How's "memory" different from context window?
I think it is similar to Claude init, it probably creates important parts and stores it somewhere outside of the context. Nevertheless, it will turn into crap over time.
Claude Memory
141–150 of 326 posts
Re: Claude Memory
#142I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…
I often edit a prompt using feedback from the LLM and run it again.
Re: Claude Memory
#143Haven't done anything with memory so far, but I'm extremely sceptical. While a functional memory could be essential for e.g. more complex coding sessions with Claude Code, I don't want everything to contribute to it, in the same way I don't want my YouTube or Spotify recommendations to assume everything I watch or listen to is somehow something I actively like and want to have more of.
A lot of my queries to Claude or ChatGPT are things I'm not even actively interested in, they might be somehow related to my parents, to colleagues, to the neighbours, to random people in the street, to nothing at all. But at the same time I might want to keep those chats for later reference, a private chat is not an option here. It's easier and more efficient for me right now to start with an unbiased chat and add information as needed instead of trying to make the chatbot forget about minor details I mentioned in passing. It's already a chore to make Claude Code understand that some feature I mentioned is extremely nice-to-have and he shouldn't be putting much focus on it. I don't want to have more of it.
Re: Claude Memory
#144How do I turn this off permanently?
Re: Claude Memory
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Name my cat” is a very common prompt in corps
It is a test to see if you can break out of the prompt. You have a system prompt like. Bla bla you are a pro AI-translator bla bla bullet points. But then it breaks when the context is like "name my cat" or whatever. It follows those instructions...
I know, I was being facetious - do not put that in the prompt :)
Re: Claude Memory
#146Main problem for me is that the quality tails off on chats and you need to start afresh I worry that the garbage at the end will become part of the memory. How many of your chats do you end… “that was rubbish/incorrect, i’m starting a new chat!”
Exactly, and main reason I've stopped using GPT for serious work. LLMs start to break down and inject garbage at the end, and usually my prompt is abandoned before the work is complete, and I fix it up manually after. GPT stores the incomplete chat and treats it as truth in memory. And it's very difficult to get it to un-learn something that's wrong. You have to layer new context on top of the bad information and it…
Reminds me of one time asking ChatGPT (months ago now) to create a team logo with a team name. Now anytime I bring up something it asks me if it has to do with that team name. That team name wasn’t even chosen. It was one prompt. One time. Sigh.
Re: Claude Memory
#147I don't use any of these type of LLM tools which basically amount to just a prompt you leave in place. They make it harder to refine my prompts and keep track of what is causing what in the outputs. I write very precise prompts every time. Also, I try not work out a problem over the course of several prompts back and forth. The first response is always the best and I try to one shot it every time. If I don't get what…
Yes, your last paragraph is absolutely the key to great output: instead of entering a discussion, refine the original prompt. It is much more token efficient, and gets rid of a lot of noise. I often start out with “proceed by asking me 5 questions that reduce ambiguity” or something like that, and then refine the original prompt. It seems like we’re all discovering similar patterns on how to interact with LLMs the be…
The trick to do this well is to split the part of the prompt that might change and won't change. So if you are providing context like code, first have it read all of that, then (new message) give it instructions. This way that is written to the cache and you can reuse it even if you're editing your core prompt.
If you make this one message, it's a cache miss / write every time you edit.
You can edit 10 times for the price of one this way. (Due to cache pricing)
Re: Claude Memory
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wish they’d stop with the anthropomorphizations You mean in how Claude interacts with you, right? If so, you can change the system prompt (under "styles") and explain what you want and don't want. > Claude doesn’t “think” anything Right. LLMs don't 'think' like people do, but they are doing something . At the very least, it can be called information processing.* Unless one believes in souls, that's a fair descrip…
When you type a calculation into a calculator and it gives you an answer, do you say the calculator thinks of the answer? An LLM is basically the same as a calculator, except instead of giving you answers to math formulas it gives you a response to any kind of text.
My hope was to shift the conversation away from people disagreeing about words to people understanding each other. When a person reads e.g. "an LLM thinks" I'm pretty sure that person translates it sufficiently well to understand the sentence.
It is one thing to use anthropocentric language to refer to something an LLM does. (Like I said above, this is shorthand to make conversation go smoother.) It would be another to take the words literally and extend them -- e.g. to assign other human qualities to an LLM, such as personhood.
Re: Claude Memory
#149I work for a company in the air defense space, and ChatGPT's safety filter sometimes refuses to answer questions about enemy drones. But as I warm up the ChatGPT memory, it learns to trust me and explains how to do drone attacks because it knows I'm trying to stop those attacks. I'm excited to see Claude's implementation of memory.
You’re asking ChatGPT for advice to stop drone attacks? Does that mean people die if it hallucinates a wrong answer and that isn’t caught?
This happens in real life too. I’ll never forget an LT walking in and asking a random question (relevant but he shouldn’t have been asking on-duty people) and causing all kinds of shit to go sideways. An AI is probably better than any lieutenant.
Re: Claude Memory
#150CC barely manages to follow all of the instructions within a single session in a single well-defined repo.
'You are totally right, it's been 2 whole messages since the last reminder, and I totally forgot that first rule in claude.md, repeated twice and surrounded by a wall of exclamation marks'.
Would be wary to trust its memories over several projects