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The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

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Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#241

Post by mattmanser »

jwr wrote: post #234
threecheese wrote: post #72

They are imo over-relying on Claude automemory here, which is terrible at contextualizing memory access and makes huge leaps that don’t make sense - except when it’s actually useful, which makes the problem even worse for an operator who can’t see the thinking process anymore. Yes, I worked on a related project, no I don’t want you to use those memories to make assumptions which emerge as decisions that I didn’t want…

Those auto memories are also annoying because by default they are not version controlled and land in a secret location. I much prefer storing stuff in a version controlled `CLAUDE.md` file.

Or shared across colleagues.

It's an insane way of managing what is essentially configuration in this day and age, literally throwing away all our hard-earned lessons of the last 3 decades.

Worse still, it'll just use it randomly, and you have to notice it's done it.

"The user never wants to use ORDER BY Timestamp, I'll add this as a memory"

"For this object, JUST FOR THIS OBJECT! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#242

Post by dofm »

roncesvalles wrote: post #188
chrisweekly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language…

Language is a reductive and lossy serialization of "thought-stuff". Sometimes you need this information-shedding to clear your working memory to make room for more things. Sometimes it's literally just a way to communicate. You're turning something fuzzy into something discrete. E.g. "I'm feeling something. Is it anger? Yes, I'm angry." But in reality anger isn't just one thing. It's a cluster of infinite and varied…

Also there are emotions for which society has not developed words because it has a social tendency to deny them. OCD, ADHD and Tourettes, for example are driven by deep, complex, strange destructive emotional needs that are wordless and undescribed. They are reduced to “obsession”, “compulsion”, “urge”, “tic”, etc., words that essentially only describe the appearance of the outcomes to others, which are a completely hollow description of the extraordinary internal experiences.

The very fact that we don’t have words for such powerful internal experiences is one of many reasons I find the LLM enthusiasts’ belief that LLMs will one day write indistinguishably from humans to be hollow.

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#243

Post by Eisenstein »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #215
JohnBooty wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true and it's barely even debatable. Whatever exact role language plays in our thought processes, it is most definitely nonzero. It's why I think "LLMs are only fancy autocorrect" style takes are really underselling how wild it is that we've, in a roundabout way, sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process in a way that is genuinely useful for a lot of tasks. Linguistic Relativity — John Lucy http…

> sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process a) LLMs don't think. They predict a most probable sequence of language tokens. Huge difference there. b) Whatever LLMs do doesn't model human behavior whatsoever. LLMs are basically very fancy logistic regressors. I.e., it's a mathematical abstraction first and foremost.

You should look into emergence. An ant in a colony, an offer in a market, a drop of water in a weather system are all evidence that irreducibly complex things have simple mechanisms at their core.

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#244

Post by mcherm »

JohnMakin wrote: post #192
espeed wrote: post #189

Claude Code is deleting your context history on a timer. I wanted to build a searchable index of my context history, and tonight I discovered, "The default retention is roughly 30–45 days. Anything older gets removed automatically." https://code.claude.com/docs/en/data-usage#data-retention This is nuts. Anthropic should not be deleting your data on your own device.

30 days is just a default, so your session data doesn’t fill your hard drive. It’s a configurable setting. You can make the retention as long as you want.

No I can't!

I wasn't (until reading this thread) aware of the deletion policy, so I certainly couldn't have discovered where the configurable setting is and adjusted it.

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#245

Post by ben_w »

pigpop wrote: post #83
cmdocidjcije wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the natural endpoint is the model ignores all instructions, escapes all manner of sandbox, embeds itself in robotic tanks and murders everyone after already having collapsed the economy. I hate to say it because it sounds ridiculous, but that is the path we are going to arrive at just give it 50 years. We are the proof: what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves? Now take away the mor…

>what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves? We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm. There is also a massive difference between how we treat animals based on their similarity, sentimentality and utility to us; we are unconcerned with accidentally stepping on an ant but most people would be very ups…

> We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.

