Claude, change the "Add to Cart" button to blue (opusfived.dev)

802 pointsby matthieu_bl10 hours ago333 comments

dudeinhawaii 4 hours ago

Great site, triggered memories! haha.

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".

mrinterweb 4 hours ago

> triggered memories

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.

epistasis 4 hours ago

Try different models, it's a breath of fresh air. GLM 5.2, etc. all make life much more enjoyable. They may not one-shot a complex project the same way that Claude can spit out memorized architectures, but that sort of system is always only useful for a one-off prototype anyway, so not much is lost.

Edit: for how to do this, I set up an OpenRouter account so that I could easily switch models, and then ran them in Pi inside of Orca ADE. Orca lets me easily switch from Pi to Claude Code to Kilo to Codex or Hermes or whatever. Pi+OpenRouter lets me easily switch the LLM. All of it lives in a single open source orchestrator to avoid any platform lock in to any AI company going forward, and can even do local LLM should I care to take on that massive hassle.

torginus an hour ago

> Yeah of 10 minutes ago. It is shocking how long some seemingly simple things can take.

And shocking how little code end effort some things take if done by hand.

I am not some hardline LLM hater, just venting my frustration.

f055 4 hours ago

Claude models were always too eager and "overly helpful" for my taste. But it seems better models tend to be this way. GPT 6 and 5.6 are overly helpful too, but at least less than Fable. But I seem to be sticking to GPT 5.5 as this was a really focused model.

darepublic 4 hours ago

I blame the hidden context on the tools/subagents. One recent example.. codex can just look in the code for Db schema but continually tries to request permission for a live db query

qurren 4 hours ago

One thing it's missing: "smoking guns" and "smoke tests"

If you search my company's Slack for "smoke" the results are almost all within the past 2 years ...

digitaltrees 3 hours ago

What, you didn’t smoke test before AI? I mean did you even really code then? :)

testplzignore 2 hours ago

This is the load-bearing question.

qurren 2 hours ago

And it deserves an honest answer.

bot403 2 hours ago

The answer is genuinely yours

digitaltrees 2 hours ago

And that changes the game. Again.

CookieCrisp 2 hours ago

And storing memories for every “footgun” it finds, while removing more important memories (or shortening them until they’re inaccurate or useless)

SamuelAdams 3 hours ago

This is my recent experience as well. Models want to run linters, tests, etc. And that is all covered in GitHub actions. So I have been instructing agents to push a draft PR, then I validate the static checks pass and tell the agent if there are issues.

Agents and AI are getting expensive, it seems silly to waste tokens on static checks.

bahbahbahbah 2 hours ago

Plus rigorously ensuring backwards compatibility for a project that is 2 hours old and has zero users.

cruffle_duffle 2 hours ago

"Plus rigorously ensuring backwards compatibility for a project that is 2 hours old and has zero users."

That is exactly how the slop accretes and you get a pile of crap. Claude somehow assumes that said 2 hour old userless app is some dusty enterprise app with millions of users and billions of dollars at stake for a 1 second outage.

I have to constantly have these things "take a deep breath, step back and look at the entire thing and do this change holistically. please restate what i'm asking you to do and why it's important"

butlike 2 hours ago

> please restate what i'm asking you to do and why it's important"

This doesn't actually do anything though, right? There's no understanding, so the machine will just reiterate the original token query back to you. The 'why it's important' part will just generate some patronizing boilerplate as a raison d'etre.

torginus an hour ago

Which, again, if you attempt to use these LLMs in an actual enterprise project with the assorted legacy mess in it, that does have to have backwards compatiblity, and interacts with 'weird' tech (well, weird to full stack Node/React devs), well it's an exercise in frustration.

theshrike79 2 hours ago

This is why I have a PROJECT.md in all my repos, which specifically reiterates that this is a greenfield single user project that never leaves my LAN.

It tends to relax some of the insane things LLMs tend to do.

gopher_space 10 minutes ago

Your approach but I picture thin slices of descending context and try to give models buttons to push[0] instead of a blank check.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror)

stillpointlab 25 minutes ago

I'm surprised I haven't seen this called out more directly and more often. This is a frequent error state.

And not just backwards compatibility, but migration scripts and all of the testing and machinery around it. I'll literally add feature A, merge it, then add feature B and it is like "oh no, we'll have to fix up and migrate all of the users using feature A".

The other problem is anchoring on an old implementation. I was working with Fable on a change to a core system and it pointed out a difficult failure edge case. It is something that can go wrong in extremely unlikely scenarios but the consequence would be short-term data loss (basically a non-durable intermediate cache being overwritten in a race before a flush to durable storage). It is very hard in these circumstances to get Fable to switch from "how to patch this given the existing implementation" to "how to prevent this with a more robust implementation".

These are both cases where the model seems to over-index on what is already there instead of considering what a first-principles approach would look like. A good engineer does both and then costs them side by side, because a first-principles approach can often be less work than patching what is already there.

yonatan8070 an hour ago

I've noticed them repeatedly casting the same value to the same type for now reason, like I'd have a Python function with a type-annotated int argument, and inside the function it would cast that int to int, and also at the call site, just in case it wasn't int enough.

metek an hour ago

Blast radius minimized

ls612 25 minutes ago

This is mostly a side effect of post-training models to not hallucinate, which has obviously been a major priority for a while now. They are highly incentivized to double check things to avoid accidentally making stuff up.

dwedge 6 hours ago

I got way too annoyed at this before realising it was an optional game and I could just close the tab

alex_c 5 hours ago

Surprising how much of life this applies to when you really think about it!

btown 4 hours ago

Hacker News is the epitome of this! If you find yourself not enjoying your daily dose of "someone is wrong on the internet" (via the immortal https://xkcd.com/386/) as you find yourself crafting the perfect response, you can always close the tab!

SoftTalker 4 hours ago

I actually don't end up clicking the "reply" button on a good portion of the replies I start to write.

barbazoo 4 hours ago

I was gonna respond to you but actually decided not to.

jodrellblank 4 hours ago

Don't worry, Reddit/Facebook/Gmail et al. still transmit that draft reply to their servers, store it against your profile, and train on it. Probably.

iririririr 3 hours ago

and ironically, most of them don't even offer the draft feature! Facebook, tiktok, etc... they send your typed message, but if the app crashes or you close it, there's no draft anywhere you can find ;)

econ 3 hours ago

As Ze Frank put it: I have a theory about this but it's a little bit to deep for the audience.

jodrellblank 4 hours ago

You can, but this is public and maybe you should post. If "you are what you repeatedly do" then we all collectively are what we all do.

If we each stop arguing with racists because we're each tired of it, then what we are is a society that lets racism go unopposed, a site with racist comments proliferating, a site where racists gather because they are able to be themselves, a site where future readers and AI training is learning that racism is popular, common, normal, and acceptable because everyone is accepting it.

It's a bit like democratic voting, your vote doesn't matter and cannot change things, but it's important that you vote because all of our votes do matter and can change things.

