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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

#61
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd do this by only running the linter locally and using this as a custom rule for the LLM, but I need to think about it a bit harder.

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

#62
post #3

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

Delete the comments: I’ve gone on a tear with these recently because they’re nothing but trouble.

The absolute least worst outcome is they chew up your token budget. But what tends to happen, and this is much more serious, is they poison future work and make further modification of the codebase more burdensome and error prone.

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

#63
post #3

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

We have this in our harness markdown:

```

## Comments

Use comments extremely sparingly. Most comments should be at the request of the user. When something warrants a comment, keep it to one or two lines: what the code does and why it's necessary. No background narrative, no replaying the investigation or failure mode, nothing a test name or the commit message already says. Applies to specs too. If a comment needs a paragraph, make the code clearer instead.

```

The comments Claude was leaving got absolutely out of control. Just lines and lines of LLM drivel that was barely intelligible and not remotely relevant to what a code comment should be used for.

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

#64
post #3

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

Delete the comments: I’ve gone on a tear with these recently because they’re nothing but trouble. The absolute least worst outcome is they chew up your token budget. But what tends to happen, and this is much more serious, is they poison future work and make further modification of the codebase more burdensome and error prone.

Absolutely. IMO, comments can explain historical reasoning for the code, but refactorings can benefit heavily from rethinking ideas from scratch, as opposed to trying to follow the same reasons. LLMs tend to be misguided by comments, probably by treating them as instructions. Ergo, get rid of them.

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

#66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but then no human generated comments allowed either, right?

I'd do this by only running the linter locally and using this as a custom rule for the LLM, but I need to think about it a bit harder.

There is probably something you can do to only apply some rules to the actual changed lines in a git diff.

You may have to write your own linter for that specifically.

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

#67

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 just want something that I can use to record notes, with good backups, and a format that doesn't lock me in. Obsidian offers that. It has a pretty decent mobile app and desktop app, in terms of the actual editing. And if I do want to do something advanced, like automatically generate a daily note for recording what I worked on today, it can do that. You can do all these things with other programs, or even just raw files, but Obsidian adds just enough to make it easy.

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

#68
The title is editorialized. It is "Keep AI Out of Your (Obsidian) Vault".

For the Original title, I wish they added the qualifier "generative" for AI. You may well use e.g. embeddings to semantically search through your notes, and there are only gains in that.

Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.

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

#69
One of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that.

Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking.

I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.

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

#70
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 suspect for many people productivity tools are more about feeling more productive than actually being productive. And then there is the kind of people who spend time on productivity tools to avoid spending time on real, hard work.
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