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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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71–80 of 91 posts

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

#71
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.

I completely block all LLM comments via pi extension, it makes using them significantly more enjoyable. If the LLM wants to add a comment it must ASK me explicitly to do so.

Seeing LLM comments in other peoples code is very upsetting because theres just so much meaningless noise.

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

#72

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 use Obsidian as a glorified notebook. I've been using paper notebooks, but I tend to lose them... With Obsidian I just push my files to git and never worry again. Since the files are just markdown, there's no lock-in.

What I also really like about notetaking apps is that I can organize my notes hierarchically, move things around and make cross references.

I still regularly sketch ideas on paper, but once I have something that's worth keeping, I write it down in Obsidian.

I'm also skeptical about this "Second Brain" thing. People make videos on YT about how they have been enlightened by Obsidian and then try to sell you their online course. To me it seems like notetaking for its own sake. You could call it "idea maxxing" :)

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

#73
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…

There seems to be two schools of thought for "second brain" stuff:

1. Those who kind of semi-obsessively write down every little thought, semi-obsessively catalogue everything, etc.

2. Those who use the idea of "writing helps you think", where the second brain functions in support of this

Personally I find 2 quite valuable, and although I could "think about programming all the time" (or one of my other interests), I find it helpful to have f.ex. exact quotes from some book at hand (and various other Obsidian-related things)

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

#74
post #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.

Yes. Note taking apps were very much the precursors of modern agentic coding.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.

Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.

Sounds like society at the moment even without the free labour thing. The world generally loves celebrities and influencers and other famous people, and I hear in some fields (like publishing) they're actively selecting for online fame/popularity so they don't have to spend as much on marketing.

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

#76
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.

I've had codex delete useful (albeit not directly relevant or perhaps messy wip notes) comments, even though I explicitly have it in my agents.md not to delete comments, and ask for permission if it thinks it should.

It deleted the comments, and when I asked why it did that even though I expressedly asked it not to, it responded that me prompting it in the first place explicit permission. I have no idea if that's the actual reason or just some post-hoc explanation.

But I genuinely don't think it's possible to just have these things be completely, 100%, indpenedent and also solve deep problems that need to also be understood by people in a people-based organization context.

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

#77
post #66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you'd probs want a commit hook for that

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely block all LLM comments via pi extension, it makes using them significantly more enjoyable. If the LLM wants to add a comment it must ASK me explicitly to do so. Seeing LLM comments in other peoples code is very upsetting because theres just so much meaningless noise.

What's the extension, please?

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

#80
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.

My approach is to keep the comments only with a references. My LLM based projects always have the decision log where are my decisions while working on the features are stored with the date. I found this useful to actually trace why something is in the codebase. It's much easier for both me and the LLM to navigate through the big projects where I spent months and dozens of full night sessions executing my plans with --dangerously-skip-permissions. In the morning I was answering all the model questions and iterating like that. Honestly, try that.
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