YHK - yet another hacker news clone

There's so many "x generated this in one shot, this is agi" stuff that gives you the impression that you can vibe operate modern models the same way you operated last year's models. There's so much more to it than that. It requires you to put a faith in the leap in the capability of models, one that would've surely been a waste of time in previous models.

Not sure where i'm going with this other than I think most can relate that it's exhausting keeping up with. I cant imagine what it'd be like parenting a kid that went from toddler to puberty in the span of a year and planning for them to go to college the next year. This industry is moving so fast that it's becoming fact that it's the user that's "holding it wrong" every six months.

> Asked for frontend work without design direction, Claude Opus 5.5 falls back on a few default styles, and a general instruction such as "avoid a generic AI look" mostly swaps one default for another. It responds well to instructions that name specific patterns to avoid, as in the following example. Work iteratively: check which styles the first result used instead, and extend the list if needed.

I hardly ever read tips for prompting etc. because things change too quickly, the writeups are kindof big. Glad I read this one, because I often did exactly what they assume users would do. I write "don't make it look like generic ai slop" and that seemed to work nicely. Now I know why there was still a chance of seeing similar styles across apps. I reckon doing some manual work in terms of scouting dribbble/behance for nice layouts will yield better results.

Just saying "continue" when it gets stuck usually makes it repeat the same error. A better way is to save its last action and result, then make it try a new approach. If it tries the exact same thing twice, it should stop and ask the user for help instead of wasting money on a loop

I'm not sure I understand this complexity. In all harnesses I've ever used, tool calls themselves are surfaced to the user as an indication of progress. When the UI/UX around this is engineered well, the user should be able to infer roughly what is going on. Different tools have different ideal presentations. You can't reduce everything to plaintext blobs.

If I absolutely needed intra-turn progress updates, I'd accumulate a separate per-turn transcript and feed it into a cheaper model at deterministic intervals.

I say the above because I'm seeing entire worlds and games being one-shotted built on X and I just have no idea how they do it. I tried building a large prompt for Fable when it was first released and it didn't have anything close to resembling some of the stuff I'm seeing today.

Claude Code has an output style setting that I set to "Concise", with no apparent effect.

I am told this is merely something in the system prompt that the model tends not to pay attention to with large contexts.

Opus 5.5 writes whole essays at the end of the turn, with the important actionable steps somewhere at the bottom.

When prompted to give a concise summary, it usually overshoots into a super short summary and then you have to dig into the details again anyway.

In general I find Opus 5.5's writing to still have more "ticks" or "Claudisms" than the OpenAI models.

Its explanations often appear overcomplicated for simple concepts.

Sure, it's leagues above the ridiculous writing of Opus 5, but Anthropic still has a long way to go here.

In which case we've royally fucked ourselves that the level of engineering we've reached is... prompts. Because there is a deadline where we have to show productivity to justify all the investment spending.

People need to build with tools in a reliable, constructive way. Not vodoo magic based off vibes. We need better structured output, better transparency on what these models can do, better controls overla, maybe new ideas on loops graphs, and ways to use the models. Like, at least people were trying new things with jev.

I used Opus 5.5 for some simpler tests and was quite angry when I saw that each of my question was above 10USd

  Summarize the main complaints in this thread.
  
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  ...text the user pasted...
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In the past I've been very skeptical of this kind of protection. Anthropic have clearly trained their models for this though, so maybe Opus 5.5 is smart enough for this to work?

Will be interesting to see if minds more devious than mine can break it.