It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI (ssp.sh)

90 pointsby zazuke4 hours ago50 comments

synalx 3 hours ago

I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.

mrtesthah 3 hours ago

Probably good to establish canonical spec documents up front that it can use and maintain as an independent reference?

lupire 3 hours ago

Doesn't need to be "up front", but you do need to curate the context.

AI can't read your mind, and it will read what you (or anyone else) wrote.

pydry 2 hours ago

It can't but it will try and getting it to stop is often infeasible.

Sharlin 2 hours ago

Humans can’t read minds either, but most humans aren’t so dumb as to forget what is a normative spec and what is just their own current, evolving model of the problem space. (Though some humans certainly are…)

rendaw an hour ago

That doesn't solve the problem of it hallucinating more design details and putting them in comments. The solution to too much authoritative documentation isn't more authoritative documentation.

pc86 29 minutes ago

Comments exist for humans to understand the why of the code, including perhaps external dependencies/assumptions/requirements.

LLMs inserting code comments makes zero sense by definition.

throwaway613746 2 hours ago

Anthropic hopes you just eventually give up and become completely dependent on Claude. Toss in 10 (or more) other developers with way less discipline and you will become dissillusioned with Claude's overengineered, incomprehensible, technosalad and your demise is pretty much guaranteed.

post-it 30 minutes ago

I've been whittling my way towards having Claude write zero comments in code. They're pretty much never helpful.

sdeframond 22 minutes ago

How do you do it?

mccoyb 2 hours ago

I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time"

I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ideas. 99% of them are garbage.

Before AI, a conversation with colleagues would help me weed out the garbage, and possibly give me a new perspective ("here's something surprising about what you just said!")

Now, AI plays a helpful role in helping me weed out the garbage for the subset of ideas that I can test empirically -- and sometimes it does give me a new perspective, but with significantly more noise than my colleagues, who would take me right to the point that would be useful for me to see.

I've never felt like I needed a second brain ... because if I had such a thing, I think I would be keeping the 99% garbage around -- instead I just let biology GC it.

Dependance an hour ago

Hey, love the hivemind comment to mine. Maybe we do have kind of a second brain...? /s

How do you take notes, generally speaking ?

mccoyb an hour ago

I've never been a good note taker. In the things I think about, when I'm really invested in something, I have to reverse engineer it to experience the why.

Reverse engineering can take several forms for me: it started with writing parts of systems from scratch, and now (due to academic training) it oftens looks like "thinking about how to explain the system to a group of colleagues", which is one degree of separation from writing the system from scratch, but is much faster - and seems to work well when working with LM agents on code (because you have to confront your ignorance)

part of the training in academia is how to know when you don't understood the thing, so this ends up working well for me now.

One trick: you can force yourself to understand something better by making a presentation and imagining you're going to be grilled by someone smarter than you. This is kind of the feeling of pressure that academic paper reviews give (in an ideal world) and it translates when you think about explaining something to someone else.

CoolestBeans an hour ago

So I operate more in line with how you do, but having tried some organizational systems I think I understand the "second brain" people.

One, it forces you to do a crude approximation of critical thinking. It allows you to examine and organize your thoughts, either physically or digitally. It isn't the same as being able to sit and break something down in your mind, but for those who struggle with that, a "second brain" allows them to reap some of those benefits.

Two, it allows you to turnover things quickly in your head. By training yourself to immediately dump out an idea into an organizational system, you don't have to hold so many things in your head. Furthermore, words are immutable and the thoughts in your head aren't.

But for me, the good thoughts usually rise to the top. And there are a lot of things I'm thinking about that are so vague, it's just a feeling. And trying to write those down robs those thoughts of the long term, "on the backburner" mental processing they need to become actual ideas. They're thoughts that are still in the embryonic phase. I can't write down the qualia of them, and when I try to I move them into a "second brain" I lose it.

I think organizational systems are work dependent. Running a business lends itself well to an organizational system. Where it's good to try a lot of shallow things. But something like physics, for example, requires playing with ideas in your mind over a long period of time until they become solid enough to chase more seriously.