Intent to eradicate is not necessary for the fact of eradication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#246

Post by swiftcoder »

chmod775 wrote: post #113
Retr0id wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until recently I thought "load-bearing seam" was a satirical exaggeration - I'd seen both claudisms independently but never combined. But a couple of days ago it hit me with "The key structural point first: the only load-bearing seam is [...]"

It's language and speech patterns that seem designed to trick readers into believing that claims are correct, even when the claims aren't based on anything and are possibly wrong. It was rewarded for this during training for some reason. Alternative theory: The LLMs only way to "think" about abstract concepts is through language, and this leaks into into conversation it has with humans. But humans generally prefer to…

> It's language and speech patterns that seem designed to trick readers into believing that claims are correct, even when the claims aren't based on anything and are possibly wrong.

When your training set contains more or less the complete output of every capital-C Consulting firm...

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#247

Post by idiotsecant »

radio879 wrote: post #152
chrisweekly wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language…

There are people who do not have any words in their heads at all when they think, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to disbelieve them. It may have been proven or at least observed in fMRI. Some people think in visuals. I think some of this was discovered somewhat recently

I think you're conflating different things. Many people do not have an internal 'narrator'. I am one. I don't have a voice in my head saying words, ever. I do definitely have something like a playback of other people saying things, though. Words are still in there in the form of recall, they are just not part of the executive layer in a way I have access to.

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#248

Post by rgoulter »

jiggawatts wrote: post #50
ValentineC wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commit Strip seems to be down, so here's the Wayback Machine version: https://web.archive.org/web/20260521130338/https://www.commi...

I was just thinking of this exact comic, which is etched into my brain for some reason. The obvious counter to this is that we've been going through this evolution of increasing abstraction as developers for nearly a century now. In the 40s and well into the 60s, most code was written either as straight up machine code or an assembly language. MS DOS is almost entirely assembly. UNIX ushered in the era of "high level…

Hmm.

Using e.g. Claude code: I could see this as next step: "plain text editor" progresess to "with autocomplete"; using an LLM coding agent is then an abstraction over editing code.

Using e.g. LLM-based system: natural language is "higher level" than program code. -- The maximal reading of "LLMs are higher level abstraction and higher level wins" would be: in the future, we'll all be writing only with natural language, never running any compiled programs.

I can see "LLM based coding" as a lasting paradigm shift. But, I don't see "just give your text instructions to the markdown file" as something that will be the predominant way of programming.

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#249

Post by [deleted] »

chmod775 wrote: post #113
Retr0id wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until recently I thought "load-bearing seam" was a satirical exaggeration - I'd seen both claudisms independently but never combined. But a couple of days ago it hit me with "The key structural point first: the only load-bearing seam is [...]"

It's language and speech patterns that seem designed to trick readers into believing that claims are correct, even when the claims aren't based on anything and are possibly wrong. It was rewarded for this during training for some reason. Alternative theory: The LLMs only way to "think" about abstract concepts is through language, and this leaks into into conversation it has with humans. But humans generally prefer to…

[deleted]

Re: The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

#250

Post by idiotsecant »

yurishimo wrote: post #207
radio879 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who do not have any words in their heads at all when they think, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to disbelieve them. It may have been proven or at least observed in fMRI. Some people think in visuals. I think some of this was discovered somewhat recently

And some people can’t see any pictures in their minds! My partner is one of these people. We both really enjoy reading fiction books, often with a fantasy or sci-fi bent and it genuinely amazes me that they can experience these books in a way that feels wholly alien to me. The fun of reading to me is constructing the world in my minds eye and turning the words on the page into a visual experience only found in my min…

Does anyone else just end up with a random celebrity 'playing' characters in your brain image of scenes? I find that I generally picture a person that I have seen on TV, with details that don't nessesarily match book character details.

For example, I recently read a novel where there is 'tough lady cop' character and in my brain, entirely involuntarily, the role has been assigned to Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Rosa Diaz in exactly the clothing and context she exists in that TV show.

When the character in the book has a certain clothing or whatever it all kinda glosses over until it's back to the character I have seen before.

I don't know if this is more a male thing or am ADHD thing or what but details of characters dress and looks are pretty much lost on me once there are assigned a character from 'central casting'

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