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Comment by hmokiguess

2 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.

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 to themselves '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://aloutfi.com/writing/load-bearing-smoking-gun

  • 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?

  • 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 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.

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

I'm wondering what are Claude's common phrases in other languages?

  • > 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

  • 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.

Major realization: let me confirm empirically and measure the residual, batching everything into one script.

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.

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.