Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful • Hacker News Board

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#41

Post by dofm » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

general_reveal wrote: post #36

dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

Look man, I’ve got a MMO that I’m working on that’s set in 2014 where everyone is a programmer in SV (might call it World of Legacy ). It’s a period piece. I NEED as much blog training data of this type so that my NPCs can talk in a historically accurate way (god bless Medium.com, a historical treasure trove of a bygone medieval era). It’s gonna be a living breathing world, you see. You’re going to be like “omg, this…

I … I… don't want to play this, thanks ;-)

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#42

Post by andai » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

Fabricio20 wrote: post #19

I specifically disabled claude memory in a project because it kept writing down thigns to memory that didn't need to be in memory, including severly wrong statements that then would confuse it later. At some point it got re-enabled automatically which had me ask claude itself to "turn it the fuck off" by which it promptly figured out that both ("autoMemoryEnabled": false, "autoDreamEnabled": false) are necessary and…

> "turn it the fuck off" -> "autoDreamEnabled": false

So you told it don't go the fuck to sleep ;)

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#43

Post by general_reveal » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

dofm wrote: post #41

general_reveal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look man, I’ve got a MMO that I’m working on that’s set in 2014 where everyone is a programmer in SV (might call it World of Legacy ). It’s a period piece. I NEED as much blog training data of this type so that my NPCs can talk in a historically accurate way (god bless Medium.com, a historical treasure trove of a bygone medieval era). It’s gonna be a living breathing world, you see. You’re going to be like “omg, this…

I … I… don't want to play this, thanks ;-)

It’s the only way you’ll ever be able to pretend to be a programmer again though.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#44

Post by estearum » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

dofm wrote: post #40

estearum wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That which I do code, I am still coding by hand, though I am dealing with other people's Claude output and I am really unimpressed by it. It's often rather crass. Unfortunately the point of code is rarely to impress people (certainly not other engineers) or to avoid being "crass." 99.99% of code exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot in many contexts. A lot more than elegance or impressiven…

I'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.

"Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#45

Post by AlotOfReading » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

LPisGood wrote: post #16

dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.

Of course? I'm still better than sonnet or opus, just slower and much more expensive.

Sometimes it takes me a day or more to find the one line fix or abstraction necessary, while claude can hammer through a hundred line fix in under an hour.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#46

Post by andai » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

aranw wrote: post #12

t once had to tell claude 3-4 times to stop assuming the state of a system was the way it kept iterating it was cause it was in it's memory. I repeatably told it to otherwise and it just never updated it's memory and instead kept referencing it's memory about the state of a particular system

In my harness I have all the code auto injected at startup (doing mostly very small codebases).

I found that every model will still manually check every file/function, they immediately assume that anything in context is stale.

That's sensible because often the user edits stuff while they're running.

What it does is save it from having to grep blindly about the codebase. But I think I'd get roughly the same benefit by just dumping the function headers then.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#47

Post by LastTrain » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

LPisGood wrote: post #16

dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.

I still write code and sometimes it works well. I also use Claude and it writes code and sometimes that goes well. We have better success together, where I do the interesting stuff and let Claude write my unit tests, reconcile my documentation. That is to say, I’m using it for quality not quantity. There aren’t enough humans to deploy or consume all the sloppy shit it could write on its own.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#48

Post by dofm » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

general_reveal wrote: post #43

dofm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I … I… don't want to play this, thanks ;-)

It’s the only way you’ll ever be able to pretend to be a programmer again though.

Oh god, I just realised this really is the logical parallel to all those TV crime dramas set in the early 1900s.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#49

Post by bryanrasmussen » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

general_reveal wrote: post #36

dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

Look man, I’ve got a MMO that I’m working on that’s set in 2014 where everyone is a programmer in SV (might call it World of Legacy ). It’s a period piece. I NEED as much blog training data of this type so that my NPCs can talk in a historically accurate way (god bless Medium.com, a historical treasure trove of a bygone medieval era). It’s gonna be a living breathing world, you see. You’re going to be like “omg, this…

The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, but the peak of your civilization was an MMO where everyone is a programmer in SV.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#50

Post by estetlinus » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

I remember when OpenAI announced ChatGPT now will remember stuff between sessions. Oh, you mean find random trivia about me and copy paste it between prompts without out my explicit consent.

”compare these three cars. Oh btw I am a data engineer, and my moms maiden name is Joana, and I am allergic to bad poetry. And code should be DRY, I prefer SQL over Python and what’s the most poisonous flower in Scandinavia?”.

I’ve had so much wierd output because context is ”””memorized””” and bleeding into completely unrelated projects and conversations. It’s the first feature I turn off.