Humans working on documentation who are not set up for success and not incentivized to do the right thing exhibit exactly the same behavior.
Accretive Editing
11–13 of 13 posts
Re: Accretive Editing
#12Same problem, same solution: For technical docs, tell it when facts change, rewrite as if the wrong fact never happened, with no references or even allusions to the obsolete fact or the change. It's been effective. From time to time I have to go further and tell it to imagine an alternate reality where the fact never happened, and write this doc as if the new thing had been true all along. This second iteration alway…
Except Claude remembers in it memories. You need to clear that too
Re: Accretive Editing
#13It’s such an annoying pattern. When bugfixing, Opus will frequently dump massive amounts of useless context into comments when documenting changes, which is relevant to the conversation and dev process but not to future readers. I’ve found that having it just do an audit of all the comments it writes can be helpful. Like, “remove comments by default but keep a brief summary when there’s important context” can help a ton after the initial draft.