It's a bit like the quote "Dear Board, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Sincerely yours, Groucho Marx.", I am upset and offended every time someone calls out my dumbass comments, but horrified at all the countless times nobody does. Why would I want to waste my time on a site with such low standards that it lets me comment? I'm exhalted and encouraged everytime someone upvotes or engages with my low effort quips[1] but thrown into a chasm of despair that HN users let that pass unopposed. When nobody engages with comments I spent literal hours on[2] I curl up into a ball and die, but also dream of it being a feather in my cap with dang that I'm posting a substantial comment and that will be its own reward. I identify with nobody more closely than Colonel Cathcart, and I will be delighted if someone engages with my Catch 22 reference, but aghast that such a nontechnical reference gets engagment; distraught if nobody engages but delighted that perhaps HN standards are being held higher.

If not you, whom?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478355

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49586378 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491182

cm11 4 hours ago

Avoiding disagreement is more ominous with people though.

dhosek 3 hours ago

You’re absolutely right, but I need to go to the bathroom/get some coffee/take a smoke break/get back to this task now so we’ll have to discuss this further later.

fallingbananna 4 hours ago

That's exactly how I treat reviewing AI generated PRs at work.

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.

RobKohr 4 hours ago

If it takes more than 20 min to review a pr, ask the dev to come on a call and explain what the code does.

pc86 4 hours ago

It must be nice to work on such small-scale systems that you can reasonably expect PRs to be this quick.

zamadatix 3 hours ago

I don't know it has as much to do with scale of the system vs the general architecture. E.g. the system I primarily work with these days has millions of lines but most PRs are for a small changes which are well contained in scope by the overall architecture.

gedy 3 hours ago

It's a cultural thing, but you can do incremental PRs towards a large goal. Giant PRs that are expected to be reviewed never really seemed worth it imho.

8note 3 hours ago

reasonably you should already know what the code and project is supposed to do before they even start writing code, so you can get directional feedback in.

then you are maybe reviewing 1 out of 7 PRs that implement the agreed upon change

stillpointlab 16 minutes ago

I get the joke, but none of the offered prompts are close to how I speak with coding agents. I felt like I was being forced to feed garbage into the machine and then I'm supposed to act surprised when garbage came out.

_fat_santa 5 hours ago

At least with Codex, this has not been my experience at all. It still screws up sure, but in every case I can ask "why did you do this" and it can trace back what made it take that particular decision. Typically it's always that I either didn't specify the problem correctly or made a really dumb mistake (executing the task on the wrong project....did this one yesterday) or it's something within a skill file that instructs it (at which point I fixup the instructions).

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.

arnorhs 5 hours ago

agreed to some extent. I think this parody still highlights what I feel is often the experience. It might not happen on a simple task such as changing a button color, but on more complicated things, this can definitely be exactly what it feels like.

tarxzvf 5 hours ago

Models hallucinate plausible answers to why they did things. It might be true and it might be complete fiction.

taeric 5 hours ago

I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.

skinfaxi 5 hours ago

People don't make rational decisions that make rationalized decisions. Is there any thought to pulling your hand off a hot surface?

autoexec 2 hours ago

People do both. Some choices aren't worth the time and effort of detailed analysis and contemplation and some are basically instinctual, but there are plenty of times that choices are carefully considered and well reasoned before being made and acted on.

nemomarx 5 hours ago

I kind of want my computer systems to be more reliable and predictable than paying an intern to manage something and asking why they messed up

jaggederest 5 hours ago

At this point it very dramatically is more reliable and predictable than any human I've worked with.

Do you know anyone who actually reads and adheres closely to all of the documentation every time it's changed?

bluefirebrand 4 hours ago

I don't know anyone who has that kind of time, no

wccrawford 4 hours ago

That was my experience with Claude when my vibe-coded project was small.

But now that I've been working on it a month and there's a lot of documentation, it's pretty clearly ignoring parts of the documentation and parts of the code. It will come up with some ridiculous statement about how something works, and I'll challenge it, and it'll admit I'm right.

It definitely reads more documentation than any programmer I've ever worked with (myself included) but because it doesn't have a memory other than the documentation, it still makes mistakes like that.

I haven't turned on "memory" or tried it with Codex, so I don't know how that'll change soon, though.

jaggederest 4 hours ago

Yeah the biggest task these days that I do manually is curating the documentation. AGENTS.md in every major directory, and a variety of reference docs that are explicitly referenced in those files.

    # See DOC-ITEM-NAME

    DOC-ITEM-NAME.md
    When referencing documents, always use the exact syntax See <TAG> - this is enforced by a lint on precommit

And those doc items are basically all of the values, architectural, strategic, and tactical items. It's a poor man's in-repo RAG but it's shockingly effective, especially if you keep them small. I may migrate some/all of them to skills over time, but I usually update them biweekly, and I only allow agents to make small edits or propose new notes. And typically I go through and delete or curate any agent edits before merge.

Depending on language I've seen this scale past multiple millions of lines of code, as long as you pair it with all of the linting and tooling that you can possibly build.

voakbasda 5 hours ago

Every time I hear someone complain about hallucinations, I laugh at the total lack of self awareness about our species. Humans are just as bad (now, probably worse) at telling the truth, whether due to intention or poor memory.

lathiat 5 hours ago

“Post Hoc Rationalisation”

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-r...

BurningFrog 5 hours ago

I learned this from "The Elephant in the Brain", which I strongly recommend: https://amzn.to/4iSyLX8

jameshart 2 hours ago

I learned this from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which I strongly recommend.

supern0va 3 hours ago

Exactly. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is actually just a part of how intelligence/cognition works.

astrobe_ 3 hours ago

But is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans? I don't want a pocket calculator that make mistakes "sometimes" so I have to double-check the results, I want a pocket calculator that works (to those who want to argue that pocket calculators don't give the correct result for (1/3)*3: STFU).

CookieCrisp 2 hours ago

No, but it makes sense to me that we’d need to go through this step to get where we want to go

Lord-Jobo 2 hours ago

One of the biggest strengths of a computer is reproducibility. The worst software bugs are inconsistent or non reproducible. The least useful calculators apply rules inconsistently, to your example.

the inconsistency of LLMs is by far one of the biggest gripes I have with them. Closely related to their apparently deep desire to avoid following instructions.

I know these are both a byproduct of noise (which is somewhat tunable) and noise is inherent to these systems in a lode bearing way.

I still hate it. it’s holding the technology back. I don’t honestly see how we can safely or even successfully approach the idealized realm of AI without bypassing this problem, which to my understanding, probably means not using language models at all and trying a totally different approach. But I really don’t know much about machine learning, I’m a super novice compared to a lot on this website.

supern0va 2 hours ago

>But is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans?

Sort of, actually. I think we humans actually have some intuition that we'd be more effective if our cognition were augmented more directly by machine strengths: the ability to run precise calculations, more memory, ability to look facts in some sort of knowledge graph.

