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Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
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Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#152Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#153Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#154Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was reading through the Claude docs and it was talking about common patterns to preserve context across sessions. One pattern was a "handoff file", which they explained like "have claude save a summary of the current session into a handoff file, start a new session, then tell it to read the file." That sounded like a nice idea, so I made it effortless beyond typing /handoff. The generated docs turned out to be real…
Oh, so the word 'gate' is probably in the documentation also! I see. So this isn't as scary. Claude is helping me understand how to use it properly.
If this was more than just a gut reaction [0], I have a tough time navigating what swings this topic between scary and not scary for you.
Unless you're a true and invested believer of souls, free will, and other spiritualistic nonsense (or have a vested political affiliation to pretend so), it should be tautological that everything you read and experience biases you. LLM output then is no different.
If you are a believer, then either nothing ever did, or LLMs are special in some way, or everything else is. Which just doesn't make sense to me.
[0] It's jarring to observe the boundaries of one's agency, sure, but LLMs are really nothing special in this way. For example, I somewhat frequently catch myself using words and phrases I saw earlier during the day elsewhere, even if I did not process them consciously.
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote a skill called /handoff. Whenever a session is nearing a compaction limit or has served its usefulness, it generates and commits a markdown file explaining everything it did or talked about. It’s called /handoff because you do it before a compaction. (“Isn’t that what compaction is for?” Yes, but those go away. This is like a permanent record of compacted sessions.) I don’t know if it helps maintain long term…
Did you call it '/handoff' or did Claude name it that? The reason I'm asking is because I noticed a pattern with Claude subtly influencing me. For example, the first time I heard the the word 'gate' was from Claude and 1 week later I hear it everywhere including on Hacker News. I didn't use the word 'handoff' but Claude creates handoff files also [0]. I was thinking about this all day. Because Claude didn't just use…
Claude has trained me on the use of the word 'invariant'. I never used it before, but it makes sense as a term for a rule the system guarantees. I would have used 'validation' for application-side rules or 'constraint' for db rules, but 'invariant' is a nice generic substitute.
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#157Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also share something of an "efficient market hypothesis" with regards to Claude Code. Given that Anthropic is basically a hothouse of geniuses recursively dogfooding their own product, the market pressure to make the vanilla setup be the one that performs best at writing code is incredibly high. I just treat CLAUDE.md like my first draft memo to a very smart remote colleague, let Claude do all its various quirks, a…
The "efficient market" framing assumes Anthropic wants to minimize output, but they don't. They charge per token, so the defaults being verbose isn't a bug they haven't gotten around to fixing. That said, most of this repo is solving the wrong problem. "Answer before reasoning" actively hurts quality, and the benchmark is basically meaningless. But the anti-sycophancy rules should just be default. "Great Question!" h…
Gemini CLI is notorious for being verbose (or was, I haven't used it for a while), and many people don't want to use Gemini for that reason alone.
So the market kind of works in this instance.
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Answer is always line 1. Reasoning comes after, never before. This doesn't stop it from reasoning before answering. This only affects the user-facing output, not the reasoning tokens. It has already reasoned by the time it shows the answer, and it just shows the answer above any explanation.
The output is part of context. The model reason but also output tokens. Force it to respond in an unfamiliar format and the next token will veer more and more from the training distribution, rendering the model less smart/useful.
It won't matter. By the time it's done reasoning, it has already decided what it wants to say.
Reasoning tokens are just regular output tokens the model generates before answering. The UI just doesn't show the reasoning. Conceptually, the output is something like:
Lots of text here
Part you see here. Usually much shorter.
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#160It seems the benchmarks here are heavily biased towards single-shot explanatory tasks, not agentic loops where code is generated: https://github.com/drona23/claude-token-efficient/blob/main/... And I think this raises a really important question. When you're deep into a project that's iterating on a live codebase, does Claude's default verbosity, where it's allowed to expound on why it's doing what it's doing when it…
Some redundancy also helps to keep a running todo list on the context tip, in the event of compacting or truncation.
Distilled mini/nano models need regular reminders about their objectives.
As documented by Manus https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Less...