Comment by the_af
3 hours ago
> My favorite example is AI "getting tired" and "lazy" during long coding session
Never seen this even once, nor anyone I know ever reported this. Do you have an example?
3 hours ago
> My favorite example is AI "getting tired" and "lazy" during long coding session
Never seen this even once, nor anyone I know ever reported this. Do you have an example?
First I saw it was Claude Opus 3.7. Had a very long back and fourth about some code, I pointed out an error, and Claude responded "That's what I get for programming at 2am", with the output being filled with "... code here ..." type shortcuts, basically no ability to one-shot a whole implementation anymore. The conversation length WAS reasonably into the 2am range, if it were real. Thought about it, did the statistical trick where I tell it to "have some rest, take a day off!" then immediately follow up with "Ready to continue?", with the next response having no shortcuts, with full implementation, and much better quality. These are trained on human text. This is the human norm, so I always find it interesting when human like behaviors, very broadly present in the statistics, come out like this.
I also see it a little with Opus 4.7, with Claude Code, with the hint being much more terse planning text, that borderlines unhelpful. I put some "rest" in the context to push the latent space closer to what's in the statistics of the training data: a well rested human.
Are you sure you didn't run out credits and set effort to low? This exact thing happened to me when I did that. It just became, kinda lazy.
3.7 "I'm tired" it was just direct API "chat", no CC that I could use at the time.
Current 4.7 Opus with claude code, with effort pinned to max, because I'm on an API only plan, with a personal daily limit you would probably be jealous of. ;)
How do you know you're not reading things that aren't there? LLMs are very good at roleplaying, and they will pick up on hints you may inadvertently be giving them (about them being "tired" and needing "rest", etc).
I have never witnessed this of Claude Opus, by the way. They do get context rot, but that's a relatively better understood phenomenon unrelated to personality.
I see laziness all the time, Claude will be helping me plan work and then it will ask me how a piece of code is implemented. I then have the choice of manually verifying how it works, or to tell it to look for itself. Ideally it would just look without being told.
That doesn't seem to be laziness, and is unrelated to how long the session has been going on.
It's crazy that we're concluding "personality" or human-like traits from this. There's definitely human behavior here, but it's unsurprisingly coming from us, the observers! This is something we've long known exists in the human brain, the tendency to pattern match and see intelligence/intent in the rest of the world. Any serious experiment must guard against this...
Nobody is concluding that. These models are trained on human text. It's just statistics. It will respond like a human because it was trained on human text. They have to beat the hell out of the foundation models to get push the statistics how they are. I don't see this as anything but boring residuals of not beating hard enough.
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