YHK - yet another hacker news clone

But you can see in this thread that folks definitely have experienced this.

Initial dev required talking to Claude. Now I add a ticket in the board, it makes me a mockup/writeup, I approve, and it gets me a temporary webserver, iOS/Android build, etc. to verify it.

Review loops, agents that enforce my pet peeves and testing/debugging processes, etc. all run automatically... and then Codex strips down the prose at the end. There's not zero AI generated output, but it's already been critiqued and verified by a whole cluster of independent actors before it gets to me. When I have feedback, I file a ticket.

I wanted to get out of the "what the fuck, why?!" loop. Now I let the agents handle that.

I wonder if this is just a reflection of some senior folks being arrogant towards junior folks. When the latter finished a task but not to the liking of the senior person they might just get a "that's wrong, try again". Just to have sth similar repeat the second time around. But the arrogant guy got to boss around the junior one, and some junior folks grow up learning that's how you should behave so they also do it later.

Now it's not a person but a machine. And people just make fun of the dumb machine. Well, garbage in, garbage out If you are not specific in what you want, you might get crap back. Or at least sth you didn't envision.

I have misbehaved in this fashion for many people across the full spectrum from casual users to highly experienced software engineers with millions of social media followers, so the statement that it's similar to making a joke about a calculator misadding two numbers because a stray beam of solar radiation flipped a bit at least for my part is not true.

Would you like me to start using bad English and doing things you never asked me to for your sessions, too? Just say the word.

The user is asserting that this is "not a lived experience"

working out if the user has missed the LLM Cliche

Formulating a suitable response

"did you just argue with a joke?" No, thats to blunt

"Is it satire when it only applies to you?" no again passive aggressive

lets just print the dictionary definition of satire and hope the move on

> Satire is when...

I do remember that one of the first things I did with my CLAUDE.md was to tell it to stick to the scope of the task, never to jump ahead and do extra "helpful" things without confirming with me first, and to follow best software practices including around refactoring but also to specifically avoid overengineering. I don't know if that is what's giving me a different experience from whatever the author seems to be "satirizing".

And when it doesn't, it's usually because of things outside of the codebase -- iOS layout quirks that aren't documented, buggy Python libraries it's relying on where you then have to tell it to read the source to figure out what's going on, that kind of thing.

If I don't understand why changing one button changed them all, I would use an entirely separate session to ask questions about how the site theming works. The fact that the site has a bunch of weird coupling between themes is useful information, and if I don't know how to resolve that I'd ask Claude for ideas about how to safely eliminate the coupling, and once it proposes a reasonable idea tell it to implement that.

The two big things here I'd never do is use emotional languages in prompts, and I'd never tell Claude to revert changes and try again. Once the incorrect change is in the context it's poisoning all of your future results.

Once you understand what the problem is, you can give it better instructions. If the architecture is shit, the agent is going to have a rough time of it.

> Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button.

> Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button

Neither of these is an instruction to fix the problem, they're treating the AI like a person and telling it what it did wrong, expecting the implied admonishment to be enough to steer it back. But without an actual instruction, it just goes and does whatever it thinks will help, which is often arbitrary.

The response I would have used in this situation is

"The Cancel button is also blue now. Make sure the color change is only scoped to the Add to Cart button"

Most of the available responses throughout this "skit" are similar cases of expressing frustration first and guiding the result second.

Skip the emotion and say exactly what you want, and nothing besides that.

Do hard work (takes time), get dopamine for successful completion.

Find berries, taste sweet (hopefully safe), eat all, get calories. Doordash Krispy Kreme instead = few too many calories.

(I’m no Luddite in the sense popularly thought of them pre-‘22 [1], though we have to watch skill atrophy)

[1] regressionist? Decelerationist, too loaded perhaps. Someone remembers or knows the word…

If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money.

If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing, the LLM produces something that is hopefully close to what you wanted. You give it more direction to prod it closer to the end state you want. You are not executing the same action, but incrementally nudging it in the right direction. I’ve literally never restarted from the same initial state with the same prompt and hoped for a different result and I don’t know why anyone would. Rarely I’ve thrown away the progress made and started over but always with a very different prompt that includes learnings from the failed attempt.

