One thing i am curious about is if anyone who is fluent in a romance language(en/es/fr etc) but their native language was a non-romance one(e.g. japanese or hindi) felt it better using the latter exclusively?
I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
371–380 of 399 posts
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#372The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…
I use pi+codex and OpenAI codex models do much less of this in my experience.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#373The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…
I've found it does this in two situations: Firstly when you've instructed it ( possibly through skills ) not to do something. It'll keep reminding you that it didn't do that. So I might say, "Check out and review this PR, do not make comments on it", and then it'll be keen to point out it hasn't posted comments to the PR. But more often it happens when it tries one approach, gets itself messed up, and then has to bac…
This is a skill I learned as a coffee shop supervisor and youth camp counselor, and now I really practice it on Slack with half-interested product owners.
- Always describe tasks in the positive. (Never describe tasks in the negative.)
- DO guide the user safely. DO NOT use DO NOT because the reader already DID.
- Give guided choices based on your expertise.
- Asking two-or-more questions results in one-or-less answers.
- Conditionals are also questions, so you only get one.
I only use AI agents and tools for work, I don't create them, so I'm not a subject matter expert. Where I've anthropomorphized the tools highlights my own misunderstandings.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#374The biggest "Claudism" that I have a hard time getting the LLM to stop doing is its insistence on talking about what it didn't do in addition to what it did. "I edited this.py and that.py but I did not edit README.md and I did not commit." or code comments like "This code invokes foo on bar and returns the results directly -- not through a callback." "This code returns true if the user clicked on a button -- not on t…
It's been getting worse for months. I literally tweeted yesterday that Claude has ADHD and nothing I do will keep him focused. It's not entirely true though, I have found if I'm rude and mean it stays on track a lot better but I don't want to be rude and mean. Me: I'm thinking about how to frob a knob using a mechanical arm attached to a raspberry pi. What IO does the raspberry pi have? Claude: Five paragraphs about…
> but I don't want to be rude and mean.
I've also found that "bruh" and f-bombs get me better results, but like you say, I don't want to have that vocabulary.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism. Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
That's not how it works. The text you see is primarily due to a massive amount of handwritten templates for how it should write. The semantic content the templates use is due to the training corpus. The syntax, only a bit.
But that syntax is followed by predicting the next token.
Even if it was instructed to write as if it were a robot -- it would ultimately be outputting what is statistically most likely for a human mimicking a robot, based on the training corpus.
It is all ultimately a statistical predictor of the input material.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
True which is why I said anecdata. But the point is that it’s a useful signal when it’s across enough sessions where it quotes back contradictions to you. If you’re willing to burn the tokens, the first thing it does is use a tool call to search your rules to see what it quoted wasn’t there. That leads to the LLM claiming two common conclusions (sometimes after a lot of back and forth) - it’s in the harness or it’s i…
Meta: > True which is why I said anecdata Forgive me for being cheeky, but presumably this is not why you said anecdata. You presumably said anecdata because you were describing your own personal sessions with Claude. Your original comment is written as someone who is assuming the AI is doing a deep deterministic analysis of its own internal systems in order to respond to you. It could simply be aping some discussion…
Fair. I should have reigned in my emotions and written that first comment with a lot less conviction and not jumped to my conclusion. It’s a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about and got a bit too excited when a relevant thread popped up where I could chime in.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're absolutely right, and I think you've put your finger on something important here. That said, I think there's a deeper tension here that's worth naming.
That subtle caveat is why you were absolutely correct to push back, and we should adopt a belt-and-braces approach.
That one is on me — I failed to take into consideration the limitations that you put in plain in front of me. This won't happen again.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't trust it's account on why it did something, it does not "remember". It will just make up something plausible sounding.
I know this is a popular position and it makes sense at face value when you think of LLMs as autocomplete systems. But it’s genuinely wrong. Relevant reading is most notably anthropic’s research on the J-space. LLMs will plan ahead of time helped with CoT, get to a plan and “store” it in j-space, and execute on that plan which means they can in fact “backtrack” and give you reasoning on why they did something, becaus…
J-space is just one convenient projection (out of many) to look at these well known phenomena
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you suggest it do that? Take a simple example. "I found three issues." How would you phrase that without an "I"? "Three issues were found" doesn't tell you who/what found them. Was it the AI itself? Was it a command line tool it ran? I'm fine with conversational interfaces using "I". It makes the grammar easier and more clear. Strong emphasis here on conversational interfaces. I don't want a compiler to say…
“I found these issues.” Could be easily written as “These issues surfaced.”. Do you need to point out the finder of the issues? Easy. “Tool x ran for x amount of time and surfaced these issues…” “Parsing x code surfaced these issues.” I don’t understand why are people pretending like the English language is incapable of transmitting information without personal pronouns when every program under the sun has always bee…
I deliberately emphasized conversational interfaces. Finder, toolbars, and terminal utilities don't have conversational interfaces. Those have point-and-click interfaces or rigid command structures.
And it's not that English is incapable of it, but I just think when using a conversational interface, the AI using "I" just comes off as more natural.
Re: I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
#380Claude models are the ones that need this the most and in my experience with this specific skill only maintain the conciseness for a few turns at most before they completely forget and are back to their unfathomable verbosity. That's with it instructed to use it in my sparse global CLAUDE.md and also manually repeating it regularly during sessions. I don't really want to install a hook that runs this on every single…
Same experience — it's not that the instruction stops working, it just gets drowned out as context grows. Re-stating a short version periodically works better for me than a one-shot instruction up front.