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I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

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Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#131

The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…

The thing I struggle the most with is getting it to stop referring to itself with personal pronouns. No Claude, you are not an “I” you are an “it”. You are a fucking tool, dammit. Tell me what you did without trying to assume personality; stop impersonating humans you steroidal autocorrect.

You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism.

Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#133
post #71

Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense. I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anth…

It was quite insufferable: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra... Long story short, I ended up looking at other providers and models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 and eventually just stuck with OpenAI (more limits, despite smaller context), none of them have such pronounced issues with the tone and writing like Claude does - seems like they were working on it with 5.1 but I'd almost classify it as…

I imagine Claudisms might make it into human-speak.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#134
post #112
post #71

Let's face it. Claude (in particular) is a terrible writer. There's a whole cottage industry of skills and CLAUDE.md instructions trying to push it toward writing better, but each new model iteration seems expressly designed to override all that so that it can load up its writing with unnecessary participle phrases, not-this-but-thats, burying the lede, and other nonsense. I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anth…

You think that they communicate? I just assumed they sent each other output of Claude, which is then fed into Claude

Ohh lol :D So Anthropic is a company of copy-pasters

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#135

The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…

The thing I struggle the most with is getting it to stop referring to itself with personal pronouns. No Claude, you are not an “I” you are an “it”. You are a fucking tool, dammit. Tell me what you did without trying to assume personality; stop impersonating humans you steroidal autocorrect.

I want them to be sterile and inhuman as much as you do. But I don't draw the line at "I". I'd rather not read through even more awkward English as it tries to work around how all of the training data has something or someone refer to itself.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#136
>explain like I have executive dysfunction

This is true. Transformer has several orders of magnitude more working memory than any human. Compared to transformer we all have executive dysfunction.

By default they explain things assuming I have infinite processing bandwidth. I do not! I have several zeroes less than they do.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#138
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've corrupted their data set by padding it with generated slop, in the misguided belief that you need 10PB of data to train a brain. Every training round they load more AI slop into it, further amplifying the slop language. It's fascinating, Sonnet 4 is still available via API and it's so much less moronic than the current model. All of the em-dashes and nonsense are a result of the repeated rounds of reinforceme…

But why did that style of writing get rewarded? The people at Anthropic are ultimately responsible for the reward signal and what it produced.

I blame it on their focus on "persona design". They botched it.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#139
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be burned out too if 48k of my comp went to what amounts to a facilities spend. Crazy. You think the models actually give you ROI, or this is a sort of jumping with the lemmings thing your company is doing, and you could probably deliver the same output working in "The Old Way" with another 48k on top your base?

My output is easily 2-3X what it was two years ago. With the introduction of Claude to everyone in the company (HR, finance, marketing, product, dev, etc), so came the expectations of what used to take 2 quarters can now be done in a couple sprints. I would be even more underwater working in "The Old Way" regardless of comp, with how deadlines are being set now. That being said, I don't know how long this will last,…

>Longterm, I believe my total output would be higher working with minimal AI when you consider the impact to motivation and how long I anticipate staying with the company.

That makes sense. The increased theoretical output certainly makes it tempting to squeeze the developers for all they are and to keep testing how close deadlines can be made. But of course, to what end? A lot of dev work, probably most of it if we are being honest beyond building the initial product-market fit function, doesn't really impact sales at all, and sometimes too much can even hurt sales. And as you say you hit a point where this burns out your talent and makes them seek greener pastures.

Factory sort of thinking towards a job that is not really analogous to a factory anyhow. I'm not saying dev work is one of those 'bullshit jobs', but lets be honest about the job and its role in the business model. Your customers are probably going to be there all the same if you fix the bug today or next month, and you also won't get more customers fixing the bug today vs next month. Feature shipment might be a little different but even then it would take the right feature and the right customer for that one function to really drive the needle in sales compared to being lost in the changelog, and that isn't what a coding model solves for you after all.

Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer

#140
From the "10 rules":

> Specific time estimates (minutes, not "a bit").

I actually wish the model would go completely in the opposite direction. Except in the rare circumstances where the model has actually measured something, it is hilariously deficient in its concept of time. It will often output phrases like "this relates to that you did weeks ago", referring to something that happened in the session just a few turns (and hours or a couple of days) ago. Likewise for estimating how long a coding tasks takes, it is hilariously inept. It honestly feels like it rolls two completely independent dice to select a number and a value from (hours | days | weeks) when it needs to attach an estimate to something. I'd much rather read "a bit" than be distracted by these utterly nonsensical times.

The full skill gives this example:

>Bad: "This will take some work." Good: "About 15 minutes if tests already cover this. An afternoon if not."

My experience is that it is very likely that whatever task this is describing takes anywhere from 1 to 30 minutes, consistently. Maybe I just work way faster than the average person.

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