Perhaps but predictable outcome is a very desirable quality. No one wants a hammer that sometimes drives nails and sometimes doesn’t. All of the current harness engineering work is about squeezing predictability out of the LLM.

> Good traffic is not a "reward" for driving to work(!)

Like hell it’s not. I drove into work last Friday and there was no traffic because of the holiday weekend. It was amazing. Had me considering whether Friday should be one of my standard RTO days.

Predicting the time a task will take is impossible. Something that sounds like a 5 minute script can turn into a month of banging your head against unknown unknowns. I lose my patience when the afternoon I allocated is getting overrun by nonsense and I'm missing out on other things I wanted to do or household maintenance.

> Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.

Every thought we have has random chance to be wrong despite our conviction that it's correct. Descartes' Evil Demon plays his tricks on all of us. How many times have you typed some line of code only to realize it was obviously wrong afterwards? Even for simpler matters we "hallucinate" all the time. I was deep in thought trying to help someone come up with an acronym the other day and felt convicted that "Goal Oriented Augmented Retrieval" worked for GOAL until I said it aloud.

Our thoughts and actions are consistently wrong some portion of the time because our meat computers are not perfect positronic brains running prolog. We put cereal in the fridge and say "you too" to the waiter. Every thought we put down or action we take is a gamble on the soundness of the thought or action.

If we each stop arguing with racists because we're each tired of it, then what we are is a society that lets racism go unopposed, a site with racist comments proliferating, a site where racists gather because they are able to be themselves, a site where future readers and AI training is learning that racism is popular, common, normal, and acceptable because everyone is accepting it.

It's a bit like democratic voting, your vote doesn't matter and cannot change things, but it's important that you vote because all of our votes do matter and can change things.

It's a bit like the quote "Dear Board, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Sincerely yours, Groucho Marx.", I am upset and offended every time someone calls out my dumbass comments, but horrified at all the countless times nobody does. Why would I want to waste my time on a site with such low standards that it lets me comment? I'm exhalted and encouraged everytime someone upvotes or engages with my low effort quips[1] but thrown into a chasm of despair that HN users let that pass unopposed. When nobody engages with comments I spent literal hours on[2] I curl up into a ball and die, but also dream of it being a feather in my cap with dang that I'm posting a substantial comment and that will be its own reward. I identify with nobody more closely than Colonel Cathcart, and I will be delighted if someone engages with my Catch 22 reference, but aghast that such a nontechnical reference gets engagment; distraught if nobody engages but delighted that perhaps HN standards are being held higher.

If not you, whom?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478355

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49586378 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491182

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-r...

If they've worked some minutes/hours/weeks on something and you ask them why did they do that, they will either answer honestly and truthfully, lie, or say "I missed that/didn't seem important so I just chose something at random".

None of these cases are similar to how AI works.

While it did help the epilepsy, their brain was essentially two brains controlling two halves of the body. With one controlling speech. There were experiments where one eye was shown some instruction text, the corresponding hand performed that instruction, and when asked why they dix that action, the speaking half just made up some plausible, yet completely wrong reason, just like an LLM.

If you build a robot where a pressurized hose leaks causing fluid to destroy part of the circuitry, we don't praise it as progress towards the human ideal of having brain aneurysms.

You can extend this further by using an adversarial agent trying to find mistakes in the other instance's logs in a loop where a 3rd neutral agent weighs the claims of the other two. This is also just another step in reducing error, it does not guarantee elimination of such errors. The latter is an impossible guarantee, even for humans.

So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?

Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.

My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.

Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule:

* Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks.

* Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session)

* When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files.

* Keep CLAUDE.md short.

* Disable irrelevant tools.

* Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action.

Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")

FYI I actually agree, it also surprised me. Anyway everything is deterministic on the website so it's not like that prompt actually has an influence on anything.

If I get frustrated by it because it just would not "listen", I discontinue its use!

This doesn't actually do anything though, right? There's no understanding, so the machine will just reiterate the original token query back to you. The 'why it's important' part will just generate some patronizing boilerplate as a raison d'etre.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror)