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Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

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Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#221

Post by barbazoo »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #211
_fat_santa wrote: post #84

At least with Codex, this has not been my experience at all. It still screws up sure, but in every case I can ask "why did you do this" and it can trace back what made it take that particular decision. Typically it's always that I either didn't specify the problem correctly or made a really dumb mistake (executing the task on the wrong project....did this one yesterday) or it's something within a skill file that inst…

No model acts like this in my experience, not fable, not opus, not k3, not gml, not qwen 3.8 either. Additionally the provided prompts are not what anyone who has used this things would say in either situation. Sure you can ask it to make one button blue and it can easily make all buttons blue, but they quickly backtrack if told to.

The game is fun because it's so obvious that any answer will just devolve into an even more unstable state when in reality I feel like it's pretty straight forward to correct it in the moment, if not permanently, to get what you actually need.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#222

Post by jaggederest »

crazygringo wrote: post #196
madibo3156 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part skeptic and part zetetic, what prompt would you have used? My impression is that this is an oversimplified demonstration of what can happen when you prompt Claude in a system with many more variables (than two buttons and two colours). If I want the button to turn blue and that's it, what instead do I ask? Even in a complicated system with many levers, what do I request other than the desired end result, hoping…

I dunno, but in my experience Claude looks at all the levers in your codebase, understands what they do, and then generally figures out how to achieve the desired end result. And when it doesn't, it's usually because of things outside of the codebase -- iOS layout quirks that aren't documented, buggy Python libraries it's relying on where you then have to tell it to read the source to figure out what's going on, that…

The other thing that I think a lot of people run into is that they launch it into a completely human-built system with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and expect run #1 to be perfect.

You have to change the system so that the AI understands it, via establishing what your beliefs are, how those are reflected in values (especially important if you have e.g. compliance needs), how those values are reflected in the operational and strategic levels, and then a variety of tactical behavior coaching. For example, I ban 2>/dev/null - super tactical, and I say I value simplicity over covering every edge case - a very broad generalization.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#223

Post by epistasis »

One note for those still using the Claude system for chats: there's no system to get generated images, spreadsheets, etc. out of the system. They claim it's a "security concern" to provide that data to you, as if they are protecting you by refusing to follow data export laws.

I'm hesitant to email their data emails, as it's common for companies to delete all data upon any request, instead of providing data as they are required to.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#224

Post by jodrellblank »

SoftTalker wrote: post #192
btown wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is the epitome of this! If you find yourself not enjoying your daily dose of "someone is wrong on the internet" (via the immortal https://xkcd.com/386/ ) as you find yourself crafting the perfect response, you can always close the tab!

I actually don't end up clicking the "reply" button on a good portion of the replies I start to write.

Don't worry, Reddit/Facebook/Gmail et al. still transmit that draft reply to their servers, store it against your profile, and train on it. Probably.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#225

Post by jimmaswell »

captainbland wrote: post #40

This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling.

Programming before AI was always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on the first try or I could have had to spend the day chasing logic errors (or multiple days chasing memory errors if it was C or C++). Maybe I would just get bored of the project, especially if I realized there were 20 layers of yaks I needed to shave first, and Visual Studio got stuck updating again, and before I could even start actually coding I had to spend the entire evening on an exhausting merge conflict. My entire weekend could be gone with nothing to actually show for it.

I got so sick of all this at some point that I slowly stopped doing anything that wasn't my job. But then AI got better and better and I realized it was the ultimate unblocker. When that dreaded malaise started creeping in signaling it was a project's end because I didn't want to waste any more of my life dealing with bullshit orthogonal to what I was trying to do, I'd give it to the AI. It felt like a miracle the first time this worked, and it still does. If we were previously equipped with shovels to dig through bullshit, we now have a fully automated Bagger 288.

The reward schedule now isn't variable anymore; the chance that I finish something in a good state is 100%. I can focus on the parts I actually enjoy - architecting the broader system, making the parts mesh together in a sensible way that's easy to work with and has some mathematical elegance to it, hand coding the bits I want to be really specific about (but now without the endless frustration of bugfixing or import errors and edgecases being immediately discovered, thanks to the AI).