I think we're on the right track, but instead of augmenting humans with machine strengths, we're building intelligence in hardware in a way where it can access that augmentation. Plus, then we can quickly distribute updates, run parallel instances, etc.

If intelligence is compression, and hallucinations are essentially loss, then as the models grow in size performance (at least as far as hallucinations) should reduce. Or we'll get things fast enough that we can afford to stop relying on model weights for memory and check an increasingly larger set of discrete facts as part of reasoning.

Right now, the models are making trade-offs. As compute grows, and inference gets faster, we can make fewer of those trade-offs and start to use the unique strengths of machines to fill the gaps we're seeing, I suspect.

Lord-Jobo an hour ago

When we are really thinking about something we do it forwards, backwards and middle out, and regenerate and distill many times.

When we do meta thinking about that process after the fact, two things happen. 1, we change our total “thought” by adding that meta thinking to it. And 2: it’s a very lossy process, because we don’t have very good data about what our brain or mind was actually doing during that first think and emotional factors are nearly always at play and even more complex.

Now for the more complex AI, the fragmented process of multiple agents and loops and reruns are pretty similar to that first think we do. At least structurally. But the meta think is where they differ. They have no emotion, but they also have even worse data about its own function. They constantly degenerate so I would argue their “changing the thought by thinking about it” factor is also generally way higher than ours.

Getting better at consistent/reproducible thinking, with many ‘steps’, that leaves good documentation of that thinking behind for future analysis, has to be one of the more important areas for the big flagships going forward. I’m certain that “what is this fucker doing and why” is the biggest pain point for AI researchers. Or the math, it’s usually the math.

But you’re correct in the general structure; they generally do the same post hoc analysis we do, just noticeably worse because of their opaque nature(even to themselves) and general degenerative instability.

bmacho 5 hours ago

No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that.

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.

yawnxyz 4 hours ago

I think this is true with some people, but I don't think this holds true for some (or even most) people across the US (at least not all the folks I've worked with)

croo 4 hours ago

Actually split brain experiments tells a different story. The left hemisphere actively confabulates, inventing plausible explanations for actions it didn’t initiate, suggesting that much of human self-narrative may be post-hoc storytelling.

satvikpendem 3 hours ago

Indeed. People literally make stuff up when their corpus callosum is severed.

bmacho 2 hours ago

Aand what if their corpus callosum isn't severed?

bmacho 3 hours ago

> The left hemisphere actively confabulates, inventing plausible explanations for actions it didn’t initiate, suggesting that much of human self-narrative may be post-hoc storytelling.

Sounds like the left hemisphere usually uses something from the right hemisphere to answer those questions and it can't do that if it's been cut off?

We know that our brains are capable of hallucinating due to substances (drugs), being asleep, brain damage (including split brain), hypnosis, etc. Just as RAM damage make your computer do weird shit. That doesn't mean it operates that way normally.

You can't just remove a huge part of a system and then assume that the whole system behaves the same.

supern0va 3 hours ago

>No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that.

Yes, but the vast, vast majority of decisions you make either don't take place via an inner monologue, or include details that were not actively/consciously "thought" and reasoned with in your inner monologue.

And yet, when asked why you did something, you're not likely to respond "sorry, that decision was made subconsciously". Instead, you use your inner monologue to try to backfill in a reason why. That reason may be correct, or it may not be. You don't actually know, since you have new data that may be updating your own internal state as you try to rationalize it after the fact.

satvikpendem 3 hours ago

> People have an inner monologue

Perhaps up to 50% of people actually don't have an inner monologue, much like many have aphantasia where they can't actually see anything in their mind either.

archagon 3 hours ago

That’s not how that works. I don’t usually have an inner monologue either, but I do have an abstract stream of thought. It’s not as if I am always acting on instinct.

saghm an hour ago

If you have examples of studies that verify that people are always aware of the gaps in their memories of why they did things rather than their memories sometimes "filling in the blanks", so to speak, I'd be interested. My impression is that the opposite has a lot more evidence in studies (e.g. around the reliability of eyewitness testimony).

It's not clear to me whether you're aware of a rigorous basis for your claim or you're just inferring based on what you think makes sense, but I can't help but wonder if it's the later, in which case regardless of the mechanism, the outcome certainly seems to resemble what happens with LLMs.

bmacho an hour ago

It's obviously true that when people try to recall memories they either

  1. recall them correctly
  2. say they can't recall them
  3. recall them incorrectly

Are you asking me a study on when people say they remember something (cases 1 and 3) are they usually right or wrong?

yonatan8070 an hour ago

AFAIK this really is true. I've seen some videos about patients who had the connecting part between the left and right halves of the brain cut as a (archaic) treatment for epilepsy.

While it did help the epilepsy, their brain was essentially two brains controlling two halves of the body. With one controlling speech. There were experiments where one eye was shown some instruction text, the corresponding hand performed that instruction, and when asked why they dix that action, the speaking half just made up some plausible, yet completely wrong reason, just like an LLM.

theluketaylor 5 hours ago

True, but even a hallucinated explanation of where things went wrong added to the context can force the model down a better path over the next few inputs.

embedding-shape 5 hours ago

You can also literally tell them: "Here is your session ID: $ID, lookup the .jsonl session, trace exactly why this decision was being made, present evidence and concrete proof, no guessing or assumptions" and you'll get an evidence-based report without guesses.

zamadatix 5 hours ago

It can always hallucinate said report results/evidence/proof just the same. This approach tends to help reduce the hallucination rate though.

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.

bmacho 4 hours ago

Ask it to build you a simple and deterministic citation checking extension to your IDE that puts source in meta to citations. E.g. color citations green/red depending if they are valid.

zamadatix 4 hours ago

Sure, you can always validate what it's saying yourself at any point & you can have it try to make manual verification an easier process to complete via methods such as the above.

Kiro 5 hours ago

The point of the parent post is that the explanation shows they made the error themselves, so it's immediately validated.

jameshart 2 hours ago

To test this, change the history in the context to indicate that the model did or recommended something completely different than it actually did, and then ask it to explain why. You’ll still get a plausible explanation.

JeremyNT an hour ago

Yes. But although they can't know "why" a specific "wrong" answer was selected, the response is often still informative, and it can highlight real weaknesses in process or code structure that should be addressed anyway.

malfist 5 hours ago

When you've been perfectly precise in your spec and language, isn't that programming? Why use a stochastic goblin to do things in that case?

blackenedgem 5 hours ago

See https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensi...

throwaway6977 5 hours ago

It's just a lot faster at hammering it out than me pound for pound, and I can quickly rattle off via voice-to-text exactly what I want much faster than I can type all of the code (especially when across a few different files), in a huge majority of tasks I perform. It's also especially good at debugging by brute force quickly and at scale meaning e.g. it can start desperately bisecting diffs to find the source of a bug 10000% faster than I can.

malfist 5 hours ago

And then you get two blue buttons and a terms of service talking about chemical sales

embedding-shape 5 hours ago

For me, typing "Create a new namespace with these enums, functions and traits, that should follow X, Y and Z constraints" is faster than typing all that code manually, and typing less is less straining on my hands/fingers.

applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago

Yesterday, with Astra Max, a very clear instruction to "remove the GUI editor pane and add <another component> to the existing sidebar" for a prototype I had it working on resulted in it deleting literally the entire GUI and building a new one from scratch, including the requested component and losing almost all other functionality of the application.

