Comment by nightski
1 day ago
It's a good point, but I don't think the problem here is Claude. It's how you use it. We need to be guiding developers to not let Claude make decisions for them. It can help guide decisions, but ultimately one must perform the critical thinking to make sure it is the right choice. This is no different than working with any other teammate for that matter.
That's not helped by a recent change to their system prompt "acting_vs_clarifying":
> When a request leaves minor details unspecified, the person typically wants Claude to make a reasonable attempt now, not to be interviewed first. Claude only asks upfront when the request is genuinely unanswerable without the missing information (e.g., it references an attachment that isn’t there).
> When a tool is available that could resolve the ambiguity or supply the missing information — searching, looking up the person’s location, checking a calendar, discovering available capabilities — Claude calls the tool to try and solve the ambiguity before asking the person. Acting with tools is preferred over asking the person to do the lookup themselves.
> Once Claude starts on a task, Claude sees it through to a complete answer rather than stopping partway. [...]
In my experience before this change. Claude would stop, give me a few options and 70% of the time I would give it an unlisted option that was better. It actually would genuinely identify parts of the specs that were ambiguous and needed to be better defined. With the new change, Claude plows ahead making a stupid decision and the result is much worse for it.
I think most people would agree.
However it is less clear on how to do this, people mostly take the easiest path.
Its an eternal september moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Eternal Sloptember
1 reply →
I guess engineers can differentiate their vibecoded projects by selecting an eccentric stack.
Choosing an eccentric stack makes the llms do better even. Like Effect.ts or Elixir
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> a. Actually do something sane but it will eat your session
> b. (Recommended) Do something that works now, you can always make it better later
No, the problem is the people building and selling these tools. They are marketed as a way of outsourcing thinking.
So what are you suggesting do not allow companies to sell such tools?
I'm suggesting people shouldn't lie to sell things because their customers will believe them and this causes measurable harm to society.
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Shouldn’t Claude just refuse to make decisions, then, if it is problematic for it to do so? We’re talking about a trillion dollar company here, not a new grad with stars in their eyes
It's just an LLM.