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Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
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Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#52Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#53Blog 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…
>session transcripts were the new oil
Something about this idea really resonates with certain personality types. I equate it to the Zettelkasten hype phase from several years ago. People (...like me..) got really wrapped up in the belief that the process was more important that the content. "Linking" was an "activity." Something good will happen as long as you (a) take notes on stuff and (b) link them to other notes on stuff.
You see the same thing with the session transcripts people. They're building ever more sophisticated setups of indexing and storing and cross referencing every conversation they've ever had on the (I would argue) mistaken belief that the transcripts are the valuable part, rather than the uncomfortable part where you go do something. A lot of it, I say from falling in the trap, is fancy procrastination.
(Although, I have found myself jealous on many occasions where their fancy system retrieves something they vaguely recall from a conversation they had 3 months ago. So, who knows.)
Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#54Blog 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…
Occasionally posts like this do get the attention of the company responsible, more than an email does... but indeed that's like a one in a million situation
Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#55Isn’t this just a form of the bitter lesson? Our attempts to make engineered context and agents will simply be made obsolete with bigger and better models. Those transcripts are probably extremely useful for lesser capable models, and near unnecessary for frontier ones, maybe?
I don't think so - I think we'll find that to build a brain you need more built-in structure and biases, not less.
Bear in mind that brain architecture is learnt too - just over a much longer timescale than an individual lifetime.
Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#56Earlier 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.
Nobody cares about code quality /s
They only care about the things which you can only get with good code quality like reliability and speed of development.
Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’ll be the programmers version of those civil war reenactments.
Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#58I 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…
Ugh, agentic _dreaming_. Why on earth would I want that?
Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#59There has been this slow transition inside me, as someone who likes to not touch the AI as much as possible, where I've gone from skeptical and argumentative about it all to starting to just feel sad for all the Claude et al heads. Like, this is such a ridiculous house of cards you have to deal with all the time, which isn't even directly concerning the task at hand, presumably. Like you're cooking yourself a meal bu…
I've been having a very nice time with Fable. I cooked up an Anki clone in like half an hour, with tech it's not familiar with. Nothing too ground breaking, but I was very pleased!
I think Opus might be on similar level for most of what I'm doing, but I haven't used it much recently, so I can't remember the difference. So I guess I'll find out on the 7th when they pull the plug again! (Free-ish trial of Fable ending.)
That being said, I tried using other frontier models to help with a Pong clone the other day and they were introducing new bugs at approximately the same rate as they were fixing it. On Pong!! I found that amusing because I couldn't think of a simpler game, so it didn't inspire confidence.
Fable's doing just fine on an online multiplayer game though. I have no idea how that works. (Maybe it would fail Pong too?? I haven't tested that!)
Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.
I am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself. Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand. As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.
You have the privilege to keep yourself sharp, most businesses favor productivity over their workers' long term relevancy.