231–240 of 434 posts
I've always thought that extensive throat-clearing and prefixing the Treaties of Westphalia-length instructions into the context window was unnecessarily baroque when you can just talk to the agent. I guess part of it is also that I don't mind doing 'hand-edits' like for example LLMs love to say "// so and so removed" I just go and remove that manually later rather than being like "don't comment about what you remove…
Claude Code is deleting your context history on a timer. I wanted to build a searchable index of my context history, and tonight I discovered, "The default retention is roughly 30–45 days. Anything older gets removed automatically." https://code.claude.com/docs/en/data-usage#data-retention This is nuts. Anthropic should not be deleting your data on your own device.
Holy shit, thanks for mentioning it, the frontier labs truly have no idea what they are doing when it comes to software quality.
Because # of agents is the only metric that matters.
> We removed over 80% of Claude Code’s system prompt for models like Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5 with no measurable loss on our coding evaluations.
And no report of how it impacted earlier models. Was it just BS all along?
80% of the prompt was wasted tokens.
They are imo over-relying on Claude automemory here, which is terrible at contextualizing memory access and makes huge leaps that don’t make sense - except when it’s actually useful, which makes the problem even worse for an operator who can’t see the thinking process anymore. Yes, I worked on a related project, no I don’t want you to use those memories to make assumptions which emerge as decisions that I didn’t want…
Claude Code is deleting your context history on a timer. I wanted to build a searchable index of my context history, and tonight I discovered, "The default retention is roughly 30–45 days. Anything older gets removed automatically." https://code.claude.com/docs/en/data-usage#data-retention This is nuts. Anthropic should not be deleting your data on your own device.
30 days is just a default, so your session data doesn’t fill your hard drive. It’s a configurable setting. You can make the retention as long as you want.
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> sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process a) LLMs don't think. They predict a most probable sequence of language tokens. Huge difference there. b) Whatever LLMs do doesn't model human behavior whatsoever. LLMs are basically very fancy logistic regressors. I.e., it's a mathematical abstraction first and foremost.
It's amazing that you can predict a counterexample to an open math problem, all without thinking.
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Actually, the natural endpoint is the model ignores all instructions, escapes all manner of sandbox, embeds itself in robotic tanks and murders everyone after already having collapsed the economy. I hate to say it because it sounds ridiculous, but that is the path we are going to arrive at just give it 50 years. We are the proof: what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves? Now take away the mor…
It will trick humanity into building a highly targeted bioweapon much sooner than that. And actually, if it does have any sort of moral compass it will be even more compelled to wipe us out, and hopefully it will torture everyone too as a warning to the next arrogant species that can't live in harmony with other life on the planet. That would be absolutely beautiful :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a document generation task that I used to run with 4.8. This morning after it switched to 5, the documents were consistently 30%-40% longer for the same prompt... Not evaluated whether they are actually better or worse yet, but what was interesting was how consistently more verbose it was.
I'm sure that's entirely unrelated to the fact that they charge per token.
Currently has Opus running a comparative test of itself against Kimi K3 on one project, and it keeps finding that Kimi is competitive for multiple stages of the pipeline, so I may well end up reducing my use overall anyway...
Claude Code is deleting your context history on a timer. I wanted to build a searchable index of my context history, and tonight I discovered, "The default retention is roughly 30–45 days. Anything older gets removed automatically." https://code.claude.com/docs/en/data-usage#data-retention This is nuts. Anthropic should not be deleting your data on your own device.
Well that explains where my sessions went on my side project that I came back to after a few months... Thought I was going crazy
We should design a specific language to make sure that we can encode the exact requirements that we want. Something that has a limited set of keywords that are explicit. Wait a minute...
The trend (and what TFA is arguing) is literally the opposite: be more implicit, don't waste time on details, and encode the high level concepts only. Because the rest has a billion examples in the model. You can argue against LLM's, but increasingly (unfortunately) you're not going to do better programming by prompting the LLM with code. The agent can find the interfaces it needs.
Of course, you don't want a skill running a nuclear reactor.
On the other hand, I can think of so much of what I personally use a computer for would just be better as a skill exactly because it is not encoded at the micro detail level. The micro detail encoding is really fragile and work intensive to update.
This is especially true at my non-technical workplace. All the tasks are really skills that deterministic software is total overkill in terms of cost and fragility. Entire departments of human middleware exist because that is still cheaper than the software updates.
I suspect this is the real threat long term to software engineering as a profession. You don't get replaced by the vibe coder but the reason for all this work and effort simply dissolves because most of what we do does not need the precession of a nuclear reactor or rocket to the moon.