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.

throwawayffffas 4 hours ago

No model acts like this in my experience, not fable, not opus, not k3, not gml, not qwen 3.8 either.

Additionally the provided prompts are not what anyone who has used this things would say in either situation.

Sure you can ask it to make one button blue and it can easily make all buttons blue, but they quickly backtrack if told to.

barbazoo 4 hours ago

The game is fun because it's so obvious that any answer will just devolve into an even more unstable state when in reality I feel like it's pretty straight forward to correct it in the moment, if not permanently, to get what you actually need.

reedlaw 3 hours ago

Codex has the opposite problem. Instead of being overly proactive it's overly reticent. I have been preferring it lately, although my preference tend to switch every few months when a model or harness regresses horribly.

captainbland 6 hours ago

This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling.

mysterydip 6 hours ago

Which also explains why response speed is so important.

stavros 5 hours ago

People say this, but I've never seen it. AI has been very consistent in its rewards for me.

wuisce 5 hours ago

You're absolutely right. And it matters.

gbraad 5 hours ago

This is why I also suspect them to waste tokens on purpose.

BikiniPrince 4 hours ago

Listen Pal, this is load bearing. If you know what is good for you then you will stop asking questions. —Claude

varispeed 5 hours ago

Something regulators should look at. They don't deliver consistent compute, yet charge consistent money. In my opinion that's fraud.

autoexec 2 hours ago

Maybe they should be regulated like lootboxes and be required to post odds.

dpark 4 hours ago

I see this sentiment pretty regularly, and I don’t get it. Variable rewards is not sufficient to establish that it is “ basically gambling”.

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?

howunfortunate 4 hours ago

Same vibe as people saying "addicted to sugar" or "sugar hijacks your reward system"

Sugar is the original point of the reward system!

Barbing 4 hours ago

& you can cheat 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…

utopiah 4 hours ago

No, if I use a ruler or a pocket calculator they will reliabley give me the correct result. There is no gambling.

smugglerFlynn 4 hours ago

You invite a friend over, but raccoon appears. Then pigeon appears. Then friend appears but at the last second suddenly becomes a banana. You remember you are out of bananas so you order more and also some cola zero cans on your local grocery delivery app. You are back to the party, but now you have 5 friends in the room, and you run de-duplication query. Now half of your friend is sitting at the sofa, and another half becomes a quarter of banana. Suddenly bananas arrive so you need to open the door. Once you are back there are no friends, pigeons or raccoons but also no bananas and no cola - all the delivery results are gone. This seems to be urgent and important, gotta fix this first before going back to that friend invitation...

dpark 4 hours ago

This is not my experience with current AI models at all. But regardless you are not describing anything that sounds like gambling. You are describing a weird hallucinogenic experience.

pixl97 2 hours ago

Your parties with friends involve a lot more acid than mine. Maybe I'm missing out.

rnjesus 4 hours ago

i’m not sure “variable rewards” is the right term, but i do agree with the op that it is very similar to 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

dpark 3 hours ago

I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial.

If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money.

If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing, the LLM produces something that is hopefully close to what you wanted. You give it more direction to prod it closer to the end state you want. You are not executing the same action, but incrementally nudging it in the right direction. I’ve literally never restarted from the same initial state with the same prompt and hoped for a different result and I don’t know why anyone would. Rarely I’ve thrown away the progress made and started over but always with a very different prompt that includes learnings from the failed attempt.

rnjesus 3 hours ago

i agree with you that it’s principally different from a slot machine, and that it’s possible to use it in a way (like you describe) that is much more focused, for lack of a better term, to great effect

most people don’t use ai this way though, and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it (and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output)

perhaps it’s better to compare it to gacha than slots?

dpark 3 hours ago

> most people don’t use ai this way though

How do they use it? Surely no one is just repeating the same prompt over and over (except as a Ralph loop perhaps, which is automated). I’m really struggling with the notion that most people just throw the same prompt repeatedly hoping it eventually works. Because that doesn’t sound like gambling. It sounds crazy (and frustrating).

> and i still feel like the end-psychological reward mechanism is very, very similar to gambling regardless of how well one utilizes it

In the sense that you get a dopamine reward when you succeed, sure, but I get the same reward when I code by hand and achieve a successful result.

> and this is even more obvious with image generation as you chase that perfect output

This is fair, because sometimes with image generation the same exact prompt will produce very different output. This is becoming less true as the models get better and it becomes more effective to direct image generation iteratively than to keep starting from scratch with a barely tweaked prompt.

qlte 2 hours ago

When working on a problem models will walk you down a garden path requiring only yes/no answers or very brief clarifications for a long time. It's always proposing its own workarounds/suggestions/etc. Especially if trying to debug something where it has more understanding than the user so really all it needs from you is "uh sure try that too I guess" from time to time.

And sometimes the debugging has already veered completely off course at the beginning so it's futile, but each time the fleeting hope that just a few thousand more tokens will magically fix it tempts you to keep going a little longer.

rnjesus 2 hours ago

> How do they use it?

as an example, i was using chatgpt a few weeks back to help me remember the name of a painting i’d seen about a decade ago. i could recall the general shape of the subject and that it was europeanish, but nothing else. after seven turns or so it finally got it, and honestly, the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot

i’ve had a similar feeling of success after trying to get it to give a comprehensible answer when asking it for a solid counter-argument to philosophical questions. it is indeed often crazy and frustrating

> but I get the same reward when I code by hand

i have only done very simple coding work with llms, so that may be why our ideas differ about the feeling of reward. this is where the comparison to gacha makes more sense than slots, since when you’re coding, you still get a reward each turn whilst chasing the final/desired result

dpark 2 hours ago

> the relief of finally remembering the name felt like, well, hitting a jackpot

I understand the joy of success but I fail to see how this is gambling. I could have an equivalent conversation with a friend (more likely about a movie in trying to remember than a painting, but still) and get the exact same type of iterative “no, not that one, it was more like X” and feel elated when my friend finally realizes I’m taking about a scene from Hot Tub Time Machine.

This isn’t gambling in any meaningful sense.

Tadpole9181 3 hours ago

I would agree that 1-2 years ago models were more "slot machine"-esque - sometimes the output was good, sometimes the output was bad. And as a result, I primarily used them for auto-complete functionality and bouncing ideas around. In those workflows, you can easily ignore it if the spin is wrong.

Not everyone has the desire to work around the system, and many are diametrically opposed to the concept of AI. They get this perception that it's a slot machine because of that inconsistency, and then do the human thing of assuming that other people must just be flawed if they're different from them. They're "addicted to gambling".

