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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

#301

Post by mettamage »

anon22981 wrote: post #184
zahlman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess part of it is also that I don't mind doing 'hand-edits' like for example LLMs love to say "// so and so removed" I just go and remove that manually later rather than being like "don't comment about what you removed!11" cause you're really fighting deep grooves in the model's behavior at that point. I feel like this is the way. There are surely things where it's faster; certainly it's more pleasant to do sim…

I’m ashamed to admit that I once suddenly realized what I had done: I asked the LLM to rename a variable. It took it some minutes or so. With IDE by hand it would have been seconds.

The annoying issue sometimes is that while it is faster to do it yourself, the context of the LLM is not updated. So now you have you to mention that and mentioning it is a bit fuzzier sometimes than the LLM simply doing the rename itself, so the context stays up to date.

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

#302

Post by mpweiher »

grim_io wrote: post #22
mycentstoo wrote: post #7

We should design a specific language to make sure that we can encode the exact requirements that we want. Something that has a limited set of keywords that are explicit. Wait a minute...

The success of LLM's (by usage) tells us that programming languages are still too close to the machine than the actual problem domain as defined by humans. If we truly had the right abstractions, no one would care to use LLM's for programming.

Yes.

Our programming languages are far too low level, and have been for a long time.

I've long held this view, LLMs are fairly clear evidence that this is true, because it looks like the much, much more compact prompt(s) have enough information content to create a much larger program in our current languages.

So it should be possible to create a non-natural language with the same information density.

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

#303

Post by throwatdem12311 »

This kind of stuff just makes me think nobody has any clue how these things work.

Why do I need a system prompt at all?

Why do I need another black box AIs to review the code of the black box AI why can’t these things get code right the first time.

Why is the best “coding model” in the world still making up APIs that don’t exist and do seemingly random unreleased changes that it wasn’t prompted for.

Why do these models (supposedly) keep getting “better” (on benchmarks) but continue to degrade in output quality while grtting more expensive for actual work?

I use Claude every day but I’m getting disillusioned by the so-called “progress”. If my employer wasn’t paying for my access I would not pay for any of these things. Don’t even get me started on the absolute brainrot inflicted on people that I work with from depending on these things every day, it’s depressing.

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

#304

Post by OzzyB »

mycentstoo wrote: post #7

We should design a specific language to make sure that we can encode the exact requirements that we want. Something that has a limited set of keywords that are explicit. Wait a minute...

I can help with this. I used to work in an industry that adopted this approach.

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

#306

Post by acedTrex »

mettamage wrote: post #301
anon22981 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m ashamed to admit that I once suddenly realized what I had done: I asked the LLM to rename a variable. It took it some minutes or so. With IDE by hand it would have been seconds.

The annoying issue sometimes is that while it is faster to do it yourself, the context of the LLM is not updated. So now you have you to mention that and mentioning it is a bit fuzzier sometimes than the LLM simply doing the rename itself, so the context stays up to date.

The llm will figure it out when it relooks at the file.

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

#307

Post by jeremyjh »

the_gipsy wrote: post #256
andai wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was young, a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages, which one do you think in?" I paused, confused, and replied, "People think in words?" Fast forward a decade or so, in my twenties, I had lost most of the inner visual sense I had previously used, and developed an overreliance, in my opinion, on language. (I think my dominant sense was some "non visual abstract sense of ideas", but the visual was al…

You just lack (or lacked) introspection, nothing special. Many people claim to have no inner monologue. When pressed, it always comes out. Simply put, it's impossible to function as a human without it. But many people are not aware, and think it means something like "hearing actual voices".

You just stated your vibes like it is a fact.

There was a study about this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679762412430...

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

#308

Post by drooby »

dxdm wrote: post #210
chickensong wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People make fun of the language, rightfully so in some cases, but also it's often quite effective language. "load-bearing seam" communicates quite a lot in very few characters.

It's a clunky metaphor, and it's used clumsily: not for the sake of its clunkiness, but by mixing two decent individual parts in an attempt to have them reinforce each other, but ending up with something weaker. It communicates an absence of thought and awareness, blind groping at building blocks without understanding. It's borderline vapid, and quite annoying.

I don't follow, the words make perfect sense together in most software engineering contexts.

"Seam" is an industry standard term coined by Michael Feathers in Working Effectively with Legacy Code.

To call a seam load bearing means it's performing critical work for the dependent class, perhaps a database query.

A seam that is not load-bearing would be something that is just injected for testability - maybe a date provider that provides some constant time to avoid flaky tests.

Tbh, this is quite literally the opposite of vapid. A whole book was written about them and their importance, and how to leverage them.

In my experience, Claude uses the word accurately. Code has a lot of seams, and seams are an important thing to communicate when working with code. Therefore, expect to see the word often.

Personally, I don't mind it at all. I'm glad the industry is finally standardizing our language more. Makes it easier for me to communicate with other engineers.

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

#309

Post by jeremyjh »

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.

The statistical model that underpins any deep learning system is the substrate in which a process is implemented. There is still a process - just because that process is grown - not programmed - doesn't tell us anything about the depth or limits of its capability.

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

#310

Post by cataphract »

idiotsecant wrote: post #247
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

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.

What about when you're reading? You don't have a voice in your head saying the words?
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