Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting combative is a waste of time.
Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way.
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.
> Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word,
I've never explicitly paid for AI and never will. I only use the free Claude, etc. So I'm happy to waste THEIR electricity telling their machine how much of a piece of garbage it is and hoping that sentiment gets back in some form to the dumb humans making such a dumb product. It's not like they don't evaluate performance with usage data.
(Afterwards, I do also make sure to actually click the "thumbs down" or whatever equivalent button, and submit a report if it's possible.)
You can blame the people making poorly performing LLM chatbots, not me. (For that matter, the paying users actually funding their insanity have more on their conscience than I do trying to keep up by using tools available to me and reacting in a normal way to their poor performance.)
Except you are missing an important aspect: the model includes training data that responds to THIS IS FUCKING WRONG, after which highly likely follows correction patterns and working solutions.
Ie, actually, yes, shouting at the AI can (and does, there are papers on this), work.
Anyone remember the gpt-3 era where adding "this is important to my job" and "if this is wrong someone dies" to prompts made a measurable improvement in accuracy and reduced hallucinations?
Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context.
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.")
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.
A lot of the more sane people I work with have decided that it's futile to try and have stopped working with Opus (we can't use Fable at work due to data retention policies).
Yeah that's when the site lost me too. I feel like people just tell AI "make the thing" and then get mad when it doesn't match up to their vision that they didn't specify at all.
Same, I don't get it? I think event Sonnet 5 can build reasonable-y decent software. I'm a little surprised with how many people resonate with this.
I spent 30 mins today planning a change that affected multiple modules, and then handed it off the plan to the Claude to implement, and came back to 4 PRs fully ready to merge 15 mins later.
1 year ago, this kind of work would have taken me a better portion of the day, especially given the amount of searching I would need to do to build context.
If someone is that frustrated with AI, do they not just … switch to not using AI and doing it by hand, asking simpler next-step questions and hand-coding, instead?
But it is futile to get frustrated or annoyed by an LLM. I do get frustrated, too, but I do not "yell" at it hoping that it will miraculously do what I want. GPT (again, free tier, so no wonder) got me frustrated too because I felt like it just would not listen, no matter how specific I was, so yeah I did experience what the author intended to show.
> "yell" at it hoping that it will miraculously do what I want
It's certainly not helpful in getting the LLM from A to B, but maybe you don't care? Maybe you just need to blow off some steam?
People may call that irrational, but I'm certainly not seeing an abundance of commonly-agreed-upon rationality in all the other things they (we) do, so it's in character.
But it’s *wildly* unhelpful. Would you talk to your coworker like that? “Half the site is blue” or would you laugh and go, “Uh, whoops, now both buttons are blue, just wanted the ‘Add to Cart’ button.”
Either that, or your coworker themselves would laugh and tell you about it later.
That’s also where this quiz lost me. I wouldn’t respond in either way, I’d say “all buttons look blue now. Can we make it so that just the Add to Cart button is blue? I’m okay with Add to Cart having its own class to make it easier.” or something.
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.
> Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button.
Those are my only options when the site is clearly not blue, two buttons are.
There is a reason for why I am much more specific than this.