Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

231–240 of 390 posts

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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Imma get a sledge hammer and knock down the next "load-bearing" wall I see.

Officer — it's not a crime, it's AI induced rage.

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

#232
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I rather have them hand out these banked resets (even if they expire after n weeks), that would prevent the problem case I described.

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

#233
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).

Ah yes the old "I have it but you don't"

Yeah, that's called diagnosis

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

#234
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…

Not just imprinted with the engrams of any one person (however brilliant they might be) — it’s more than that! Like all great writing, it’s more like it’s been imbued with patterns, patterns that are peppered with a potpourri of popular ways of writing in an enthusiastic style while regularly restating things and recapitulating them. Would you like me to explain more?

Potpourri is an excellent word to describe LLM output

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

#235
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…

I added “ respond as Jeeves from the P.G. Wodehouse stories.” to my Claude’s instructions best thing I ever did.

“It is hardly my place, sir, to criticize the facial peculiarities of your friends.”

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's bad enough from Opus, but it's worse how people have actually retooled their vocabulary around these tools. In the US tech industry, at least.

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

#237
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work across multiple companies, but in general company profits are up across the board. Salaries are not. The larger enterprises are the ones that move the slowest and are the furthest behind. It's not just one thing (productivity), there's all of capitalism at play.

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

#238

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 worst is when this bleeds into the comments and docs. Like, my dude, you don't have to document the code you didn't write (most of the time anyway).

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

#239
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to have been rushed with certain releases. It is impossible they didn’t know or see this awful writing before 5 series.

Yeah agree. Someone on HN posed the theory that the dogfooding might have worked against them here - the theory is that internally they used Fable as conversational agent and Opus as subagents, leading to Opus falling deeper into a style mainly aimed at other LLMs. All conjecture of course, and yeah it's hard to imagine they would enjoy this prose internally

Fable can't write in a legible manner either.

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

#240

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.

That is what you struggle with the most? Are you kidding me?

English has no distinct personal pronoun for an "it". "I" has to be used for grammar to be attributive. There's quite literally no alternative without using passive voice for everything, which is miserable to read and creates ambiguity on if the speaker (it) did something or something happened to have been done, which then requires entire sentences to clarify.

You aren't stupid, you know what it means when it says "I". And it serves a grammatical purpose. You're getting upset at a toaster for ringing a bell to notify the toast is done. "Toasters aren't bell ringers!?"

Post reply on HN