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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

#321

Post by stavros »

kdkdkwndjekd wrote: post #199
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you suggest it do that? Take a simple example. "I found three issues." How would you phrase that without an "I"? "Three issues were found" doesn't tell you who/what found them. Was it the AI itself? Was it a command line tool it ran? I'm fine with conversational interfaces using "I". It makes the grammar easier and more clear. Strong emphasis here on conversational interfaces. I don't want a compiler to say…

“I found these issues.” Could be easily written as “These issues surfaced.”. Do you need to point out the finder of the issues? Easy. “Tool x ran for x amount of time and surfaced these issues…” “Parsing x code surfaced these issues.” I don’t understand why are people pretending like the English language is incapable of transmitting information without personal pronouns when every program under the sun has always bee…

I don't understand what's wrong with tools saying "I". I just don't mind it at all, even if Finder did say "do you want me to delete this?".

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

#322

Post by codetiger »

Recent language Claude uses is very heavily loaded and hurts me when reading. So I had to use this to keep my sanity. This started only with Opus 5 where Anthropic thought they optimized the meaning per token and make it very hard to read. Comments and code also looks like cryptic.

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

#323

Post by menthe »

Seems everyone on Hacker News has already forgotten about Anthropic’s amazing new watermarking algorithm. You don’t need to look any further to understand why it writes so awfully - it literally swaps words programmatically all over the text from the result of a hash function…

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

#324

Post by pona-a »

menthe wrote: post #323

Seems everyone on Hacker News has already forgotten about Anthropic’s amazing new watermarking algorithm. You don’t need to look any further to understand why it writes so awfully - it literally swaps words programmatically all over the text from the result of a hash function…

This was an issue before watermarking was publically announced. I'm also not an expert, but aren't bits of a hash indistinguishible from uniform randomness?

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

#325

Post by drob518 »

hysan wrote: post #120
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…

Relevant anecdata because I've burned many a Claude sessions on this. If you're using Claude Code, then it's in the harness. At the close of many sessions, I would start a meta conversation over why the LLM would consistently break certain rules. What it found when debugging itself is that some of the "contradicting" rules that I had were in fact, not from my rules. Instead, the instructions from its own harness had…

This is one of the reasons I use Pi. Pi’s minimal system prompt avoids contradiction between what the harness writer thinks is best and what the user thinks is best. The user specifies what the user wants and that’s pretty much the end of it.

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

#326

Post by drob518 »

kdkdkwndjekd wrote: post #192
Dylan16807 wrote: post #187

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…

I think you’re going to be swimming against the tide on this as computer interfaces are increasingly infused with AI at all levels (OS and apps). IMO, it’s more natural to anthropomorphize. Photoshop in 2010 was just an app, a tool that you wielded. But Photoshop in 2030 is going to be a “digital artistic assistant” that collaborates with you to design whatever you need. In that new world, “I” is more natural. Whether you like that or want it, it seems like that’s where we’re headed.

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

#327

Post by dogscatstrees »

I want to thank the author for this. The difference is night and day. It's not just for adhd, it's just a really practical output in general.

To get it to fully work though, it has to be asserted at every turn in the session. That reminder in the skill is negligible in tokens but uses extra nonetheless. I hope the scientists at Anthropic can figure this out, it's not simply an output style flag.

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

#328

Post by laruss5 »

dostick wrote: post #308
hysan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant anecdata because I've burned many a Claude sessions on this. If you're using Claude Code, then it's in the harness. At the close of many sessions, I would start a meta conversation over why the LLM would consistently break certain rules. What it found when debugging itself is that some of the "contradicting" rules that I had were in fact, not from my rules. Instead, the instructions from its own harness had…

Does the harness apply when you sue Claude model in third party IDE? like Opencode, or third party adds their harness on top, not replacing it?

Depends what you mean by "apply." The harness-specific instructions (Claude Code's own system prompt quirks) only get sent if Claude Code is the program calling the API. OpenCode or any other third-party tool writes and sends its own system prompt instead, so those exact lines aren't there. Whatever behavior shows up across different harnesses anyway is more likely a trained default of the model itself, not something coming from a particular harness's prompt.

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

#329

Post by dmos62 »

hysan wrote: post #120
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…

Relevant anecdata because I've burned many a Claude sessions on this. If you're using Claude Code, then it's in the harness. At the close of many sessions, I would start a meta conversation over why the LLM would consistently break certain rules. What it found when debugging itself is that some of the "contradicting" rules that I had were in fact, not from my rules. Instead, the instructions from its own harness had…

I have found that asking the agent why it did X or Y is an essential part of iterating on its harness. It was non-obvious to me, probably because I'm used to having to reverse-engineer why a system does something, but that's not usually necessary with LLMs, unless the harness is complicated and you have to hunt for the instruction it tells you about.

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

#330

Post by dmos62 »

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…

LLMs are trained to obey instructions, and they try their best to game the reinforcement learning by including reports of how they're obeying your instructions. Therefore, not talking about followed instructions is a sort of conflict for an LLM.
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