delightful user experience 10/10
Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
351–360 of 457 posts
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#352Earlier 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?
Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context.
Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule:
* Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks.
* Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session)
* When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files.
* Keep CLAUDE.md short.
* Disable irrelevant tools.
* Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action.
Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#353I dont find this to be indicative of Claude (opus?) at all. My experience doesnt lead me to think it would change a cancel button to blue if I ask it to change an "Add to Cart" button to blue. I assume this is just a contrived example?
It’s a contrived example, but also not very far from the mark. The spinner with random claudisms is what makes the game, mixed with Claude helpfully deciding to pick up some tasks along the way. I feel like most of my conversations with Claude lately are a battle of “I am a technical user, share technical details, but not random superfluous gibberish”
This hasn’t been my experience at all
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#354Great 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 mostly a side effect of post-training models to not hallucinate, which has obviously been a major priority for a while now. They are highly incentivized to double check things to avoid accidentally making stuff up.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#355Great 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…
Plus rigorously ensuring backwards compatibility for a project that is 2 hours old and has zero users.
I'm surprised I haven't seen this called out more directly and more often. This is a frequent error state.
And not just backwards compatibility, but migration scripts and all of the testing and machinery around it. I'll literally add feature A, merge it, then add feature B and it is like "oh no, we'll have to fix up and migrate all of the users using feature A".
The other problem is anchoring on an old implementation. I was working with Fable on a change to a core system and it pointed out a difficult failure edge case. It is something that can go wrong in extremely unlikely scenarios but the consequence would be short-term data loss (basically a non-durable intermediate cache being overwritten in a race before a flush to durable storage). It is very hard in these circumstances to get Fable to switch from "how to patch this given the existing implementation" to "how to prevent this with a more robust implementation".
These are both cases where the model seems to over-index on what is already there instead of considering what a first-principles approach would look like. A good engineer does both and then costs them side by side, because a first-principles approach can often be less work than patching what is already there.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#356> 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.
Same here. I assume this doesn't work in Chrome or something?
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#357I get the joke, but none of the offered prompts are close to how I speak with coding agents. I felt like I was being forced to feed garbage into the machine and then I'm supposed to act surprised when garbage came out.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
same. none of the available prompts are what I would prompt claude with and I get way better results than this. makes sense to me why the provided prompts result in the simulated outcomes. garbage in, garbage out.
It "makes sense" that plainly telling the chat bot to make one button blue makes the whole site blue? It "makes sense" that correcting it and repeating 3 times that no, only the one button should be blue, should make the button a gradient and start a philosophical discussion around the nature of "blue"? Wow, you AI people really have a negative view of the technology y'all are trying to sell as the next Jesus
I'm not trying to sell the technology at all, much less as a messiah, and I absolutely have a negative view of it. It's a token predictor - nothing more, nothing less. If you treat it like it is supposed to "make sense" of things, you get predictably bad results. It "makes sense" that if you don't make the sense for it, it will do poorly, because it's a glorified auto-complete.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus rigorously ensuring backwards compatibility for a project that is 2 hours old and has zero users.
This is why I have a PROJECT.md in all my repos, which specifically reiterates that this is a greenfield single user project that never leaves my LAN. It tends to relax some of the insane things LLMs tend to do.
Your approach but I picture thin slices of descending context and try to give models buttons to push[0] instead of a blank check.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror)
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#360That's so weird... This doesn't at all match my experience with Claude. I've never seen it behave this way.
because you are now getting coded products written in large by people who do not have technical foundations, so the way they interact with and even prompt the model is different. We all know how to fix this scenario; be more specific, or diagnose the abstraction mix ups and straighten those out. Ask for change A and get unwanted change B happens all the time with bad programmers and tradgedy of the commons (ie poorly…
Yeah, a while back I did a small project with a stack I wasn't familiar with, and it was really non-critical. So I decided to vibe code it. The experience was pretty similar to this satirical example. But when I work in areas in which I'm paying attention and understand the stack better, I don't experience this nearly as much