Comment by wrs
14 days ago
As a general rule with LLMs, don't just tell it to do something if you actually need to make sure it gets done. Use a hook script to make it do that, or use the history that's already there (transcripts of all sessions are retained in ~/.claude, for example). There are innumerable scripts out there to parse these, or your agent will whip one up for you in 5 minutes.
I was hoping to get them access to a specific tool like GitHub Copilot via GitHub Education, but when I looked, sign-ups were paused, so I went the tool-agnostic approach. Even during installation a lot of them were telling me how "chat" told them to fix their installation issues (but some were clearly using an alternative to ChatGPT, specifically).
However, I see from other comments on this post that I may need to include a CLAUDE.md as a copy (and could maybe just leave the .history part out of that version?).
worth clarifying "chat" is actually (linguistically) completely separate from a shorthand for ChatGPT. Livestreamers (e.g. on twitch/youtube) often talk to "chat", the people watching. Visually, they're just narrating actions etc to a 3rd party who is not present.
This has leaked into (some) younger people's vocabulary. A particular example is saying "Chat is this real?"
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/chat-is-this-real
but some people use it more freely.
Ha, I have a 16 year old who yells "chat" often enough when online gaming to be familiar with that use.
I'm positive these students did use an LLM to get the help instead of crowdsourcing, but it is an interesting linguistic overlap.
And while I'm on my "old man" soapbox -- "look it up" and "search for it" somehow became "search it up" with the young people. I corrected my son for years before I started hearing college students also saying it that way...
8 replies →
Not entirely sure what your point is, but if you're implying that kids don't use "chat" to refer to any LLM (usually ChatGPT) then that's very wrong. It doesn't have anything to do with the usage of "chat" you described.
I don’t think this is right. Certainly one usage of “chat” is the livestream version, as you describe, but both Gen Z and Boomers use “chat” to refer to AI tools specifically