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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

#211

Post by d_tr »

jp57 wrote: 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…

Meanwhile I am just impressed that we have models that write better than most native speakers, at least English and Greek... OTOH I like to write my code and my text myself, so I have no reason to get pissed when LLMs fuck up.

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

#212

Post by asdff »

smcleod wrote: post #184
asdff wrote: 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?

That's not really how it works. I'm able to get 5-10x more work done, perhaps more, it's a significant accelerant to those that know how to be productive. The problem is more for those who don't - and we bring them up to speed or help them pivot to other work.

How does that shake out for your company? Are you growing 5-10x in sales? I'd guess not and that is sort of the rub with all this. Yes we can push more frequently to the git repo but that wasn't the limiting factor of scaling the business.

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

#214

Post by code_biologist »

altern8 wrote: post #190

With Claude—and I feel Opus 5 in particular—I always feel like I'm talking in circles. Just when I think the task is finally done, it mentions a caveat that might invalidate the whole thing. Or it adds a hint at the end about something that it didn't look into but might be a potential problem. ALWAYS. If I ask a yes/no question, it's always a short novel that barely answers the question and adds 3-4 side quests. It's…

Opus 4.7/4.8/5 have a built-in nitpicking as anti-syphcophancy. Fable too. The models are structurally incapable of not nipicking.

I suspect the nitpicking helps engagement metrics and it doesn't harm RLVF outcomes, so there's just not good signal against it.

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

#215

Post by cromka »

hashstring wrote: post #174
cromka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was incredibly surprised how much better was Astra at rephrasing the docs that Fable came up for a project I am about to publish. The instructions are now actually what a human would expect, with clear logic flow diagrams, lists itemized, short paragraphs. It also actually correctly detected the train-of-thought leftovers, as well as stuff that never made it to final version of the project and removed them. Meanwhi…

These resets also reset your weekly timer right. So it’s like, you may have 30% left for 1 days that you want to use. They reset it, and that means you your “new week” timer starts today. That sucks, because it doesn’t always work in your favour if you plan your weekly spend. I think a real reset shouldn’t also reset your week timer.

Agreed. But they also hand out the usage resets you can use at will, so if you bank couple of those, they come in handy specifically in situations like you described.

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

#216

Post by ghostpepper »

bgilroy26 wrote: post #83
jp57 wrote: 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've identified a load-bearing problem and it's worth naming

It reminds me of when people will use filler words because they haven't actually decided what thesis they're going to commit to yet. Just-in-time thinking.

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

#217

Post by ricardobeat »

ryandrake wrote: post #74

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…

Claude is very resistant to instructions. I've been cultivating my own minimal skill to tame it for a couple months: https://github.com/ricardobeat/skills/tree/main/human

The key sentences to get rid of claude-isms so far:

- say what you have to say and stop

- [no] document-structure signposts

- [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states

- don't attribute agency to things

- never narrate your own changes, fixes, defects from the past, or what the code used to do

It works 100% of the time for other models, 70-80% for Claude, but already makes a big difference.

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

#218

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

egeozcan wrote: post #8

As a person who has ADHD, it feels weird when people who obviously do not have it, claim to have it, while there's very little I wouldn't do to "get rid of it" (in quotes because it makes me, me but it's very hard to be me).

> while there's very little I wouldn't do to "get rid of it"

I'd be satisfied with removing the crippling executive dysfunction.

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

#219

Post by sleight42 »

jp57 wrote: 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…

Cynically, I wonder if it's a way to increase token spend from repeated requests to speak like fucking human.

The number of times my response has been "Plain English"...

I started using "debuzz", a skill that runs Claude output through antigravity. Works. But makes everything even slower.

Anthropic needs to get their shit together.

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

#220

Post by hinkley »

creesch wrote: post #116
hinkley wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you suppose it's just that it's aping humans who say too much without saying anything or do you think maybe this is a stalling tactic to get people to spread out their transactions? Like how theme parks generally don't do much to keep queues short (or Disney charges you a premium to skip the queue)

> Do you suppose it's just that it's aping humans who say too much without saying anything Considering how much of the input must me nonsense SEO bullshit articles and blogs that only serve to promote a person or company that might be a factor. I also often have wondered if it is also targeting those same people. Certainly with tools like deep research options (not just Anthropic's offering) the result report seems t…

I'm remembering cooking recipes.

Here's a simple recipe for deviled eggs with only four ingredients.

My great grandmother was born during the Great Depression. They valued foods that could be made with cheap ingredients.

[four paragraphs later]

Start with 8 hardboiled eggs...

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