Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

12gramsofcarbon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 168 posts

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#61

Post by estetlinus »

grimcompanion wrote: post #22

> I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. This is infuriatingly common wrt talking/writing about how to use AI effectively. All of the "this is how you write an AGENTS.md" and "you need to talk to it like X to optimize it". Like sure, you can believe tha…

When nobody actually knows (how to write a CLAUDE.md), everyone’s an expert. Infuriating, indeed. Even more so when people vibe code those files without proofreading.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#62

Post by pennomi »

semiquaver wrote: post #10

Strongly agree here. claude-code’s memory system is occasionally useful but much more often harmful, pulling in obsolete info that muddies the waters about current tasks. I’ve frequently seen Claude’s own memories severely mislead it. My guess is that has something to do with the training process leaving models unable to differentiate between “what’s happening now” and “what happened before”. Perhaps if making infere…

Humans make memories constantly, but they also forget things that are no longer relevant. Until Claude can do that, it means the LLM will have an ever-increasing, ever more fragmented context.

And LLMs are NOT intelligent enough to survive even mild context poisoning.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#63

Post by saagarjha »

I mean, it’s pretty clear the people who work on Claude Code aren’t actually looking at what they’re implementing. The thought behind this feature seems like it goes nowhere beyond “oh wouldn’t it be nice if Claude could remember things about you? Ok Claude go implement this” and nobody bothered to see if it was useful or helpful.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#64

Post by andai »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #7
chopete3 wrote: post #3

The author says >> We don't really write code by hand anymore. The software world is very close to building a super intelligent senior software developer. Companies like this will ask all the best things a software engineer does automatically. Now claude will add it into the coding agents itself. Damn, I didn't see this coming. Its first the build the intelligent builder. We will figure out what we want to build late…

> The software world is very close to building a super intelligent senior software developer. Yeah. Two more weeks, as they say. Just need to iron out some kinks.

It's the error rate. That's what everyone found when they were trying to go Full Auto with OpenClaw in February.

You can rely on it like 95% of the time but that means if you keep it running continuously the error rate rapidly approaches 100%. That's getting a little better with each release, and it might actually hit the point where you can more or less trust it indefinitely (on well defined workflows).

Or at least it would, if context window permitted...

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#65

Post by sdesol »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #39
wongarsu wrote: post #8

I agree with the take not to bother with a sophisticated memory system. Anything worth remembering should be in docs, guides, source comments, commit messages or tickets. You don't need another layer, every conceivable granularity is already covered by existing best practices

There is some value to agents being able to query the history of work done, docs aren't a good place to accumulate negative evidence for example, but it can be tagged in traces so that it's efficient to look up as needed. Additionally, docs rot while traces can be tagged with commit hashes and other things that make their lifetime clearer.

The user flow I am trying to get adopted for sessions is to turn them into notes and lessons when you have finished and it should be part of the code review process.

By propery categorizing lessons and notes, it should make it easy to scrub and keep up to date.

I also suggest mapping lessons and notes to files when possible to make discovery and cleanup easier.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#66

Post by Arainach »

estearum wrote: post #44
dofm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about impressing people. We used to be concerned about code quality. Are we not anymore? Crassness was a signal. Still is, to me — in a human I find that people who write crass code are going to cause me trouble.

"Code quality" encompasses a lot of dimensions, one of which is impressing your colleagues, and many of which there's virtually no reason to care about now.

On the contrary, it's more important than ever. With ever more code being generated, it's essential that the code be understandable and maintainable - by human and machine.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#67

Post by [deleted] »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #38
LPisGood wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.

I am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself. Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand. As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.

[deleted]

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#68

Post by csomar »

LPisGood wrote: post #16
dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

I have to ask: do you still write a lot of code yourself? I and most people I know do not.

I am now in the process of fixing code I wrote using AI. I have come to the realization that AI can't really write software and I am annoyed that it took me that long (months) to realize that.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#69

Post by dofm »

hirako2000 wrote: post #60
Ronsenshi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am. I have Codex running, doing some tasks which I don't care much about, but anything I want to understand I write myself. Same thing with hobby projects - I might ask ChatGPT or Gemini some questions about best practices in Swift for example, but writing code is done by hand. As others said - if you don't use it, you'll lose it. And I'd rather keep my skills up to date.

You have the privilege to keep yourself sharp, most businesses favor productivity over their workers' long term relevancy.

This is the thing that makes me saddest. Second to the fact that none of the management tier promoting and weaponising this insanity will meaningfully suffer consequences.

Right now I am lucky that I have the time to recover and learn.

Re: Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

#70

Post by csomar »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #24
dofm wrote: post #9

Blog posts like this just blow me away. > I believed this so strongly that my company built an entire product around this concept. I used to tell folks that "session transcripts were the new oil," that they were more valuable than the code itself. > […] > We don't really write code by hand anymore. Honestly, isn't this just influencer spam? What possible value is there in reading about people who used to have product…

It reminds me of the peak crypto days. Lots of resources consumed, many late nights, little to no value created.

I mean at least crypto provided value to criminals, tax evaders and Trump? (regardless of what you think of that). I don't see a parallel with AI.
Post reply on HN