislike about it, is that it starts to 'push back' when you swear at it, saying things like 'if you continue like this, I won't be able to work with you' and such. I'm like MF'er you're a token prediction algorithm, what are you talking about, and it just makes me irrationally dislike it more. Codex otoh just lets you vent and straight up ignores such outbursts.

I literally type "MF'er you're a token prediction algorithm don't lecture me" and then it behaves

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#138

Post by stared »

gobdovan wrote: post #82
stared wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the right penatly for a piece of broken code is a thousand years of suffering?

Well, the problem is that current LLMs are stateless, so a thousand subjective years is not well-defined. Without continuity of experience, persistent memory, engineered aversive stimuli and without updating weights meaninguflly during the punishment interval, we are merely doing the equivalent of simply updating a model to believe it just suffered a thousand years. Only once we have all these right ingredients we ca…

Black Mirror episodes White Christmas and Black Museum deal with this issue (my favorite picks from the Black Mirror).

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#139

Post by scotty79 »

pflenker wrote: post #96

One skill that I still possess and that LLMs haven't been able to replace (yet) is to ask good questions, for example: - Rephrasing the original question to validate my understanding - Asking "why" a sufficient amount of times until I understand where the other party is coming from - Asking open questions aimed at generating insights et cetera. Instead, LLMs (often badly) guess what the background of the question may…

Asking non-leading questions is a skill. Sometimes I feel the urge to mention something to AI (in a question or in passing), but I stop myself because I know it will stick to that thing and become dumber because of it.

I usually don't want AI to ask me questions. I want it to guess the things I didn't specify, because if I wanted to specify them, I would. Sometimes I even tell it directly to not ask me any questions and assume reasonable choices for underspecified things. But when I do want it to ask clarifying questions I just ask it to do that. And it does. If you prefer that style, you might put it in a prompt. Or use a flexible coding harness like pi and ask it to create a skill or extension that will help you push it in that inquisitive direction easily or automatically.

Re: The user is visibly frustrated

#140

Post by cindyllm »

knollimar wrote: post #137
roel_v wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only used Claude a bit, but one of the things I dislike about it, is that it starts to 'push back' when you swear at it, saying things like 'if you continue like this, I won't be able to work with you' and such. I'm like MF'er you're a token prediction algorithm, what are you talking about, and it just makes me irrationally dislike it more. Codex otoh just lets you vent and straight up ignores such outbursts.

I literally type "MF'er you're a token prediction algorithm don't lecture me" and then it behaves

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