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Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

olafalders.com

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Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#71

Post by [deleted] »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #52
blixt wrote: post #38

So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great c…

> and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. I cannot fathom implementing and shipping a feature to hundreds of thousands of people without even asking basic questions like: "what types of questions does Claude ask users". Literally one of the most used plugins in their entire ecosystem, provided via their…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#72

Post by jascha_eng »

trq_ wrote: post #64
lubujackson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of one-off fixes Claude should have a much richer interface to configure between "ask approval every time" and "YOLO dangerously". I should be able to trivially set "run this task until completed" and have settings like: don't consult the web, don't touch files outside of the codebase, don't delete anything, etc. They don't have to be perfect, just better than the all or nothing system we have now.

automode mostly fixes these things, it runs a classifier on every request that would have required permissions to make sure it matches your request

Until the classifier is wrong or also prompt injected. the classifier is just as vulnerable as the model itself is. Yes it is harder to break but trying to make a nondeterministic tool deterministic by adding another nondeterministic one on top just reduces the chance of something going wrong.

Tbf as long as that chance is low enough it doesn't matter in practice, but I have definitely seen the classifier approve things that were questionable, and I've also seen it decline things that were obviously okay.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#73

Post by jazzyjackson »

lubujackson wrote: post #61
trq_ wrote: post #47

Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that…

Instead of one-off fixes Claude should have a much richer interface to configure between "ask approval every time" and "YOLO dangerously". I should be able to trivially set "run this task until completed" and have settings like: don't consult the web, don't touch files outside of the codebase, don't delete anything, etc. They don't have to be perfect, just better than the all or nothing system we have now.

I feel like this could be solved with an NLP interface to SELinux, spinning up policies on the fly, blocking network access or giving read only permissions on a per-conversation basis.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#74

Post by customguy »

blixt wrote: post #38

So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great c…

> the features that they themselves would use

IMO that's worse.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#75

Post by blixt »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #52
blixt wrote: post #38

So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great c…

> and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question. I cannot fathom implementing and shipping a feature to hundreds of thousands of people without even asking basic questions like: "what types of questions does Claude ask users". Literally one of the most used plugins in their entire ecosystem, provided via their…

Yeah the UX doesn't seem great, though I do think in general the AskQuestion tool is very awkward when it gets used in a very long running process (I personally use Claude to run repetitive tests to slowly iterate on a problem and verify in true conditions that it was solved), so I wouldn't like it without the auto-continue either.

(I had originally replied on safety of letting LLMs skip questions but I don't think that was your point so I removed it.)

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#76

Post by brabel »

dehrmann wrote: post #7

The headache I recently had was it somehow started interpreting mouse clicks in the terminal to mean I clicked an option when I was really just trying to get/confirm window focus.

I saw that but it asked me if I wanted to optin first! I did accidentally and hated it since I always click on the terminal to make it focused and now accidentally click on something that actually responds!

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#77

Post by msp26 »

trq_ wrote: post #47

Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that…

hello, please fix needing to reauth every day (sometimes with email verification). This started happening this month. It's tedious and makes switching very tempting.

I'm using the VS Code extension over SSH.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#79

Post by Jcampuzano2 »

brabel wrote: post #69
randysalami wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article but I find this response kind of strange. Am I alone in this? Wanton accountability for a multi-billion dollar cutting edge company… leaves more to be desired from the best? Take Apple or Google or any top tech company of the past at its prime and compare. This kind of behavior then would probably reflect poorly on the institutions behind the tech and not maintain their image of technical brillianc…

> it shows weakness in a vulnerable way. It is human. It is not strategic. Are you complaining that the answer is too human and that a multi billion company should not allow a human who made a mistake to own the mistake in public, being honest about what happened in this case?? Would you prefer complete silence from them like you most certainly would from Google or Apple. That sounds incredibly sad to me, we don’t ev…

> It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it.

In a sense yes, I think it is actually reasonable to complain that the answer is too human/individualized here because it likely wasn't this individual human who made this decision, but he's making it seem like it is so that we are less likely to blame the company as a whole.

It's counterintuitive but when one singular person owns up to the problems that, at the root, are actually systemic to the decision making of the whole company it plays on the psychology of us as humans.

"I'm in charge of maintaining it" - This is not the same as "I'm in charge of all of the decision-making behind the implementation of how this tool works for users".

I actually agree exactly with your last point that one single person taking blame is counter-intuitive/non-productive here, but it actually seems like what these large companies desire is to have one person be the fall guy to play on people's sympathies.

If this were some small startup it would make sense but this is not that case.

Re: Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature

#80

Post by [deleted] »

trq_ wrote: post #47

Hi everyone, It's Thariq from the Claude Code team here. This was my change! I made the AskUserQuestion tool so am generally in charge of maintaining it. First, overall wanted to apologize and agree that this did not meet our bar and does not represent how we plan to ship on Claude Code. To give you a motivating sense, as the models get more powerful, usage patterns start to change. I'd gotten a lot of feedback that…

[deleted]
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