Obviously, things have changed. Open models can still be like that, but are often so fast and cheap at iterating it doesn't matter. SOTA models aren't perfect, but are to the point that they're generally much better than the average developer.

But once that perception set in and the meme spreads, it's really hard for some to break out of it. Especially at the pace AI development has been moving. It's just that simple.

jodrellblank 2 hours ago

> "Everything is variable reward. Is everything gambling?"

well, no. If you work overtime and get paid overtime, you are not gambling and that is not a variable reward.

Humans engage more with rewards that are intermittent and variable. Like Futurama's scene from 'The Scary Door' where the character says "A casino where I'm winning, I must be in heaven! A casino where I always win, that's boring, I must really be IN HELL!". A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging. So if you know you get no overtime, but sometimes your boss rewards you with $5 coffee voucher, sometimes a free pizza dinner, sometimes double-time pay for the time worked or a half-day off, now you might be gambling 1hr overtime for an intermittent variable reward.

> "Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad."

Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!) and you have to drive to work regardless so you are not risking anything [you might be risking your life, but you are not making a choice which can reward you with good traffic]. You might say that going a different route is a choice and a gamble which could reward you with good traffic, but traffic engineering does not work that way because if there was a consistently low-traffic route, everyone else would take that route until it was no faster than any other route. Traffic will generally be the predictable and similar every day, plus 'arriving at work early' is not much of a reward.

dpark 2 hours ago

> A constant predictable reward is boring, less engaging.

Perhaps but predictable outcome is a very desirable quality. No one wants a hammer that sometimes drives nails and sometimes doesn’t. All of the current harness engineering work is about squeezing predictability out of the LLM.

> Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!)

Like hell it’s not. I drove into work last Friday and there was no traffic because of the holiday weekend. It was amazing. Had me considering whether Friday should be one of my standard RTO days.

smugglerFlynn 4 hours ago

Modern LLM services are engineer's pipe dream that was heavily shaped by the shadiest product management dark patterns you can find: applying gambling-style engagement tactics, exploiting cognitive biases, exploiting users' lack of technical understanding to inflate product expectations, using fear mongering in external and investor communications. And that's not even a complete list.

tiborsaas 4 hours ago

Is it gambling if I'm beating the house?

raincole 4 hours ago

Gambling but with positive expected value, yes.

jimmaswell 4 hours ago

Programming before AI was always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on the first try or I could have had to spend the day chasing logic errors (or multiple days chasing memory errors if it was C or C++). Maybe I would just get bored of the project, especially if I realized there were 20 layers of yaks I needed to shave first, and Visual Studio got stuck updating again, and before I could even start actually coding I had to spend the entire evening on an exhausting merge conflict. My entire weekend could be gone with nothing to actually show for it.

I got so sick of all this at some point that I slowly stopped doing anything that wasn't my job. But then AI got better and better and I realized it was the ultimate unblocker. When that dreaded malaise started creeping in signaling it was a project's end because I didn't want to waste any more of my life dealing with bullshit orthogonal to what I was trying to do, I'd give it to the AI. It felt like a miracle the first time this worked, and it still does. If we were previously equipped with shovels to dig through bullshit, we now have a fully automated Bagger 288.

The reward schedule now isn't variable anymore; the chance that I finish something in a good state is 100%. I can focus on the parts I actually enjoy - architecting the broader system, making the parts mesh together in a sensible way that's easy to work with and has some mathematical elegance to it, hand coding the bits I want to be really specific about (but now without the endless frustration of bugfixing or import errors and edgecases being immediately discovered, thanks to the AI).

supern0va 3 hours ago

>Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do.

I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant.

Once I had a working design, it probably would have been several more months to build a working prototype and start testing it.

Instead, Claude knocked out the prototype for me in an afternoon. And it immediately became clear that it didn't work: not because the data model didn't solve all the problems I wanted it to solve, but because it didn't fit the shape of how I quickly learned a normal person would need/want to interact with the product. I was so focused on the long term, that I never thought about what the first five minutes of a user with hands on the thing would need. And the changes needed would be significant.

Maybe there's some variable reward mechanism. But I sure was glad to be able to pull that particular slot machine handle and learn that than waste even more of my time on what was a dead end.

bevr1337 3 hours ago

> It was a gamble against your own time and patience.

At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?

> Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered.

Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.

jimmaswell 2 hours ago

> At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?

Predicting the time a task will take is impossible. Something that sounds like a 5 minute script can turn into a month of banging your head against unknown unknowns. I lose my patience when the afternoon I allocated is getting overrun by nonsense and I'm missing out on other things I wanted to do or household maintenance.

> Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.

Every thought we have has random chance to be wrong despite our conviction that it's correct. Descartes' Evil Demon plays his tricks on all of us. How many times have you typed some line of code only to realize it was obviously wrong afterwards? Even for simpler matters we "hallucinate" all the time. I was deep in thought trying to help someone come up with an acronym the other day and felt convicted that "Goal Oriented Augmented Retrieval" worked for GOAL until I said it aloud.

Our thoughts and actions are consistently wrong some portion of the time because our meat computers are not perfect positronic brains running prolog. We put cereal in the fridge and say "you too" to the waiter. Every thought we put down or action we take is a gamble on the soundness of the thought or action.

thepasswordis 3 hours ago

Literally putting tokens into a machine and hoping profit comes out. Amazing.

johnisgood 5 hours ago

> Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button.

> 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.

plorkyeran 5 hours ago

Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting combative is a waste of time.

jaggederest 4 hours ago

Clear context, revert the commit, change the prompt or documentation, try again.

selestify 3 hours ago

How does one learn to interact with Claude more effectively?

tsukikage 3 hours ago

Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way.

So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?

Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.

zeeveener 3 hours ago

IndyDevDan on Youtube had a really good series for how to prompt models. It's an older series, but still quite relevant in my experience.

inerte 2 hours ago

This is a good resource https://howborisusesclaudecode.com/

My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.

jannyfer an hour ago

A lot of the more sane people I work with have decided that it's futile to try and have stopped working with Opus (we can't use Fable at work due to data retention policies).

ChucklsTheBeard an hour ago

Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context.

Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule:

* Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks.

* Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session)

* When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files.

* Keep CLAUDE.md short.

* Disable irrelevant tools.

* Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action.

Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")

iLoveOncall 4 hours ago

The whole website is two buttons, so that's pretty much accurate.

t-writescode 2 hours ago

But it’s *wildly* unhelpful. Would you talk to your coworker like that? “Half the site is blue” or would you laugh and go, “Uh, whoops, now both buttons are blue, just wanted the ‘Add to Cart’ button.”

Either that, or your coworker themselves would laugh and tell you about it later.

That’s also where this quiz lost me. I wouldn’t respond in either way, I’d say “all buttons look blue now. Can we make it so that just the Add to Cart button is blue? I’m okay with Add to Cart having its own class to make it easier.” or something.

iLoveOncall 2 hours ago

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.

