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AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

rickmanelius.com

691–700 of 729 posts

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh god this has been driving me nuts since Opus 5 landed. Every docblock is filled with long-winded jargon explaining why this design is superior to some other design, which never existed as far as any dev who might read that comment is concerned.

Oh no, you said "landed"! It's dug into our brains!

Smoking gun!

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#692
post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what they wanted they'd mandate that process. They want the deniability of having you rubber stamp the PR. That way they can blame you when it goes wrong. There may be high trust teams, but I've never seen one firsthand, but my sample size is only N=5.

Before I became a SW engineer, I've worked in such teams (you "own" the quality, but they want you to do it so quickly that you can't really own it). I left. I will always recommend finding a new job when you have dishonest management. (Dishonest by not admitting they are lowering the quality.) Fortunately, none of my jobs since that job had that problem. They either allow good quality reviews, or they explicitly acc…

> I make sure to probe these things during the interview process

I absolutely plan to do so throughly when I begin interviewing later this year. But I've been fooled before, so it'll take extraordinary evidence to get my hopes up, and I don't think I'll ever truly believe it again. There's always the possibility it isn't real or I'm misunderstanding something.

If you ever trust an employer you put yourself at a profound disadvantage. Employers are not so disadvantaged by placing (judiciously earned) trust in employees. That's because employers are companies, and companies are not people.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#693
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

It's not just claude, all AI is unable to produce something concise. On the surface everything looks 'good' whether code or prose, but then if you dig a bit, try and understand the whole text you quickly realise that 80% of it is unecessary and the whole thing could have been re-worded/re-coded into something a fraction of its size and complexity. I asked Sol to reduce the length of some documentation we had by makin…

The trick is to give AI an exact max acceptable word count. "Comments may be no longer than 50 words"

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#694

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

Am I the only one who's had Claude almost systematically remove human-written comments? It might be touching one line of actual code in a file, and take advantage of it to remove 20+ lines of actual useful comments. Everybody is talking about the opposite, so I'm wondering if this is rare.

When i first added "do not write comments" to my Claude.md, it started deleting all comments it came across. I yelled at it a bunch, eventually it got its md files aligned to where it's very clear: Claude does not write comments. Claude does not edit comments. Claude does not delete comments. Claude does not move comments. Only humans touch comments.

It's been working well for me for months now. If only I could convince the team to do it too

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital One is a particularly toxic work environment, and I'm not sure that your experiences there apply to other companies. I started my first post-Capital One job a few months ago, and I'm still not used to the fact that this company expects everybody working here to still be working here in two years. Most employers are not going through everybody with a fine tooth comb every 6 months hunting for any hint of an ex…

Oh wow, that sounds horrible. Do you have a sense of what motivates that behavior?

The founder CEO (with a cult of personality) really believes that it is the way to "top tech talent." He comes from a management consulting background and tries to manage the software organization like they're consultants. Leads to a very bottom heavy organization, with a lot of juniors, many of whom get PIPed right as they're starting to become useful. It leads to high turnover with a lot of backstabbing, and very short term thinking because everybody is always focused on the next performance management cycle.

It was really a bizarre place to work, because work-life balance was amazing, the benefits and vacation were great, but twice a year there was this insane hunger games.

They really chilled out the performance management process from 2020 or so through 2023, so people who worked there then didn't always notice.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#696

My coworkers continue to dump hundreds of lines of AI documentation in every PR and every other line of code has between one and ten lines of AI generated comments, talking about the real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path or how the acceptance ladder is misleading. Features are coming out and metrics are improving, but we’re basically in a post readability code base, with the…

With one colleague, I was leaving PR comments and he would just put my feedback into the AI and paste its response. So I decided to cut out the middleman and now I just @cursor and tell it to trim unnecessarily long comments.

One coworker had their agent respond to me, with "from Claude : robot emoji:" at the end, that made me mad.

Then another coworker just pasted the Claude response with no signature and no comment and no context as if they had written it themself. That made me livid. I used to like that guy. No respect anymore.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#697
post #114
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I address it with AI. Write REVIEW.md. I have CC check itself pretty well. I also put into agent/claude/review instructions to write using simple English skill and humanizer skill. Then not to write redundant comments. It’s not perfect but definitely catches lots of slop.

It's actually insanely difficult to get LLMs not to produce comments. Even with explicit "NEVER LEAVE ANY COMMENTS WHATSOEVER", they still do, across basically all providers.

Every single time Claude wrote a comment i replied in all caps FUCK YOU CLAUDE I TOLD YOU NEVER TO WRITE COMMENTS, WRITE IT DOWN SO YOU NEVER FORGET: YOU DO NOT WRITE COMMENTS. ONLY HUMANS WRITE COMMENTS. and after like 3 or 4 rounds of this it finally stuck and i haven't seen a Claude comment on my personal machine in months.

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#698
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually insanely difficult to get LLMs not to produce comments. Even with explicit "NEVER LEAVE ANY COMMENTS WHATSOEVER", they still do, across basically all providers.

No problems with GPT-5.6 Sol here. I have an agent file that says, among other things, only to document purpose and intent, not just what the code does, and not write obvious comments. It's been so effective that it often doesn't comment anything at all, including some stuff that's so niche that it must be explained carefully. As a result, I've had to pull back a bit and tell it explicitly which areas to actually add…

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Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#699
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually insanely difficult to get LLMs not to produce comments. Even with explicit "NEVER LEAVE ANY COMMENTS WHATSOEVER", they still do, across basically all providers.

Every single time Claude wrote a comment i replied in all caps FUCK YOU CLAUDE I TOLD YOU NEVER TO WRITE COMMENTS, WRITE IT DOWN SO YOU NEVER FORGET: YOU DO NOT WRITE COMMENTS. ONLY HUMANS WRITE COMMENTS. and after like 3 or 4 rounds of this it finally stuck and i haven't seen a Claude comment on my personal machine in months.

I assume you are already using CLAUDE.md to give these instructions and still not working?

Re: AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "favorite" Claudism is when I critique its work and ask it to remove some unnecessary part of the design -- and then the diff has more green than red because it added comments about why the code is no longer there -- the code that was never in the mainline and never asked for!

Oh god this has been driving me nuts since Opus 5 landed. Every docblock is filled with long-winded jargon explaining why this design is superior to some other design, which never existed as far as any dev who might read that comment is concerned.

just add to markdown instructions to check that this failure mode isn't happening in its diff before yielding back to human review. Any issue that occurs more than once, you can just put in the review markdown instructions so you don't need to look at it twice.
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