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It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

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Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#51
post #8
post #2

While I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end. It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.

It's also hard to finish an idea that is mine.

hehe :D

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been whittling my way towards having Claude write zero comments in code. They're pretty much never helpful.

How do you do it?

You could probably add linting rules to your tool of choice and tell claude that your lint tool has to pass.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#55

Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? I have a dozen ideas popping a day and nothing comes close in terms of ease than a paper notebook for capturing and some apple notes equivalent for storage. Used to have a Notion but all the "Second Brain" movement seems...fishy to me ?

I use Obsidian but I don't follow the whole "second brain" thing, I just organize my notes by directories. You can use Obsidian however you want and adapt to the way your actual brain works. The "second brain" thing doesn't work for everyone. Even taking digital notes doesn't work for everyone (for example, it looks like you prefer paper notes).

If you haven't tried Obsidian at all I think you should give it a shot and write notes without following any system in particular. If you've tried it and you still prefer paper notes and the occasional apple note, then perhaps Obsidian isn't necessary for the way you take and organize notes.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#56
post #47
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't solve the problem of it hallucinating more design details and putting them in comments. The solution to too much authoritative documentation isn't more authoritative documentation.

Comments exist for humans to understand the why of the code, including perhaps external dependencies/assumptions/requirements. LLMs inserting code comments makes zero sense by definition.

That’s not true because LLMs clearly benefit from having multiple statements representing aspects of the same thing.

That’s why they’re always doing the “it’s not X, it’s Y” kind of patterns. It’s reinforcement.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#57
post #9
post #5

I think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/

I don't understand. Are you saying that AI should write notes but then they should be excluded from the AI's context?

You need provenance for the notes, the AI can't tell the difference between its own code comments in code and team decisions.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#58
post #31

I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time" I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ide…

I don't think I do the second brain thing well but keeping some detailed notes (using a daily note at a scratch pad for one off queries, small scripts etc) and occasionally branching them off into dedicated markdown files like "Database debugging" or "MongoDB" has saved me a lot of time on aggregate.

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#59
> It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

Yes! And that's because you can't really delegate ownership/authorship to AI (at today's capability levels). Coding agents might have been RL'd out the wazoo to write code to solve well defined problems, but given a situation the onus of making sense of the ambiguity and identifying the problem -- and even crafting a skeleton for an acceptable solution keeping in mind tradeoffs -- needs to be done by a human taking ownership.

I wrote about this recently from a slightly different angle [1], but the core idea is the same -- which is why it is hard to take over an idea mooted by AI. Before even writing/implementing, the AI has internally resolved ambiguity with several decisions which are arbitrary, and match neither your mental model nor the actual ground reality (which you need to spend time understanding in order to productively interpret).

[1] https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...

Re: It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI

#60
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do it?

You could probably add linting rules to your tool of choice and tell claude that your lint tool has to pass.

but then no human generated comments allowed either, right?
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