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#claude#button#experience#things#blue#don#might#opus#more#something
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Discussion (183 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
To try to add something to this discussion -- I think that while I've seen these sort of loops less --- what I have seen is "overly helpful".
Models nowadays want to double-triple-quadruple check things. I'm being silly but it verges on "I have a working solution but let me write a variation in Rust to ensure a convergent solution and prove this works".
I've had to stop models nowadays mostly because they're being agonizingly pedantic in their validation. Opus is actually one of the most pedantic and "off track" here. But again, not in a bad way. I'm usually like "stop testing latency between 50 runs of this app... this is version one.. we're going to make a million more changes.. you're not buying us anything".
Yeah of 10 minutes ago. It is shocking how long some seemingly simple things can take. I know there are some things I can do faster than the LLM and some things it can do faster than me. The amount of rambling BS is the exhausting part.
Except... the next day they are still there and I have to push myself a bit further through the wall of changes before closing the tab again.
Once in a blue moon it's actually the model making a material error in it's thinking and I have to go back and redo it.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-r...
If they've worked some minutes/hours/weeks on something and you ask them why did they do that, they will either answer honestly and truthfully, lie, or say "I missed that/didn't seem important so I just chose something at random".
None of these cases are similar to how AI works.
You can extend this further by using an adversarial agent trying to find mistakes in the other instance's logs in a loop where a 3rd neutral agent weighs the claims of the other two. This is also just another step in reducing error, it does not guarantee elimination of such errors. The latter is an impossible guarantee, even for humans.
This is fucking constant. I can't deny that this stupid tech saves time prototyping even with having to wrangle it, but it commits a fireable offense several times a day that no human would get away with and is obviously incapable of learning from mistakes in the way a human is. The only reason it's not fired is because it's a slave that works for no more than the cost to feed it.
Got an audible guffaw out of me. This really is what the experience is like sometimes if you're just giving it a result without being specific in implementation, and it comes out of nowhere, some days much worse than others.
I've become patient with it, but whatever this style of output is called or doing - it is both condescending and entirely unhelpful, and it seems designed to frustrate.
Everything in life is variable reward. You invite a friend over, they might accept or they might not. Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad. You ask a colleague to finish a task, they might do it or might not or might do a good job or might not.
Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?
regarding your examples, i think the difference is that with ai, you’re literally sitting in front of a machine, pressing a button, and (almost instantly) getting a result that, if not desired, can immediately be tried for again. you even spend “tokens” to do this, and at least in my native language, “token” brings to mind the coins you’d stick in a slot machine
Sugar is the original point of the reward system!
Do hard work (takes time), get dopamine for successful completion.
Find berries, taste sweet (hopefully safe), eat all, get calories. Doordash Krispy Kreme instead = few too many calories.
(I’m no Luddite in the sense popularly thought of them pre-‘22 [1], though we have to watch skill atrophy)
[1] regressionist? Decelerationist, too loaded perhaps. Someone remembers or knows the word…
> Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button.
Those are my only options when the site is clearly not blue, two buttons are.
There is a reason for why I am much more specific than this.
I do remember that one of the first things I did with my CLAUDE.md was to tell it to stick to the scope of the task, never to jump ahead and do extra "helpful" things without confirming with me first, and to follow best software practices including around refactoring but also to specifically avoid overengineering. I don't know if that is what's giving me a different experience from whatever the author seems to be "satirizing".
I have misbehaved in this fashion for many people across the full spectrum from casual users to highly experienced software engineers with millions of social media followers, so the statement that it's similar to making a joke about a calculator misadding two numbers because a stray beam of solar radiation flipped a bit at least for my part is not true.
Would you like me to start using bad English and doing things you never asked me to for your sessions, too? Just say the word.
The user is asserting that this is "not a lived experience"
working out if the user has missed the LLM Cliche
Formulating a suitable response
"did you just argue with a joke?" No, thats to blunt
"Is it satire when it only applies to you?" no again passive aggressive
lets just print the dictionary definition of satire and hope the move on
> Satire is when...
My impression is that this is an oversimplified demonstration of what can happen when you prompt Claude in a system with many more variables (than two buttons and two colours).
If I want the button to turn blue and that's it, what instead do I ask? Even in a complicated system with many levers, what do I request other than the desired end result, hoping that Claude pulls the right levers to produce something acceptably close to what I think I asked for?
And when it doesn't, it's usually because of things outside of the codebase -- iOS layout quirks that aren't documented, buggy Python libraries it's relying on where you then have to tell it to read the source to figure out what's going on, that kind of thing.
Wow, you AI people really have a negative view of the technology y'all are trying to sell as the next Jesus
Usually just restarting the session helps, though.
Be specific.
That said, GPT always acts up even if I am specific, but I only have the free tier there.
Only since 4.8 though.
To the people rather lamely doing the "it's satire/a joke", that would require this to be an exaggeration of a reality. But...it isn't.
This isn't a defense of it doing those four other things. It would be nice if it did what you wanted correctly. I'm just saying, as long as our programming skills have not completely atrophied, we have the power.
“Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying "Blood...blood...blood...blood...” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
This got me on "cyanide blue", and I was ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING on "Approaching usage limit". I can barely stop laughing now and my stomach hurts. I mean, Thank You!
EDIT: Actually, I used to use Google's AI Studio a lot and fork it after every successful prompt interaction. When I'd encounter a problematic issue like this, I'd revert to the previous fork and try a different prompt until I could get the desired outcome, thus mitigating the need to "argue" with the LLM. Unfortunately the ability to cleanly fork and revert everything including the LLM context was removed some months ago, and I've yet to discover a workflow with any tool that works as well for me.
I wonder if this is just a reflection of some senior folks being arrogant towards junior folks. When the latter finished a task but not to the liking of the senior person they might just get a "that's wrong, try again". Just to have sth similar repeat the second time around. But the arrogant guy got to boss around the junior one, and some junior folks grow up learning that's how you should behave so they also do it later.
Now it's not a person but a machine. And people just make fun of the dumb machine. Well, garbage in, garbage out If you are not specific in what you want, you might get crap back. Or at least sth you didn't envision.
It is easy to misinterpret this site, and therefore not "get" the joke.
I guess we are all PMs now.
Simple, right? But design guidelines prevent one offs, and no !important. So you create a CSS class, but you discover another element on the header declared itself as primary (the search icon or the sign in button). You talk to that team and they decided to scope what’s primary according to their component. To change the sign in button to grey now you need to talk with the growth team. Growth team wants to run an experiment but they’re backlogged, only next quarter. They say you can innersource, just need VP approval. VP says blue matches a marketing campaign that is about to go out, agency has already been hired. You can’t talk to the agency unless Legal approves.
So you leave the button gray, to revisit decision next planning cycle after you can align all stakeholders.
For a moment I thought, wow, someone put a lot of work into creating this theme park of frustration.
Next: It would be so easy to create a faux-Claude like this.
Then: How hilarious to watch the transcripts of unsuspecting users in real time.
Finally: I began wondering if this might be relevant to all the redundant, unnecessarily preambled, sentence structure complexifying, indirect referencing, canned phrasing, ambiguity mining, analogy maxxing, over-wordy responses I have recently been getting from Fable...
This hit a bit too close to home. Sol has the same issue, spawns a lot of agents for no good reasons (besides burning tokens).
I don't know if it works, but I've always had a consistent level of token burn on my plans (I've only heavily used Sol after adding it).
> WebFetch en.wikipedia.org/…/Cyan
> WebFetch en.wikipedia.org/…/Prussian_blue
> WebFetch www.colorhexa.com/16b8c4
Brilliant.
- The people who won't make any effort to learn the tools, and something as simple as reverting code (via git) needs to be done by AI?
- The awful programmers who we've had to endure working with, who are so bad at simple changes that they have negative productivity?
- Or Claude itself?
---
BTW: I don't have these problems, but I'm also not afraid to do things myself when it's easier.
Edit: If I want to change a button's color, I just change it manually. If I don't know where the code for the button is, I might start with prompting, (because AI can often find the code faster than I can,) and then once the diff is proposed, start adjusting things by hand.
(I am genuinely uncertain, though I presume it’s at least somewhat exaggerated.)
It's a pisstake, but (in the bits I read, and based on my own personal experience) the writing style is barely exaggerated, while the behaviour doesn't ring true at all.
It’s funny because there are elements of truth in each bit of it, though.
Yes, and it's mine!
I use codex now.
But you can see in this thread that folks definitely have experienced this.
I use Opus and Sonnet 5 all the time and I find their language grating. But honest, I prefer to put up with it and get the results than to put up with my own human limitations and not get the results.
I'm sure there's quite a bit of variation from person to person in these sorts of experiences, based on your harness, the way you talk, the stored memory, your CLAUDE.md, etc. But people absolutely have had this Opus 5 style experience the app simulates.
"I was wrong" and "the honest truth" are just forever phrases that are now dead to me.
Do people really prompt AI like this? Multiple times the choice was either to yell at the agent, or ask it why it did something, neither of which are very fruitful lines to go down if you know what you're doing
> I'm collapsing this back to the rendered outcome:
And intermixed with SaaS product page idioms from a brain-damaged marketer like:
> No broader cleanup.
> No further architecture work.
> Just the button.
Aside from the patterns everyone knows like em-dashes, "its not X, it's Y", etc. I think the key features of claude diction is it sounds like a junior engineer over their skies who is trying to make up for that with extra verbiage mixed with extremely grating SaaS marketing-ese.
My gripe with Claude is that while investigating how to do this it will report 200 other incidental findings which I overlooked and I realize those are broken too and need urgent fixing, derailing me, not it.
Also, while this little demo is certainly exaggerating the issue, I do find working with Claude to sometimes get quite verbose and tiresome. I doubt I would struggle this much to get it to change a button color, but the patterns of speech, the endless lists, the over-explanations, and the whole song and dance of trying to get it to make the change you want without side-effects is frustratingly familiar to me.
It made me stop using Claude at all. Codex has almost surgical precision, and I like that a lot.
(But nowadays I just use DeepSeek Flash. it does screw up but its cents so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).