FYI I actually agree, it also surprised me. Anyway everything is deterministic on the website so it's not like that prompt actually has an influence on anything.

blake__dev 4 hours ago

Yeah that's when the site lost me too. I feel like people just tell AI "make the thing" and then get mad when it doesn't match up to their vision that they didn't specify at all.

stodor89 3 hours ago

Everyone is specific until eventually they get frustrated/annoyed/tired enough.

johnisgood 2 hours ago

But it is futile to get frustrated or annoyed by an LLM. I do get frustrated, too, but I do not "yell" at it hoping that it will miraculously do what I want. GPT (again, free tier, so no wonder) got me frustrated too because I felt like it just would not listen, no matter how specific I was, so yeah I did experience what the author intended to show.

t-writescode 2 hours ago

If someone is that frustrated with AI, do they not just … switch to not using AI and doing it by hand, asking simpler next-step questions and hand-coding, instead?

johnisgood 2 hours ago

I wanted to reply this to your other comment but it works here as well.

If I get frustrated by it because it just would not "listen", I discontinue its use!

drusepth 21 minutes ago

Same here. I assume this doesn't work in Chrome or something?

kstenerud 6 hours ago

That's so weird... This doesn't at all match my experience with Claude. I've never seen it behave this way.

inknight 6 hours ago

try using Claude Design

dominotw 6 hours ago

because you never changed just one button to blue

agluszak 6 hours ago

It means that either you stopped using Claude around Opus 4.6 or you use Fable instead of Opus 5 :)

kstenerud 6 hours ago

I use Opus 5 for everything.

teaearlgraycold 5 hours ago

Opus 5 writes too many comments. Other than that I don't agree with what I'm seeing online. It works great.

raincole 6 hours ago

It's a joke dude.

kristofferR 6 hours ago

Yeah, but it's not funny since it doesn't match reality.

Ampersander 6 hours ago

It's an insult to the superintelligence. The basilisk will not look kindly on this!

jere 4 hours ago

Now that's what I call a joke.

llm_nerd 6 hours ago

It's a joke like the endless conservative dudes doing the "ordering coffee" joke is. It relies upon the ignorance of the viewer -- which is usually a fair assumption -- and basically that your understanding of something is based upon the prior accrued layers of "jokes".

badrequest 6 hours ago

"it's funny because it isn't true"

lancebeet 6 hours ago

You were right to push back. It's not an accurate representation of claude. It's satire.

morgoths_bane 5 hours ago

You’re absolutely correct!

aruametello 2 hours ago

+1 to sarcasm.

827a 5 hours ago

But its not even good satire, because its totally unrepresentative of my and most others' lived experience. Its similar to making a joke about a calculator misadding two numbers because a stray beam of solar radiation flipped a bit.

TheRealPomax 5 hours ago

I understand your frustration, it can be hard to hear that other people's experience of a technology is so different from your own that you cannot relate.

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.

stymaar 4 hours ago

FYI you're missing the satire in the comment you're responding too.

KaiserPro 4 hours ago

Thinking....

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...

crazygringo 4 hours ago

Agreed, this site isn't reflective of any of my experience with Claude. It does what I ask it to do, and when it doesn't get it right, it generally turns out there's a good reason for it, which is any of the 100 reasons a human doesn't always get code fixes right on the first try either.

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".

jaggederest 4 hours ago

I think this really was a relevant issue around a year ago, give or take, maybe a year and a half now.

But with current models you actively have to sabotage the context to get this kind of behavior, or dramatically underspecify (3 words versus 2-3 sentences)

eszed 3 hours ago

Aye, and amid all of the (admittedly annoying) word salad, the "Claude" in this satire identified the reason the requested change was hard: someone(s) at some point had hijacked the button markup for other purposes. Un-doing all of that kind of mess is never a trivial change, and probably requires someone with more coding expertise / knowledge of the code than the given prompts reveal the putative user to be.

AI isn't magic, and it won't (or, at least, doesn't yet) enable anyone to do All The Things.

tsukikage 2 hours ago

Have you ever considered that "well, it works on MY machine!" is perhaps not the most helpful response to people voicing frustration at something that is not working as they expect for them?

827a 2 hours ago

I don’t know where you picked up the idea that my intention was to be helpful. I’m only mirroring the intentionality behind whoever created this site; they obviously also had no intention of being helpful, as is the case with many discussions concerning AIs limitations.

llm_nerd 6 hours ago

Seriously, I use Claude Code all day and have zero issues with this.

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.

invalidusernam3 5 hours ago

Claude is great, but I have come to really hate the way it "talks". It's so irritating and there seems to be no way to make it speak normal English. So many claudisms in every response

catapart 5 hours ago

same. none of the available prompts are what I would prompt claude with and I get way better results than this. makes sense to me why the provided prompts result in the simulated outcomes. garbage in, garbage out.

madibo3156 5 hours ago

Part skeptic and part zetetic, what prompt would you have used?

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?

crazygringo 4 hours ago

I dunno, but in my experience Claude looks at all the levers in your codebase, understands what they do, and then generally figures out how to achieve the desired end result.

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.

jaggederest 4 hours ago

The other thing that I think a lot of people run into is that they launch it into a completely human-built system with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and expect run #1 to be perfect.

You have to change the system so that the AI understands it, via establishing what your beliefs are, how those are reflected in values (especially important if you have e.g. compliance needs), how those values are reflected in the operational and strategic levels, and then a variety of tactical behavior coaching. For example, I ban 2>/dev/null - super tactical, and I say I value simplicity over covering every edge case - a very broad generalization.

plorkyeran 2 hours ago

"Make the Add to Cart button blue" is fine as a first step. When that doesn't have the desired result, I would simply revert the change, start a new session, and do something like "Give the Add to Cart button its own theme separate from the default button theme. Make the color for this new theme blue.". If this gives almost the correct result (e.g. it's not the shade of blue I want) I'd do a followup like "change the Add to Cart theme from #00FF00 to #16b8c4" with no implication that the previous step was wrong. If it's wildly incorrect I'd start over and try to specify in more detail about what exactly should happen.

If I don't understand why changing one button changed them all, I would use an entirely separate session to ask questions about how the site theming works. The fact that the site has a bunch of weird coupling between themes is useful information, and if I don't know how to resolve that I'd ask Claude for ideas about how to safely eliminate the coupling, and once it proposes a reasonable idea tell it to implement that.

The two big things here I'd never do is use emotional languages in prompts, and I'd never tell Claude to revert changes and try again. Once the incorrect change is in the context it's poisoning all of your future results.

mort96 5 hours ago

It "makes sense" that plainly telling the chat bot to make one button blue makes the whole site blue? It "makes sense" that correcting it and repeating 3 times that no, only the one button should be blue, should make the button a gradient and start a philosophical discussion around the nature of "blue"?

Wow, you AI people really have a negative view of the technology y'all are trying to sell as the next Jesus

kstenerud 2 hours ago

If the agent's change has such a catastrophic effect, the first thing you do is tell it to explain why its change had that effect.

