> Answer is always line 1. Reasoning comes after, never before.
lol, closed
Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
61–70 of 192 posts
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#62From the file: "Answer is always line 1. Reasoning comes after, never before." LLMs are autoregressive (filling in the completion of what came before), so you'd better have thinking mode on or the "reasoning" is pure confirmation bias seeded by the answer that gets locked in via the first output tokens.
Ugh. Dictated with such confidence. My god, I hate this LLMism the most. "Some directive. Always this, never that."
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#63"Gee, we can't figure out _why_ people anthropomorphize our products! It must be that they're dumb!"
Meanwhile, their products:
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#64I told mine to remove all unnecessary words from a sentence and talk like caveman, which should result in another 50% savings ;)
"I told it don't make mistakes, and don't use a lot of tokens! I'm a 10x Engineer now!" (=
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#65Things like this make me sad because they make obvious that most people don’t understand a bit about how LLM work. The “answer before reasoning” is a good evidence for it. It misses the most fundamental concept of tranaformers: the are autoregressive. Also, the reinforcement learning is what make the model behave like what you are trying to avoid. So the model output is actually what performs best in the kind of soft…
>The “answer before reasoning” is a good evidence for it. It misses the most fundamental concept of tranaformers: the are autoregressive. I don't think it's fair to assume the author doesn't understand how transformers work. Their intention with this instruction appears to aggressively reduce output token cost. i.e. I read this instruction as a hack to emulate the Qwen model series's /nothink token instruction If you…
If they want to reduce token cost, just use a smaller model instead of dumbing down a more expensive.
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#66From the file: "Answer is always line 1. Reasoning comes after, never before." LLMs are autoregressive (filling in the completion of what came before), so you'd better have thinking mode on or the "reasoning" is pure confirmation bias seeded by the answer that gets locked in via the first output tokens.
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Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#67Things like this make me sad because they make obvious that most people don’t understand a bit about how LLM work. The “answer before reasoning” is a good evidence for it. It misses the most fundamental concept of tranaformers: the are autoregressive. Also, the reinforcement learning is what make the model behave like what you are trying to avoid. So the model output is actually what performs best in the kind of soft…
> 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.
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#68As with all of these cure-alls, I'm wary. Mostly I'm wary because I anticipate the developer will lose interest in very little time and also because it will just get subsumed into CC at some point if it actually works. It might take longer but changing my workflow every few days for the new thing that's going to reduce MCP usage, replace it, compress it, etc is way too disruptive. I'm generally happy with the base Cl…
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, and it works really well.
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#69Things like this make me sad because they make obvious that most people don’t understand a bit about how LLM work. The “answer before reasoning” is a good evidence for it. It misses the most fundamental concept of tranaformers: the are autoregressive. Also, the reinforcement learning is what make the model behave like what you are trying to avoid. So the model output is actually what performs best in the kind of soft…
To me it’s as simple as “who knows best how to harness the premier LLM – Anthropic, the lab that created it, or this random person?” That’s why I’m only interested in first party tools over things like OpenCode right now.
[dead]
Re: Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens
#70Amusing how this industry went from tweaking code for the best results, to tweaking code generators for the best results. There doesn't seem to be any adults left in the room.
And seemingly we have stopped considering the fact that when we engineer something, we consider so much more than the behavior specified in the ticket. Behavior built on top of years and years of experience. And the problem with AI is that unless you explicitly 'prompt' for certain behavior you're only defining the end result. The inside becomes a black box.
Isn't having a prompt file turning the black box into an explicit codification of those years and years of experience? That would make it easier to understand and disseminate.