Even funnier is all the ways people are malding about this in the thread.
Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
271–280 of 439 posts
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#272I’m don’t do much change-clicky-button software development. But when I do, I point models to specific lines of code. And have never had a result this bad.
Maybe this is geared towards pure vibe coders for whom a file and line number is too technical.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#273Great 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…
This is my recent experience as well. Models want to run linters, tests, etc. And that is all covered in GitHub actions. So I have been instructing agents to push a draft PR, then I validate the static checks pass and tell the agent if there are issues.
Agents and AI are getting expensive, it seems silly to waste tokens on static checks.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#274-= CAUTION, SPOILERS =- This got me on "cyanide blue", and I was ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING on "Approaching usage limit". I can barely stop laughing now and my stomach hurts. I mean, Thank You!
"Confirming the button contains no cyanide" sent my sides firmly into orbit. This is fantastic.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#275Earlier 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.
As Ze Frank put it: I have a theory about this but it's a little bit to deep for the audience.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial. If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money. If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing,…
i agree with you that it’s principally different from a slot machine, and that it’s possible to use it in a way (like you describe) that is much more focused, for lack of a better term, to great effect most people don’t use ai this way though, and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it (and this is even more obvious with image…
> most people don’t use ai this way though
How do they use it? Surely no one is just repeating the same prompt over and over (except as a Ralph loop perhaps, which is automated). I’m really struggling with the notion that most people just throw the same prompt repeatedly hoping it eventually works. Because that doesn’t sound like gambling. It sounds crazy (and frustrating).
> and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it
In the sense that you get a dopamine reward when you succeed, sure, but I get the same reward when I code by hand and achieve a successful result.
> and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output
This is fair, because sometimes with image generation the same exact prompt will produce very different output. This is becoming less true as the models get better and it becomes more effective to direct image generation iteratively than to keep starting from scratch with a barely tweaked prompt.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that. If they've worked some minutes/hours/weeks on something and you ask them why did they do that, they will either answer honestly and truthfully, lie, or say "I missed that/didn't seem important so I just chose something at random". None of these cases are similar to how AI works.
Actually split brain experiments tells a different story. The left hemisphere actively confabulates, inventing plausible explanations for actions it didn’t initiate, suggesting that much of human self-narrative may be post-hoc storytelling.
> The left hemisphere actively confabulates, inventing plausible explanations for actions it didn’t initiate, suggesting that much of human self-narrative may be post-hoc storytelling.
Sounds like the left hemisphere usually uses something from the right hemisphere to answer those questions and it can't do that if it's been cut off?
We know that our brains are capable of hallucinating due to substances (drugs), being asleep, brain damage (including split brain), hypnosis, etc. Just as RAM damage make your computer do weird shit. That doesn't mean it operates that way normally.
You can't just remove a huge part of a system and then assume that the whole system behaves the same.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#278I’ve never used any of these tools. Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things. For my sanity. (I am genuinely uncertain, though I presume it’s at least somewhat exaggerated.)
I haven't been professionally responsible for code since before AI started eating everything, and haven't touched AI in the meantime. Is this representative of the BS that everyone else here puts up with on a day-to-day basis? Did we collectively burn trillions of dollars for this?
Sometimes, yes, but obviously not everyone. I suspect that it depends what you're doing and how. Perhaps the AI has more difficulty understanding what some people want than what others want. I certainly have had a milder version of this and it neutralises the value of the tool because it keeps trying to do things you don't want in a way you don't want it to do them. I get annoyed at having to write huge explanations of how to do something and end up doing it myself sometimes.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#279[deleted]
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting combative is a waste of time.
How does one learn to interact with Claude more effectively?
Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way.
So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?
Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.