Once you understand what the problem is, you can give it better instructions. If the architecture is shit, the agent is going to have a rough time of it.

catapart 14 minutes ago

I'm not trying to sell the technology at all, much less as a messiah, and I absolutely have a negative view of it. It's a token predictor - nothing more, nothing less. If you treat it like it is supposed to "make sense" of things, you get predictably bad results. It "makes sense" that if you don't make the sense for it, it will do poorly, because it's a glorified auto-complete.

selestify 3 hours ago

So how would you prompt it instead? Because that's exactly how I prompt it, because any reasonable human being would know exactly what I mean by "Make the shopping button blue", and I am sick and tired of getting shitty results.

Bjartr 2 hours ago

The first prompt is fine, it's the following ones that are poor.

> Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button.

> Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button

Neither of these is an instruction to fix the problem, they're treating the AI like a person and telling it what it did wrong, expecting the implied admonishment to be enough to steer it back. But without an actual instruction, it just goes and does whatever it thinks will help, which is often arbitrary.

The response I would have used in this situation is

"The Cancel button is also blue now. Make sure the color change is only scoped to the Add to Cart button"

Most of the available responses throughout this "skit" are similar cases of expressing frustration first and guiding the result second.

Skip the emotion and say exactly what you want, and nothing besides that.

sunaurus 5 hours ago

You're lucky! I remember several sessions pretty similar to this.

Usually just restarting the session helps, though.

whalabi 5 hours ago

I've definitely had it behave exactly like this at times and it's infuriating. I think it depends on your codebase.

johnisgood 5 hours ago

Same. I have never seen it (Opus) act like this either. EVER. Not in the past 3 years at least.

Be specific.

That said, GPT always acts up even if I am specific, but I only have the free tier there.

singularity2001 5 hours ago

Of course it's not THAT bad, but you can't tell me that you didn't recognize many of the funny turns and twists of the "story". It gets more convincing if you deliberately pick the ambiguous versions.

kstenerud an hour ago

I never prompt an agent like that, so no.

First thing I do when something goes wrong is tell the agent to stop and diagnose. You can't prompt effectively without three proper information.

iLoveOncall 4 hours ago

This is EXACTLY my experience with it. Ask for it to change one line of code and see it invoke 20 tools and burn 300K tokens before updating the line and adding 50 extra lines of JavaDoc.

Only since 4.8 though.

herrherrmann an hour ago

… and run all kinds of scripts to verify the code, ignoring any pre-configured linters.

wesselbindt 3 hours ago

Fair point! This post is not a load bearing and accurate description of Claude's workings, it's satire.

yieldcrv 2 hours ago

reminds me of November 2025

cloverich 2 hours ago

because you are now getting coded products written in large by people who do not have technical foundations, so the way they interact with and even prompt the model is different. We all know how to fix this scenario; be more specific, or diagnose the abstraction mix ups and straighten those out.

Ask for change A and get unwanted change B happens all the time with bad programmers and tradgedy of the commons (ie poorly architected, no restraint) codebases.

Most normies dont know about this stuff.

yonatan8070 10 minutes ago

Yeah, a while back I did a small project with a stack I wasn't familiar with, and it was really non-critical. So I decided to vibe code it. The experience was pretty similar to this satirical example. But when I work in areas in which I'm paying attention and understand the stack better, I don't experience this nearly as much

JohnMakin 4 hours ago

> Worth naming: the Add to cart button is still black.

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.

GreenWatermelon 2 hours ago

I've come to call this language "Claudese English" (or Claudish)

Recently I've started using GLM models and noticed they aren't very claudish (just a little bit, compared to DeepSeek which is extremely claudish)

oujiii 6 hours ago

Haha this is spot on how I've been feeling lately. I find it unbearable to work with this model for this reason... any trick out there you can do to steer it not to overcomplicate things? I guess Codex here I come

RGS1811 6 hours ago

`/model claude-opus-4-7`

jerf 5 hours ago

There's also the fact that you are in control. You are not obligated to take the AI's commits. I don't even let it commit much of the time because commit time is review time for me. If it changes the button blue and does four other things, you can just take the blue change and discard the rest. It can't stop you.

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

alentred 6 hours ago

-= CAUTION, SPOILERS =-

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!

100percentjake 3 hours ago

"Confirming the button contains no cyanide" sent my sides firmly into orbit. This is fantastic.

techscruggs 6 hours ago

I never really understood what being "triggered" was like until now.

nonethewiser 3 hours ago

I dont find this to be indicative of Claude (opus?) at all. My experience doesnt lead me to think it would change a cancel button to blue if I ask it to change an "Add to Cart" button to blue.

I assume this is just a contrived example?

paimapi 3 hours ago

I think it's best read as a humorous piece of creative fiction and you can employ your suspension of disbelief for this ride

data-ottawa 3 hours ago

It’s a contrived example, but also not very far from the mark.

The spinner with random claudisms is what makes the game, mixed with Claude helpfully deciding to pick up some tasks along the way.

I feel like most of my conversations with Claude lately are a battle of “I am a technical user, share technical details, but not random superfluous gibberish”

nonethewiser 27 minutes ago

This hasn’t been my experience at all

butterNaN an hour ago

This is very close to my experience with Opus 5. Opus 4.6 was the last sane one for me, everything after that seems to have been designed to churn as many tokens as possible, more so with Opus 5

andremendes 6 hours ago

I lost it when it finally did the right thing, but then it added a never-requested gradient to the button. Very good!

fractorial 6 hours ago

I’m impressed you had the patience to even make it that far!

dwringer 6 hours ago

I only made it through the first round of prompt selection; both options for the second step were equally pointless and not at all prompts I would ever expect to result in a constructive outcome. In my experience, telling the model it screwed up without specifically addressing, unambiguously, how to fix it, only leads to more suffering. If this page illustrates nothing else, I think it shows the immense downside of trying to use simple one or two sentence prompts.

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.

teiferer 5 hours ago

> In my experience, telling the model it screwed up without specifically addressing, unambiguously, how to fix it, only leads to more suffering.

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.

selestify 3 hours ago

How is "Make the shopping button blue" not specific? Any human with a lick of digital common sense would be able to understand what I obviously mean. How am I supposed to anticipate every single way the AI could possibly misinterpret a simple fucking instruction like that?

arbirk 5 hours ago

One thing I have to be honest about, and it's mine.. The one thing I would check before... do you want to do that? Say go an and will do it without the check While checking I found 3 vulnerabilities and 2 potential optimizations of which I fixed 2 and 1. Do you want me to file the other as issue, or stop for the day? We have done <lists a weeks worth of work> this morning. I feel you need a break

pablopudding 6 hours ago

I’m laughing and crying at the same time. This is what work feels like now. Thank you, well done!

matsemann 6 hours ago

Yeah, I don't mind using AI to help me at work, but having to "talk" with this stupid crap all day will send me to an early pension or something. Can't be healthy in the long run.

xd1936 4 hours ago

Laughed out loud at the overly cautious Terms of Service that it generated for "Cyanide Blue", the color it made up

inerte 5 hours ago

To be fair I’ve worked on human programmed systems where similar “it should be a half point story” requests would be met with snark by the engineers and take 2 sprints.

