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Comment by roarcher

9 hours ago

Oh god this has been driving me nuts since Opus 5 landed. Every docblock is filled with long-winded jargon explaining why this design is superior to some other design, which never existed as far as any dev who might read that comment is concerned.

22 comments

roarcher

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tehlike  7 hours ago

This has been a thing for long while, on codex too.

You ask it to do something, then tell it to do something in a different way, then it assumes it needs to do the refactor in a backward compatible way, or creates migrations for it etc.

  • theshrike79  1 hour ago

    This is why I started adding a PROJECT.md file to all my projects and a hook for claude to read it.

    It contains (Among other things) stuff like "this is a single user personal project, I'm the only user, this will never be open to the public internet" etc.

    It kinda-sorta tones down the proclivity to worry about backwards compatibility and slight edge cases where if someone has edited some template and the new code doesn't support it.

  • stelonix  2 hours ago

    Oh good I thought I was doing something wrong! Using ChatGPT web for planning, ask for a prompt then notice something weird in the prompt and whether I:

    1) use the edit in-place functionality; or

    2) ask it to rewrite to remove something

    It'll write the prompt as if the agent (codex) knew about the conversation and add "don't do X" etc. At first that bothered but I realized it doesn't really change the output so I stopped caring.

    Still, no experience is unique I guess.

  • Uptrenda  1 hour ago

    I remember when I was updating some formats for my apps data files and it ended up writing v2 and laying it on top of the old one. Ended up just telling it to delete the entire feature and start again. I do think claude.md instructions help though.

foolserrandboy  8 hours ago

Oh no, you said "landed"! It's dug into our brains!

  • doix  5 hours ago

    I hate that I have to change the way I write to avoid AI-isms. I loved using "load bearing" to describe weird code that you think you can delete but is actually holding everything together.

    Now people think I'm just parroting what Claude said. It sucks. I want my catch phrases back, I guess this is how em dash users felt

  • dag11  7 hours ago

    You could say it landed cleanly.

    • hexasquid  7 hours ago

      Good instinct. Fair challenge. This corrects my framing. It makes your point sharp. This is a significant finding. Positively confirmed. That settles it, and it flips the picture. Honest verdict - this is not small. Let me wire it in.

      4 replies →