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Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

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Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#121

Post by Ronsenshi »

hirako2000 wrote: post #60
Ronsenshi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just business owners and C-suite pocketing the difference while they fire staff and replacing it with AI. At some point somebody would have to start asking "business" some tough questions.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#122

Post by dofm »

theahura wrote: post #114
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…

> Like, if you have complaints about the thing, perhaps you should address them to your supplier directly. None of your readers can help, and nobody's magic folk solution to your problem is better than yours. I think you may just misunderstand the point of having / writing a personal blog. I write because it's fun! Whether the reader gets any value out of reading it is almost entirely beside the point. (Also several…

> I think you may just misunderstand the point of having / writing a personal blog.

I used to blog, as it goes, and I have supported and enabled many more, so no, not really.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#123

Post by exabrial »

Hilariously, I'm working on a Claude Desktop replacement that does all of things. It's the best parts of Claude Desktop, Code, Cowork, and MCP connectors, but uses a client/server design. It's written in JavaFx so it's lightweight, fast, cross platform, and not another damned electron app.

Ideal outcome is this turns into a startup. I think there's a real need for team-oriented AI to avoid siloing of knowledge.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#124

Post by kolinko »

lukeschlather wrote: post #101

At the core this is a hardware problem. 1M tokens is simply not enough context to understand a codebase the way a human would understand it. Being able to selectively forget is potentially a very valuable power, but right now it's a substitute for a human's ability to remember the rough shape of something, decide it's uninteresting, and remember that it is uninteresting. They talk about memory only being useful when…

1M context - at least with most of the projects I ever worked with, 1M, or even 100k would be enough to explain in broad strokes the class/project/deployment structure, and a window of 200-500k to explain the specific issue at hand.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#125

Post by Exoristos »

jenniferhooley wrote: post #74
dofm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a freelancer recovering from severe burnout so the answer is a sort of irrelevant no. I'm trying to rebuild my life so I am in an experimenting and learning phase rather than a massive coding phase, and most of my code work is maintenance of things I have built. 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 rat…

Programmers can use smaller models like deepseek v4 flash for 98% of the same productivity as SOTA models and cost (true cost) around $10-$30 a month. So I doubt most people who heavily use them are too concerned. It's only vibe/hobby coders who really need SOTA and they probably don't think about it much.

At this point just use a JetBrains product, get deterministic assistance, and 5x your speed. It's unfortunate the resistance to a true IDE just keeps going up. The blind lead the blind, I guess.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#126

Post by dofm »

estearum wrote: post #111
slopinthebag wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree. And you have people on this forum who gleefully point out that quality doesn’t matter to the business, as if they think they’re so intelligent because they noticed that employees are there to make the company money. Not realizing that A) it’s a very antisocial attitude and B) it’s not a tenable long term strategy.

Hang on now. GP didn't say "I care about quality" and I didn't say caring about quality is wrong. GP said Claude's code "doesn't impress" them and that it's "crass." Do you think a valid "long term strategy" is to create code that impresses GP and is not crass, but doesn't achieve the business outcomes it's meant to? Inversely, do you think one can achieve business outcomes if "quality" is so abysmal that the code do…

Crassness, in the context I meant it, is not "literally meaningless" at all.

I will accept "of fully subjective value". But not "literally meaningless".

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#127

Post by operatingthetan »

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 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.

This is pretty funny because it's about the depth of understanding of every 'AI expert' on Linkedin. People who praise the context window as basically magic have no idea how any of this works.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#128

Post by estearum »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #89
slopinthebag wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t matter what materials or techniques you use to build a house. 99.99% of construction exists to achieve business outcomes, and velocity matters a lot more than using the right materials or techniques. Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fa…

> Of course the house must pass safety inspections and stuff, but the materials and techniques don’t matter one bit for that. All that matters is you achieve the desired outcome, and I will ignore the glaring fact that you achieve the desired outcome by using the right materials and techniques. This analogy is more true than you think. This is why modern homes/appartments are trash. You can pass safety inspections us…

You are aware that you can just pay more money and get a higher quality house and higher quality shoes, right?

Costs of those things have gone down over time. The high end still exists, you just don't actually care about quality as much as you think you do.

And yes, for capital-intensive things like real estate development, fast/cheap matters a lot because otherwise there would be no capital available to build any of it at any reasonable scale.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#129

Post by general_reveal »

theahura wrote: post #100
general_reveal wrote: post #5

Isn’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?

interesting take. I think I disagree, but I like this take a lot and I had to think about it. First, I think that models still need a context layer. One way to think about 'context' is as a form of compression. You provide the model context because it makes it easier for the model to figure out what to do. Even in a world with infinite model capacity and infinite model context, this is still useful because it allows…

A) Context and prompting cuts the search space for next token generation. That’s pretty useful, as you mentioned.

B) The other use of context is that it introduces entirely new information via RAG

B will never go away (as others pointed out). A, well that’s just something we’re all going to keep getting surprised at. We’ll barely give it any direction or context and the newer models will simply find the happy path.

The author is kind of suggesting that their context wasn’t really necessary to get the happy output, I think.

Chain of reasoning is a lot of context to guide token generation, but we simply see that newer models don’t need that context to get to the answer. I’m mostly reiterating this because there’s a hot take here, and that is this agentic stuff may be waived away by magic frontier-llm wand , all of a sudden.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#130

Post by wavemode »

qup wrote: post #76
AlotOfReading wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like your definition of better is pretty narrow. Quick and cheap are two of the three fabled: "Fast, cheap, and good: choose two"

Huh? The word "better" is the comparative form of the adjective "good". Or did you misunderstand the comment you're replying to?
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