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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

#251

Post by alienchow »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #243
vzmax wrote: 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.

It has access to its own instructions, right? Otherwise how would the instructions work?

All instructions to LLMs are merely suggestions to nudge it in the right behaviour. Unless you have a deterministic guardrail that guards against a single specific action, everything else is a slot machine that's biased strongly in your favour.

My global CLAUDE.md explicitly states "When commenting on code and configs, or writing MD files, strictly write within the domain of the content being commented on. DO NOT include information, negatives or ramblings from work sessions. For e.g. if commenting on a proto string field that is replacing an int field, do not comment that 'this is not an int field'".

This reduced the idiocy of the agent (Opus 5 included) when writing documents. But I'm still catching it writing README.md talking about the negatives that it removed. Those belong in the memory if it is actually that important (most of the time it's junk), but Claude doesn't seem to understand and never ever learns.

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

#252

Post by desktopentree »

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…

Claude drives me absolutely crazy for that very reason. It's so obvious when people use it to write anything.

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

#253

Post by wtfwhateven »

throw10920 wrote: post #244
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…

Your comment quite badly violates the HN guidelines. You should review them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > "Let's face it" "terrible writer" "other nonsense" "do Anthropic people actually talk like that" "Dario's engrams" Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes. > I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that. Has it been imprinted with Dario's…

Your reply is essentially spam. Please stop.

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

#254

Post by snvzz »

infogulch wrote: post #165
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…

Can we imprint Claude with a little more Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: > Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Sadly trained on human-generated code, which suffers from the same tendency to complicate.

KISS is actually, quite unfortunately, seldom applied.

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

#255

Post by redrix »

throw10920 wrote: post #244
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…

Your comment quite badly violates the HN guidelines. You should review them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > "Let's face it" "terrible writer" "other nonsense" "do Anthropic people actually talk like that" "Dario's engrams" Be kind. Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes. > I genuinely wonder if the people inside Anthropic actually communicate with each other like that. Has it been imprinted with Dario's…

Your comment technically does as well. Downvote the comment and move on. Leave the policing up to dang and the other mods.

It is evident (in my opinion) as to what the comment was talking about. I personally switched away from all Claude models recently for the same reason.

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

#256

Post by dinkleberg »

corford wrote: post #204
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…

After some iteration, this is what I currently shove in every AGENTS.md to make Fable legible: ## Writing guidelines These apply to documentation, code comments, commit and PR messages, and replies to the user. - Write precisely in clear, complete sentences; keep text concise and proportional to task complexity. - Stay focused: avoid filler, repetition, over-the-top detail, and tangents the user did not ask for. Once…

This seems solid. It is so frustrating when you state a fact and it goes off and does research and confirms that indeed the fact that you stated is accurate.

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

#257

Post by saghm »

cyanydeez wrote: post #171
saghm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

why even copy-paste when you can just plug the two terminals together and observe like fish; then just occasionally sprinkle in the flakes. Isn't that the idea here, just stop being people.

I didn't say copy paste, I just said "sent each other" and "fed into". I'm sure there are plenty of ways to streamline that!

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

#258

Post by nosioptar »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #27

ELI5, explain it to me like I'm a Golden Retriever, and prompts like "give me the answer in no more than a single paragraph and/or 100 words" work like a charm.

Ive tried asking a yes/no question with something like "answer only with 'yes' or 'no'" and still have to chew the clanker piece of shit out four or five times to get it to folow instructions.

Not to mention it almost always gets the wrong answer.

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

#259

Post by pampas »

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…

The way they use their config filename as free advertising still annoys me. Everyone else is using AGENTS.md.

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

#260

Post by docjay »

Style requests tend to get washed away by context. I’m not sure how you’d do it with Claude Code or whatever (I use the API directly), but you might try fiddling with giving it a function called “response” or “message_user” with a mandatory parameter like “output=plaintext”.

I’m basing that idea on custom functions I give Claude where I designate the style in the required parameters. Example:

“””

@pyrepl(code_golf=True, output=CSV)

//END

“””

The “//END” is a special terminator I use for halting the response. Claude runs code between the tags. The difference in code is incredible. No banners, comments, fluff, print(“=“*70), or any other nonsense, and the code is tight and compact. The parameters do nothing, Claude just outputs them as part of required syntax and it dictates the style purely because it output them.

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