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Switch to Claude without starting over

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Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#131

Post by esperent »

kdheiwns wrote: post #92
Joeri wrote: post #13

I already switched to claude a while ago. Didn’t bring along any context, just switched subscriptions, walked away from chatgpt and haven’t touched it again. Turned out to be a non-event, there really is no moat. I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure t…

Yesterday was my first time trying it. One thing that felt a bit strange to me was that I asked it something and the response was just one paragraph. Which isn't bad or anything but it felt... strange? Like I always need to preface ChatGPT/gemini/whatever question with "Briefly, what is..." or it gives me enough fluff to fill a 5 page high school essay. But I didn't need to do that and just got an answer that was to…

> Which isn't bad or anything but it felt... strange?

On the contrary, it's great. It's fully capable of outputting a wall of text when required, so instead of feeling like I'm talking to something that has a minimum word count requirement, I get an appropriate sized response to the task at hand.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#132

Post by thunky »

rustyhancock wrote: post #77
earthnail wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they did stand up to the US administration and lost a lot of money in the process. That takes courage. They clearly were being bullied into compliance, and they stood their ground. You can see the significance of this is you look at German Nazi history. If more companies had stood up to the administration, the Nazi state would have been significantly harder to build. In my opinion, what Anthropic did is not a s…

The comment I replied to said that they believed OpenAI would allow "AGI to be used for truly evil purposes". By contrast Anthropic wouldn't? Yet Anthropics stance is only two narrow restrictions. As I said are those two things the only evil things possible? If not, why is it that people on HN think Anthropic would not allow evil usage? My hypothesis is a halo effect. We are so enthralled by Claudes performance that…

> Yet Anthropics stance is only two narrow restrictions.

Really I think Anthropic should have a single restriction: to not assist with illegal or unconstitutional activities. If automated killings etc is illegal then it would be covered by that one rule.

I don't think Anthropic should be in the business of deciding what is "evil".

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#133

Post by mihaaly »

I rather switch it to nowhere. But local. I am not completely sure about the details, but I am leaning heavily, and investigating into this direction. With chat and agentic tools there plenty, accessing multiple models, and everything is evolving fast (extinct and come into existence) better keep ourselves flexible, not tied to any of the solutions. Especially not storing data in accounts. The fate of those is uncertain.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#134

Post by xmonkee »

mavamaarten wrote: post #113
kdheiwns wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday was my first time trying it. One thing that felt a bit strange to me was that I asked it something and the response was just one paragraph. Which isn't bad or anything but it felt... strange? Like I always need to preface ChatGPT/gemini/whatever question with "Briefly, what is..." or it gives me enough fluff to fill a 5 page high school essay. But I didn't need to do that and just got an answer that was to…

In my limited experience, that's mostly since the 4.6 release. I noticed that with the same prompt, it answers much more briefly. A bit jarring indeed, but I prefer it. Less bs and filler, and less burning off electricity for nothing.

It’s probably an offshoot of making Claude more and more suitable for code/cowork.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#135

Post by ACCount37 »

mavamaarten wrote: post #113
kdheiwns wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday was my first time trying it. One thing that felt a bit strange to me was that I asked it something and the response was just one paragraph. Which isn't bad or anything but it felt... strange? Like I always need to preface ChatGPT/gemini/whatever question with "Briefly, what is..." or it gives me enough fluff to fill a 5 page high school essay. But I didn't need to do that and just got an answer that was to…

In my limited experience, that's mostly since the 4.6 release. I noticed that with the same prompt, it answers much more briefly. A bit jarring indeed, but I prefer it. Less bs and filler, and less burning off electricity for nothing.

This behavior first appeared in 4.5, mostly for specific types of questions and in "natural conversation" workflows. 4.6 might have pushed it further.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#136

Post by re-thc »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #99
peteforde wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this over and over again. I don't dispute your experience. My experience with ESP32 development has been unreasonably positive. My codebase is sitting around 600k LoC and is the product of several hundred Opus 4.x Plan -> Agent -> Debug loops. I review everything that goes through, but I'm reviewing the business logic and domain gotchas, not dumb crap like what you and so many others describe. What is so strang…

The more code is out there, the worse is the average in the training dataset. There will be legacy approaches and APIs, poor design choices, popular use cases irrelevant for your context etc that increase the chances of output not matching your expectations. In Java world this is exactly how it works. I need 3-5 iterations with Claude to get things done the way I expect, sometimes jumping straight to manual refactori…

> To overcome this problem model needs specialized training, that I don‘t think the industry knows how to approach

We already have coding tuned models i.e. Codex. We should just have language / technology specific models with a focus on recent / modern usage.

Problem with something like Java is too old -- too many variants. Make a cut off like at least above Java 8 or 17.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#137

Post by [deleted] »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #70
qwertox wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep your user prefs minimal and use project memory instead: create a new project, it will only have access to your user prefs, everything else is fresh.

I'll have to try projects I guess, but I just want to sometimes ask questions without it bringing up shit I asked about in the past which isn't relevant to what I'm asking this time.

[deleted]

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#138

Post by Retr0id »

wps wrote: post #16
pfix wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can try! I currently use ChatGPT for random insights and discussions about a variety of topics. The memory is basically a grown context about me and my preferences and interests and ChatGPT uses it to tailor responses to my knowledge, so I could relate better. This is for me far more natural and easier than either craft a default prompt preset or create each conversation individually, that would be way too much ove…

I see what you mean, but I like having a clean slate even for those one off questions. I don’t want a differing answer to a philosophical inquiry just because the LLM remembers a prior position I’ve written about you know?

I have all the history settings off for this reason, but something that worries me is that there's a fair bit of information about me trained right into the model weights. I'm not "famous" by any stretch but claude has awareness of some of my HN-front-page-hitting projects, etc., which I think should be enough to bias responses (although I haven't tried to measure it).

I set my name to "User" in the settings, so in a clean-slate chat it has nothing to go on, but the moment claude code does something like `git log` it knows who I am again. I've even considered writing some kind of redaction proxy.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#140

Post by piva00 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #58
KellyCriterion wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there really is no moat. For ChatGPT and Gemini, yes. But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code which is already in production: 1. It changed without noticing things like "Touple.First.Date.Created" and "Touple.Se…

> Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code which is already in production: One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with greenfield code generation but they all start to struggle working with pre-existing code. It could be that this wasn't a like for like com…

> One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with greenfield code generation but they all start to struggle working with pre-existing code. It could be that this wasn't a like for like comparison.

In my experience working in a large codebase with a good set of standards that's not the case, I can supply examples already existing in the codebase for Claude to use as a guidance and it generates quite decent code.

I think it's because there's already a lot of decent code for it to slurp and derive from, good quality tests at the functional level (so regressions are caught quickly).

I do understand though that on codebases with a hodge podge of styles, varying quality of tests, etc. it probably doesn't work as well as in my experience but I'm quite impressed about how I can do the thinking, add relevant sections of the code to the context (including protocols, APIs, etc.), describe what I need to be done, and get a plan back that most times is correct or very close to correct, which I can then iterate over to fix gaps/mistakes it made, and get it implemented.

Of course, there are still tasks it fails and I don't like doing multiple iterations to correct course, for those I do them manually with the odd usage here and there to refactor bits and pieces.

Overall I believe if your codebase was already healthy you can have LLMs work quite well with pre-existing code.

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