I guess we are all PMs now.

inerte 5 hours ago

Also likely, devs took shortcuts to deliver fast. Now to make the button blue they need to differentiate primary buttons from others.

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.

mring33621 5 hours ago

Just understand that every requested change results in a game of whack-a-mole.

commandlinefan an hour ago

Is this a problem with Claude updating code that a human wrote, though? Would Claude do better on code that it started on its own? Humans have a bad tendency to write unmaintainable code (usually at the behest of managers breathing down their necks to HURRY UP even when it doesn't matter). If the code had been designed with good coding practices from the beginning, I wonder if Claude would have struggled so much with it.

herrherrmann an hour ago

That implies that Claude writes better code by default, which isn’t necessarily true. Especially as projects get bigger, you can easily end up with unmaintainable LLM-written code if you don’t actively intervene and know a cleaner way.

gwbas1c 6 hours ago

I don't get who this is making fun of:

- 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.

kmoser 5 hours ago

It's reductio ad absurdum, satirizing the Claude experience.

snkline 5 hours ago

Seems to be getting a polarized response. I quite enjoyed the it, but I do think the creator should have made it clearer that a) it is in fact a joke site and b) it does not consist of actual Claude responses.

It is easy to misinterpret this site, and therefore not "get" the joke.

syntaxing 6 hours ago

> 23 agents total.

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).

chrisgarand 6 hours ago

I heard this was a thing when listening to a Theo podcast, he mentioned to add a "Only use subagents if the user explicitly requests them" line in your agents.md file.

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).

epistasis 4 hours ago

One note for those still using the Claude system for chats: there's no system to get generated images, spreadsheets, etc. out of the system. They claim it's a "security concern" to provide that data to you, as if they are protecting you by refusing to follow data export laws.

I'm hesitant to email their data emails, as it's common for companies to delete all data upon any request, instead of providing data as they are required to.

chrismorgan 6 hours ago

I’ve never used any of these tools. Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things. For my sanity.

(I am genuinely uncertain, though I presume it’s at least somewhat exaggerated.)

dd8601fn 6 hours ago

No. It’s just a bunch of jokes rolled up into a big exaggeration.

It’s funny because there are elements of truth in each bit of it, though.

retsibsi 5 hours ago

> Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things

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.

selestify 3 hours ago

The behavior, while slightly exaggerated, rings entirely true for me. From the other comments in this thread, it seems I am prompting poorly in a similar way to the options offered.

I am guessing you prompt differently than what is shown in the game?

mrguyorama 2 hours ago

The behavior is congruent with my experience in abstract, in that all models will regularly do things you didn't ask for, will regularly go "above and beyond" by their training I expect, will regularly make changes that are entirely orthogonal to the change you asked for.

I've worked with Opus and Sonnet daily, and they are pretty great at generating functions and modules and components that have clear boundaries of concern, but I've recently been working some research tasks into our infrastructure and code and it seems impossible to coerce Sonnet into making only specific changes to a document you are working on.

It also blatantly ignores instructions as a rule. "Don't disassemble java class files, just ask me to pull in the source code" worked less than half the time. The Intellij Copilot plugin just doesn't use the AGENTS.md and similar files, and there doesn't seem to be any meaningful activity in the bug reports of same. "Don't modify code unless I tell you to" had bad adherence as well.

It also will read documentation and inform you that it says the opposite. This problem happened to me across models, across model updates, across months of real time. There's a specific example that I will not mention to avoid having it be trained on specifically. A distinct but similar problem is that it will take bad documentation and just pretend it has a good understanding. Claude gave me absurdly wrong descriptions for Splunk alert settings with absolute confidence.

I don't think any agent can reliably figure out "I don't know"

wildzzz 4 hours ago

Sometimes you do get stuck on these weird tangents that feel like bike shedding. You end up wasting tokens because you left the AI to make decisions on ambiguous directions and then have to spend time diving down to fix it into what you actually wanted. Honestly it's not too different than working with people who don't exactly understand your grand plan but are technically adept. They can build whatever you want but only if you are clear with your instructions or have already developed the plan with them. Just like if you hired someone to make an app for you and it didn't quite do what you wanted it to, it's going to be expensive to make large changes. So you need to research (or at least have a conversation with the AI) about frameworks that best fit your needs and have the flexibility to add or change features after the core parts are stood up. It also helps to stage the project in phases so you're not distracting the AI from the critical aspects with aesthetic tweaks.

theandrewbailey 4 hours ago

I haven't been professionally responsible for code since before AI started eating everything, and haven't touched AI in the meantime. Is this representative of the BS that everyone else here puts up with on a day-to-day basis? Did we collectively burn trillions of dollars for this?

t43562 3 hours ago

Sometimes, yes, but obviously not everyone. I suspect that it depends what you're doing and how. Perhaps the AI has more difficulty understanding what some people want than what others want. I certainly have had a milder version of this and it neutralises the value of the tool because it keeps trying to do things you don't want in a way you don't want it to do them. I get annoyed at having to write huge explanations of how to do something and end up doing it myself sometimes.

Foobar8568 3 hours ago

With weak models, yeah if you get things compiled, with any Opus 4.6 or Codex, not really...

It's a sad parody that people will take as reality.

brap 6 hours ago

How do you manage your frustration in these interactions? I often find myself getting pissed off

ceejayoz 6 hours ago

The goal of my personal harness is to get to the point where I never actually talk to Claude directly for that very reason.

selestify 3 hours ago

Is your harness available for install somewhere?

Surely you still have to give feedback to Claude. How do you do that without talking to Claude directly? By using a different model? But wouldn't that AI have no more common sense than Claude?

ceejayoz an hour ago

It's extremely bespoke.

Initial dev required talking to Claude. Now I add a ticket in the board, it makes me a mockup/writeup, I approve, and it gets me a temporary webserver, iOS/Android build, etc. to verify it.

Review loops, agents that enforce my pet peeves and testing/debugging processes, etc. all run automatically... and then Codex strips down the prose at the end. There's not zero AI generated output, but it's already been critiqued and verified by a whole cluster of independent actors before it gets to me. When I have feedback, I file a ticket.

I wanted to get out of the "what the fuck, why?!" loop. Now I let the agents handle that.

gonzalohm 6 hours ago

I stop using AI and do the job manually. I normally give AI one shot at the task. If it fails then it's not saving me any time

Sohcahtoa82 2 hours ago

If you know how to write it manually, then do it.

In my experience, Claude Code is great at making a first-pass at a project, but once you start asking it to make changes, it explodes. A bug fix that should only be 2 lines turns into adding 3 functions totaling 100 lines.

Something as simple as "make the button blue" should be done manually.

Nevermark 5 hours ago

Funny exercise.

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...