Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

221–230 of 390 posts

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

#221
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…

Maybe check in the other direction as well: Astra to Fable. I frequently simply let one of the three review what something that looks like awesome output by one AI gets totally annihilated by the other. Finished outputs are easier to improve than bend a LLM to produce stuff like that in my observation. Same with Gemini. I yet have to find out how to handle this, whether I let agents check themselves and if on what pr…

I've had Claude review output from Qwen3.8-27b. Claude negged it! Said it was hallucinating!

27b may be small but it seems competent most of the time.

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

#222
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

If I read "load-bearing", "pin", "wedge", "rung", or "it's worse than what I'd previously stated" one more fucking time from Opus...

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

#223
I've installed multiple of these skills. but it seems to quickly revert to crappy writing. i've tried the adhd. the brain fried at the end of day. the "Concise" output from the harness itself. the most useful fix to me has been yelling at it "Speak English!! No jargon!!!" it goes back to more concise talking for a little while.

Fable 5.1 is better at this so far though. :(

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

#225
post #13

> A skill to stop your coding agent from burying the answer This is just an annoying thing for anyone. It gives a 10 page dissertation that sums up to, "it's good, nothing to worry about".

I'm not paying for it, so when they get wordy and stupid, I just respond with something akin to "turn that response into like half a paragraph."

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine Claudisms might make it into human-speak.

You're absolutely right.

You've found the load-bearing seam, and my explanation was worse than it actually is.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you want it to use instead? "I" is normally used for everything. You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I".

I want it to use nothing. Use impersonal statements. Say “X was changed for Y” not “I changed X for Y”. As any tool would. Finder doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to delete this file?”. Photoshop doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to save this file?”. Claude shouldn’t assume itself to be a person either. > You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I". Except this isn’t prose. Claude is not te…

Yeah okay, but if you want no pronouns at all then I think your comparison to "it" just confuses the issue. In the contexts where you would use "it", the "it" should use "I".

But I don't think I share your preference either. It's a lot easier to talk about what I decided to do and what the machine 'decided' to do if we attach pronouns. "X was changed" can be too vague.

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

#228
post #129
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't take it anymore. I moved to Codex. I refer to "him" as Claude Shakespeare now... I wonder what he'd say if he knew my switch... Et tu, Brute?

This is insulting to Shakespeare.

and to monkeys with typewriters

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

#230
post #197
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't trust it's account on why it did something, it does not "remember". It will just make up something plausible sounding.

To me it explained its inability to follow my preferred coding style by blaming its training data.

Sounds plausible.
Post reply on HN