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#226

Post by epistasis »

mrinterweb wrote: post #190
dudeinhawaii wrote: post #164

Great site, triggered memories! haha. To try to add something to this discussion -- I think that while I've seen these sort of loops less --- what I have seen is "overly helpful". Models nowadays want to double-triple-quadruple check things. I'm being silly but it verges on "I have a working solution but let me write a variation in Rust to ensure a convergent solution and prove this works". I've had to stop models no…

> triggered memories Yeah of 10 minutes ago. It is shocking how long some seemingly simple things can take. I know there are some things I can do faster than the LLM and some things it can do faster than me. The amount of rambling BS is the exhausting part.

Try different models, it's a breath of fresh air. GLM 5.2, etc. all make life much more enjoyable. They may not one-shot a complex project the same way that Claude can spit out memorized architectures, but that sort of system is always only useful for a one-off prototype anyway, so not much is lost.

Edit: for how to do this, I set up an OpenRouter account so that I could easily switch models, and then ran them in Pi inside of Orca ADE. Orca lets me easily switch from Pi to Claude Code to Kilo to Codex or Hermes or whatever. Pi+OpenRouter lets me easily switch the LLM. All of it lives in a single open source orchestrator to avoid any platform lock in to any AI company going forward, and can even do local LLM should I care to take on that massive hassle.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#227

Post by blake__dev »

johnisgood wrote: post #135

> Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button. > Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button. Those are my only options when the site is clearly not blue, two buttons are. There is a reason for why I am much more specific than this.

Yeah that's when the site lost me too. I feel like people just tell AI "make the thing" and then get mad when it doesn't match up to their vision that they didn't specify at all.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#228

Post by jaggederest »

wccrawford wrote: post #194
jaggederest wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it very dramatically is more reliable and predictable than any human I've worked with. Do you know anyone who actually reads and adheres closely to all of the documentation every time it's changed?

That was my experience with Claude when my vibe-coded project was small. But now that I've been working on it a month and there's a lot of documentation, it's pretty clearly ignoring parts of the documentation and parts of the code. It will come up with some ridiculous statement about how something works, and I'll challenge it, and it'll admit I'm right. It definitely reads more documentation than any programmer I've…

Yeah the biggest task these days that I do manually is curating the documentation. AGENTS.md in every major directory, and a variety of reference docs that are explicitly referenced in those files.

    # See DOC-ITEM-NAME

    DOC-ITEM-NAME.md
    When referencing documents, always use the exact syntax See  - this is enforced by a lint on precommit
And those doc items are basically all of the values, architectural, strategic, and tactical items. It's a poor man's in-repo RAG but it's shockingly effective, especially if you keep them small. I may migrate some/all of them to skills over time, but I usually update them biweekly, and I only allow agents to make small edits or propose new notes. And typically I go through and delete or curate any agent edits before merge.

Depending on language I've seen this scale past multiple millions of lines of code, as long as you pair it with all of the linting and tooling that you can possibly build.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#229

Post by zamadatix »

pc86 wrote: post #201
RobKohr wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes more than 20 min to review a pr, ask the dev to come on a call and explain what the code does.

It must be nice to work on such small-scale systems that you can reasonably expect PRs to be this quick.

I don't know it has as much to do with scale of the system vs the general architecture. E.g. the system I primarily work with these days has millions of lines but most PRs are for a small changes which are well contained in scope by the overall architecture.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#230

Post by josh_p »

a funny codex anecdote:

I had 5.6-Luna coordinate a code review in which it spawns 2 agents looking for different things. My prompt was "review the currently checked out branch. diff target is `next`. The jira ticket is XX-XXXXX..." My `next` branch was a few commits behind `origin/next` but it still did its review against the stale local version instead of clarifying or inferring that I meant `origin/next`. The findings were very confusing until I realized what I did.

I'm noticing the need to be really specific with any instructions lately, which I don't think is a bad thing. I expect co-workers (or anyone really) to tell me what they need in specific terms so I can get it right. I can do the same for the machine, I guess.

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