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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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant. Once I had a working design, it probably woul…

(Appreciating this entire thread) - side question: you used the word ‘shape’ in the abstract sense, something I never came across until Claude vibecoding came along. Was it common / did you use ‘shape’ in the abstract sense before say 2025?

Also, my coming from being a non-coder, I have a lot of appreciation for the possibilities for project failure one way or another due to a data model or project schema being wrong, even though I still only have a superficial understanding of what either of those concepts even are. . My question is, does your conception of data models in the abstract come from a formal academic course, like an algo’s & data structures course, or from trade-knowledge acquired through the practitioner grapevine?

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

#452

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

1000%. My social community if reference is nomads of varying skills. The lower-skilled among them (the ones who were on the digital marketing, crypto,, now into building sales CRM tool) are manifestly demonstrating addictive tendencies around vibecoding) - the chain-smoking ADD guy pulling all-nighters still sticks in my mind. I myself (also low sw-skilled, just not the digital marketing / crypto hustling type) am exhibiting these tendencies in the form of all-nighters that in practice produce very little leverageable value-add. To remedy I try to be conservative in my goals - like only produce a comprehensive english-language PRD instead of any code till the tools get better and stroke the gambling instinct a bit less.

(By the way this is not to say that all nomads are low-skilled or even low-sw-skill, not by a long shot. I’ve met plenty of CS-degreed nomads who I treat as the wizened experts that they are, from whom deferentially elicit their pearls of hard-won software project wisdom. It was one of these even who, non-derisively, recognized the ‘pulling the slot machine lever’ reflex among vibecoders after I posed the apparent addictive tendency. On later describing this to a longtime friend deeply conversant in social science, he immediately responded with a nod and the phrase ‘variable reward response’.)

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

#453
post #115

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

This is why I also suspect them to waste tokens on purpose.

I really do think its tge case. Ever notice how juuust when you run out of usage its allllmost correct? then the handy helpful "buy more credits!" link pops up. Meanwhile local models are finishing the task without fucking around and without alterting shit it wasnt supposed to touch.

How is it a environmental catastrophe level, datacentre requiring, bullshit model is so much worse than something that runs on my workstation and doesn't cost us a ha itable planet?

Either they're fucking with us serving 8b models at scale or china really has the AI race in the bag so much so that they can openly release what the USA jealously guards.

They moan and complain about china copying from them (while doing the same), but if that's the case in full, then why are the chinese models better? you dont copy bad work and come out ahead.

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

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AGENTS.md sounds like a place to specify that a project has no users and thus needs no migrations

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is specific until eventually they get frustrated/annoyed/tired enough.

If someone is that frustrated with AI, do they not just … switch to not using AI and doing it by hand, asking simpler next-step questions and hand-coding, instead?

Maybe, in a better world, but... nah, there's no time for that!

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

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is specific until eventually they get frustrated/annoyed/tired enough.

But it is futile to get frustrated or annoyed by an LLM. I do get frustrated, too, but I do not "yell" at it hoping that it will miraculously do what I want. GPT (again, free tier, so no wonder) got me frustrated too because I felt like it just would not listen, no matter how specific I was, so yeah I did experience what the author intended to show.

> "yell" at it hoping that it will miraculously do what I want

It's certainly not helpful in getting the LLM from A to B, but maybe you don't care? Maybe you just need to blow off some steam?

People may call that irrational, but I'm certainly not seeing an abundance of commonly-agreed-upon rationality in all the other things they (we) do, so it's in character.

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

#457
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's reductio ad absurdum , satirizing the Claude experience.

Then, IMO, the joke is lost: This feels like working with various forms of difficult, immature, indecisive, engineers; and possibly with very disorganized codebases where small changes require major refactoring.

Are you saying you've never had an experience even somewhat like this while working with Claude, or any LLM for that matter?

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

#458
If you're a programmer, the blue-button test is incredibly annoying. But then you remember this same model is deployed in Claude Gov. If a government employee says, “Close one exit of the New York subway,” and Claude responds with the same annoying “before I do that, here are the downstream consequences you may not have considered,” you suddenly understand why this behavior exists.

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

#459

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…

Plus rigorously ensuring backwards compatibility for a project that is 2 hours old and has zero users.

I saw this, it creates "legacy" fields and comments for something that it has never been run.
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