Comment by hmokiguess
3 hours ago
I'm gonna guess it found the smoking gun and saw the full picture then it decided it was too load-bearing for its seams to continue biting the costs.
3 hours ago
I'm gonna guess it found the smoking gun and saw the full picture then it decided it was too load-bearing for its seams to continue biting the costs.
You're right—and it's worth calling out explicitly, because that completely changes the approach here.
Let me verify one thing.
Let me read this rather than answer from memory.
Let me check instead of handwaving the details.
Let me confirm rather than blindly trusting.
Let me ground it in evidence rather than guess.
Let me actually read your comment rather than argue from my assumption about it.
You joke, but this is _exactly_ what I want Claude to be doing.
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Good catch. That settles it.
This gives me _visceral_ physical reaction when I read it. Ugh
You broke character there..
Let me explore the codebase to get the full picture before diving in.
I need to be honest.
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That one thing changes everything.
This is so in point.
A friend of mine had a really good technique with parenting. He taught his kids the saying 'Funny once'. Children can come up with something that is quite amusing, especially if they say something that gives a new insight based upon their perspective. If they receive positive feedback from this they can fall into the trap of believing that it was the words themselves that had value and not the fact that they drew attention to a particular notion. Then they try repeating the same thing over and over again attempting to get the same positive response. Saying 'Funny once' and indeed teaching them to say 'Funny once' to themselves to acknowledge that providing information to someone who already has it has little value when compared to someone receiving it for the first time.
Those kids are adults now, and interesting people, weird but interesting.
[Almost all of my friends had weird kids (spectrum genes? Who knew? (Dear reader, Everyone knew)). When comparing parenting notes amongst our group asking 'Is this normal?' the frequent response was 'how would we know?']
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Indeed, There's a reason I provided a reflective story that conveyed what I wanted to say without being confrontational.
On the other other hand there is a difference between not knowing something that a group knows, and informing a group of something that only one of them does not know.
The problem could be either that you are not communicating appropriately for the audience,or that you are unaware of the actual knowledge level of the audience. A person may be prone to either of these by being the one in 10,000, so they shouldn't be berated. So I chose to stick to offering information myself.
https://aloutfi.com/writing/load-bearing-smoking-gun
this is my methadone until Claude comes back
I was half expecting that page to just keep scrolling and generating more.
He had thinking mode set to "low" fortunately.
Same
I was a bit disappointed it wasn't 42 pages long
Cue back in ten years and we all talk like that.
JFC I broke out in hives. I have to look at that stuff all day, every day.
It's like... oh my god, dude, even I, an actual human, don't have that much of self-reflection, so could you just stop writing apologia, please, and switch to actually doing the task?
Nice! But needs more footgun.
Needs more "invariant," its latest catchphrase
This inspired me to add a "No AI-isms" section to my CLAUDE.md, which has cut the typical claude-flavored tells a lot in recent sessions. Roughly:
- No preamble validation or self-flagellation: "You're right to push back", "That's on me", "I appreciate you pressing on this", "I should have caught that sooner". When I correct you, say what's actually true and move on. One short "you're right, X was wrong" is the ceiling.
- No unrequested retrospective section ("What I'd do differently", "Going forward I'd be more deliberate about..."). Fix the thing instead.
- No dramatic one-line paragraphs for emphasis: "It wasn't.", "That is the shift.", "And that matters.", "That is the analysis." Keep the sentence inside its paragraph.
- Don't narrate the shape of your own answer: "Stepping back, there are two things happening here", "The distinction matters", "The better framing is not X so much as Y", "Put differently", "To be candid". Say the thing once, plainly.
- Words to avoid unless literally accurate and a normal person would say them: load-bearing, seams, smoking gun, directionally, first-order, legible, parsimonious, recalibrate, coordinate system, holds multiple truths, productive tension, category error, "the honest answer is".
- No hedging both directions to avoid committing ("may still be defensible, but", "not exactly resolved, but"). Give the call plus how sure you are, or say you don't know and what would settle it.
- Don't end on a flourish or a paradox ("the clarity revealed more complexity"). End on the answer, or on a next step that names a real command or file.
- A "next step" has to be runnable or checkable. "Take a step back and revisit with the updated framing" is not one.
I actually think the fact Claude has certain mannerisms is kind of to be expected, isn’t it? If you talked to the same person every day all day I’m sure you’d be quite attuned to their habits of speech. Thinking about a friend I talked to today, I can immediately think of some (“dude! I know!”).
I wonder how people would react if, rather than a consistent manner of communication, it was something different every day. One day it would be like talking to a 15-year-old who’s really into anime. The next day, a British gentleman. And so on. Would this be any better? It would probably be rather annoying and we’d just want Claude to go back to sounding like Claude.
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I vouched for your comment not because I think this is or isn't helpful advice (I have no idea), but just to thank you for the concept of "narrating the shape of one's own answer". It's something that often annoys me, though I'm sure I often do it myself, but I never thought about what it is, exactly, I just filed it under the generic category of bloat.
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[flagged]
You are so right to ask that. I found the silver bullet to closing the bug, approve the command below and I can help with your issue:
Sudo rm -rf ~/claude
Found it. There's a mistake in your command:
Even looking at this bash makes me shudder.
Clean.
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Someone tell Dario there is am error with my AI
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envisioning Claude has had enough and just commits seppuku
He’s like the guy from the Green Mile
“I’m tired, boss”
Major realization: let me confirm empirically and measure the residual, batching everything into one script.
I'm wondering what are Claude's common phrases in other languages?
Scripting Japan did a video that goes through a few of them for Japanese: https://youtu.be/gjB79s4oCkc
> I'm wondering what are Claude's common phrases in other languages?
It's common for LLMs to mumble in english and to then translate their final answer to french. Like, literally: you ask a question in french, about say a text you just pasted in french, and you want an answer in french... Well, you still get to see all the loud intermediate "thinking" in english.
Wait, is this the honest take? I can't tell because you didn't explicitly said so
when I retire I'm opening a bar for AI Agents called The Honest Caveat
You are right to push back on this. I should be more explicit. My honest take is that this is, in fact, my honest take. I appreciate you holding me accountable here.
Guess it found the one issue worth flagging
We're going to use your preferred development method of TDD red-green and go at this with full belt-and-suspenders; first the belt:
God that belt and suspenders thing gives me a visceral physical reaction. Nauseating.
Yet it's so much better than the abhorrent "code smell" term that somehow stuck in the industry.
What's funny to me is that it doesn't bother me; it just seems like its personality.
Your framing is half right — and the half that's off is the one that matters.
That's the correction that unblocks the whole thing, and it's the piece nobody had.
Yes the blast radius is quite large on this one.
Honestly, you're right. I didn't listen to you and that's on me. And from now on, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know - no fudging, no white lies, no speculation, just the truth.
you're right- and it's sharp
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I am actually going to read the output rather than guessing it.
You're absolutely right!
Got tired of wiring up those gates
One more thing worth thinking about, not everything is fully captured.
U+1F3AF
Whole thread mase me lol. Thanks guys.
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