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Writing a good Claude.md

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Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#291

Post by adobesubmarine »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #285
swiftcoder wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is delivering massive productivity gains [citation needed] Every article I can find about this is citing the valuation of the S&P500 as evidence of the productivity gains, and that feels very circular

What kind of citation or evidence would you expect? How would you measure productivity gains? From my personal life and activities however it is very clear. I have simply been able to do so many things I would have never been able to do without AI.

I feel similarly, but the other guy's point is still good; there is no empirical evidence that AI is really as helpful as we think, and there is empirical evidence that among those who perceive productivity gains, most are wrong and the rest are overestimating the effect.

Our experiences don't agree with the established facts, but the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#293

Post by nineteen999 »

grayhatter wrote: post #262
nineteen999 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't belong anywhere near the systems that other humans use Really for those of us who actually work in critical systems (emergency services in my case) - of course we're not going to start patching the core applications with vibe code. But yeah, that frankenstein reporting script that half a dozen amateur hackers made a mess of over 20 years instead of refactoring and redesigning? That's prime fodder for thi…

> Really for those of us who actually work in critical systems (emergency services in my case) - of course we're not going to start patching the core applications with vibe code. I used to believe that no one would seriously consider this too... but I don't believe that this is a safe assumption anymore. You might be the exception, but there are many more people who don't consider the implications of turning over sai…

> I used to believe that no one would seriously consider this too... but I don't believe that this is a safe assumption anymore. You might be the exception, but there are many more people who don't consider the implications of turning over said intellectual control.

Then they'll pay for it when something goes wrong with their systems with their job etc. You need a different mindset in this particular segment industry - %99.999 uptime is everything (we actually have a %100 uptime for the past 6 years on our platform - chasing that last 0.001 is hard, and something will _eventually_ hit us).

> It's horrible, no one currently understands it, so let the AI do it, so that still, no one will understand it, but at least this one bug will be harder to trigger.

I think you're commenting without context. It's a particular nasty Perl script that's been duct taped to shell scripts and bolted hard on to a Proprietary Third Party application which needs to go - having Claude/GPT rewrite that in a modern language, spending some time on it to have it design proper interfaces and API's around where the script needs to interface other things when nobody wants to touch the code would be the greatest thing that can happen to it.

You still have the old code to test, so have the agent run exhaustive testing on its implementation to prove that its robust, or more so than the original. It's not rocket surgery.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#294

Post by swiftcoder »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #285
swiftcoder wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is delivering massive productivity gains [citation needed] Every article I can find about this is citing the valuation of the S&P500 as evidence of the productivity gains, and that feels very circular

What kind of citation or evidence would you expect? How would you measure productivity gains? From my personal life and activities however it is very clear. I have simply been able to do so many things I would have never been able to do without AI.

> How would you measure productivity gains?

I'm not entirely sure - certainly anecdotes abound (as do anecdotes to the contrary).

I am however sure that when someone claims that a technology is world-changing, and that it has already led to significant productivity gains... the onus is on them to provide evidence for such claims

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#295

Post by solumunus »

beardedwizard wrote: post #244
solumunus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange. I haven’t experienced this a single time and I use it almost all day everyday.

That is strange because it's been going on since sonnet 4.5 release.

I wonder if it's because I have instructions for Claude to add comment blocks with explanations of behavior, etc that it can self reference in future. I guess that is filling the role that these .md files would.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#296

Post by bdangubic »

tsimionescu wrote: post #231
stingraycharles wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not delivering on magical stuff. Getting real productivity improvements out of this requires engineering and planning and it needs to be approached as such. One of the big mistakes I think is that all these tools are over-promising on the “magic” part of it. It’s not. You need to really learn how to use all these tools effectively. This is not done in days or weeks even, it takes months in the same way becoming…

While I believe you're probably right that getting any productivity gains from these tools requires an investment, I think calling the process "engineering" is really stretching the meaning of the word. It's really closer to ritual magic than any solid engineering practices at this point. People have guesses and practices that may or may not actually work for them (since measuring productivity increases is difficult…

everything you wrote is true (and much worse) when humans are "engineering" shit

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#297

Post by bryanrasmussen »

seunosewa wrote: post #226
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there are any benefits, side-effects or downsides of everyone using the same fake name for Claude to call them. If a lot of people always put call me Mr. Tinkleberry in the file will it start calling people Mr. Tinkleberry even when it loses the context because so many people seem to want to be called Mr. Tinkleberry.

Then you switch to another name.

yes, when you discover it. but the reason why I said just wondering was I was trying to think of unexpected ways it could effect things, that was the top one I could think of (and not really sure if it is a possibility)

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#298

Post by [deleted] »

stingraycharles wrote: post #162
llbeansandrice wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI is supposed to deliver on this magical no-lift ease of use task flexibility that everyone likes to talk about I think it should be able to work with a README instead of clogging up ALL of my directories with yet another fucking config file. Also this isn’t portable to other potential AI tools. Do I need 3+ md files in every directory?

It’s not delivering on magical stuff. Getting real productivity improvements out of this requires engineering and planning and it needs to be approached as such. One of the big mistakes I think is that all these tools are over-promising on the “magic” part of it. It’s not. You need to really learn how to use all these tools effectively. This is not done in days or weeks even, it takes months in the same way becoming…

[deleted]

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#299

Post by davnicwil »

mosselman wrote: post #157
davnicwil wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a common tactic for filtering inbound email. Mention that people may optionally include some word like 'orange' in the subject line to tell you they've come via some place like your blog or whatever it may be, and have read at least carefully enough to notice this. Of course ironically that trick's probably trivially broken now because of use of LLMs in spam. But the point stands, it's an old trick.

Apart from the fact that not even every human would read this and add it to the subject, this would still work. I doubt there is any spam machine out there the quickly tries to find peoples personal blog before sending them viagra mail. If you are being targeted personally, then of course all bets are off, but that would’ve been the case with or without the subject-line-trick

It's not so much a case of personal targeting or anything particularly deliberate.

LLMs are trained on the full internet. All relevant information gets compressed in the weights.

If your email and this instruction are linked on your site, that goes in there, and the LLM may with some probability decide it's appropriate to use it at inference time.

That's why 'tricks' like this may get broken to some degree by LLM spam, and trivially when they do, with no special effort on the spammer's part. It's all baked into the model.

What previously would have involved a degree of targeting that wouldn't scale now will not.

Re: Writing a good Claude.md

#300

Post by mewpmewp2 »

adobesubmarine wrote: post #291
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of citation or evidence would you expect? How would you measure productivity gains? From my personal life and activities however it is very clear. I have simply been able to do so many things I would have never been able to do without AI.

I feel similarly, but the other guy's point is still good; there is no empirical evidence that AI is really as helpful as we think, and there is empirical evidence that among those who perceive productivity gains, most are wrong and the rest are overestimating the effect. Our experiences don't agree with the established facts, but the plural of "anecdote" is not "data."

I don't think it is something you can scientifically measure that easily and the studies that have tried are flawed. You can measure factory work, but you can't measure AI and software eng productivity gains or loss objectively.
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