I think programming probably straddles that line and it depends on what you're doing at any given time.

mmargenot an hour ago

A key part of maintaining a second brain is revisiting and pruning it. Much like a todo list, without that practice it absolutely just accumulates bunk.

altairprime an hour ago

Ironically, this is why one of the best ways to manage upwards is to prompt managers into coming up with your idea as if it were their own: they’re dramatically more likely to execute and deliver on it. Of course, this also obviously leads to undue credit given for coming up the idea, which is certainly a core problem with AI as well, but it’s still charming to watch managerial psych being rediscovered by this new generation of managers.

helsinkiandrew 2 hours ago

There was a related study posted awhile ago:

> When people think AI did the creative work, task meaning and effort decline

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-people-think-ai-did-...

Dependance 2 hours ago

Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? I have a dozen ideas popping a day and nothing comes close in terms of ease than a paper notebook for capturing and some apple notes equivalent for storage. Used to have a Notion but all the "Second Brain" movement seems...fishy to me ?

_def an hour ago

Taking the notes (and being able to read them again if I want) is all I need from my "second Brain". This perfectly can be pieces of paper, as long as i can carry them around with me. More realistically some digital notes software fulfills that requirement.

pragma_x 35 minutes ago

> Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ?

My handwriting has degraded from consistent keyboard use over the last 30 years. Obisidan has replaced my paper notebooks, mostly because of this. However, it is handy to be able to mesh those notes with hyperlinks, LLM output snippets, quotes from other sources, embedded images, etc. Doing all of those other things would be laborious to impossible with paper.

gdulli 2 hours ago

What am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?

datakan 2 hours ago

“After we started thinking for you it became our society” The Matrix 1999

a2ff6eeb0 2 hours ago

That's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.

hdhdhsjsbdh 2 hours ago

Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.

_def an hour ago

Nightmare fuel. This sounds like totally worthless to me.

hdhdhsjsbdh an hour ago

I agree.

ModernMech an hour ago

The ultimate goal of project capitalism is to make ownership the only thing in the world that’s valued or valuable. The only thing that matters is how much and who you own.

parineum 34 minutes ago

The actual goal of capitalism is the direct the impulses of the capitalist to align with the interests of the public.

theossuary 20 minutes ago

We didn't automate muscles generally, only specifically. The leverage those specific situations have is so high it's worth it. Same with thinking, it's very far from automated generally. Maybe one day we'll have humanoid robots as generally physically capable, and AI as generally mentally capable, but that's a long way off. Until then there's still emmense value for humans in between the high-leverage areas, and even more value in adding some leverage throughout (like the first attempts at exoskeletons, or using Claude to help manage your daily tasks, etc.)

chessucation 2 hours ago

i've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be discarded.

HPsquared 2 hours ago

The prompter becomes the prompted!

rootsudo an hour ago

For me it’s the opposite, AI has helped me do the final 20% that I could never do, making execution more painless and more successful.

avgDev 24 minutes ago

I've found it very helpful with flushing out bugs, reviewing my code. I have a hard time trusting it to generate 100+ lines of code because in the end I am responsible for it.

GPerson 2 hours ago

I have separate directories for human only files and ai files. I’m not doing anything that matters but it works for me.

zazuke 4 hours ago

While I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end.

It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.

lupire 2 hours ago

It's also hard to finish an idea that is mine.

zazuke 14 minutes ago

hehe :D

SomeonesAccount 2 hours ago

This is why I never use AI for ideas. Always my own ideas.

mohamedkoubaa 2 hours ago

Brian, CTO complains that it's so hard for him to execute against the technical strategy communicated by that smart intern on the third day of his internship two years ago. Poor Brian.

empath75 3 hours ago

I think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/

lupire 2 hours ago

I don't understand. Are you saying that AI should write notes but then they should be excluded from the AI's context?

swiftcoder 2 hours ago

Two different knowledge bases. One to store AI's "learned" context, the other for you to manually edit.

mrtesthah 2 hours ago

This might work to keep work separate:

https://github.com/eighttrigrams/us-vs-them