Switch to Claude without starting over

It keeps trying to re-invent the wheel, does a bad job of it.

The physics sim was supposed to be a thin wrapper around existing libraries, but instead of that it tried to write all the simulation code itself as a "fallback" (but it was broken), and never actually installed the real simulators that already did this stuff despite being told to use them in the first place. The last few dozen(!) prompts from me have been pairs of ~["Find all cases where you've re-invented the wheel, add them to the planning document", "now do them"]. And it's still not finished removing the original nonsense, so far as I can tell.

One of the two Swift experiments is just a dice roller, it took about 10 rounds of non-compiling metal shaders (I don't know metal, which is why I didn't give up and do that by hand after 4) before I managed to get that to work, and when it did work it immediately broke it again on the next four rounds. It wrote its own chart instead of using Swift Charts, and did it badly. It tried to put all the hamburger menu options into a UIAlertController. Something blocks the UI for several seconds when you change the dice font. I didn't count how many attempts it took to correctly label the D4.

The other Swift experiment was a musical instrument app, that got me to the prototype stage, eventually, but in a way that still felt like a student's project rather than a junior's project.

Home automation fixing

Proposed integrations with some services locally

Science experiments explained at a few levels, finding good background info and where to read up about some safety information

Maths help for specific areas my kids are looking at and proposed games for that

Evaluation of coding options for my kids

How to link up some ideas on coding, electronics and using the home automation side as some fun outputs

LED strip info and work, again integrating with smart homes and what’s good around the kids

Framework evaluations for automation at work and home

Crystal identification

Looking up local council info

Relevant music suggestions for kids to play on the piano

Here some things cross over. I’m happy writing code, I typically want easy open source options, I have languages and tech I prefer, I’m moving g things to matter, I have home assistant, my son is excellent at maths given his age but I’m working more on comprehension of problems, and a lot more. All those are things that with a bit of background info change the types of answers I get and make it more useful.

Must be some of the lowest switching costs I've seen which doesn't bode well for OpenAI's consumer revenues...

Whenever I’m in a conversation and it references something unrelated (or even related) I get the “ick”. I know how context poisoning (intentional or not) works and I work hard to only expose things to the model that I want it to consider.

There have been many times that I’ve started a fresh chat as to not being along the baggage (or wrong turns) of a previous chat but then it will say “And this should work great for ” and at that moment my spidey-sense tingles and I start wondering “Crap, did it come to the conclusion it did based mostly/only on the new context or did it “take a shortcut” and use context from another chat?

Like I said, I go out of my way to not “lead the witness” and so when the “witness” can peek at other conversations, all my caution is for naught.

I encourage everyone to go read the saved memories in their LLM of choice, I’ve cleaned out complete crap from there multiple times. Actually wrong information, confusing information, or one-off things I don’t want influencing future discussions.

The custom (or rather addition to the) system prompt is all I feel comfortable with. Where I give it some basic info about the coding language I prefer and the OSes that I’m often working with so that I don’t have to constantly say “actually this is FreeBSD” or “please give that to me in JS/TS instead of Python”.

The only thing that has, so far, kept me from turning off memory is that I’m always slightly cautious of going off the beaten path for something so new and moving so fast. I often want to have as close to the “stock” config since I know how testing/QA works at most places (the further off the beaten path you, the more likely you’ll run into bugs). Also so that I can experience when everyone else is experiencing (within reason).

Lastly, because, especially with LLMs, I feel like the people that over customize end up with a fragile systems. I think that a decent portion of the “N+1 model is dumber” or “X model has really gone downhill” is partially due to complicated configs (system prompts, MCP, etc) that might have helped at some point (dumber model, less capability) but are a hindrance to newer models. That or they never worked and someone just kept piling on more and more thinking it would help.