I Am Morally Opposed to Updating My Claude.md

(alex-jacobs.com)

27 points | by tacoooooooo 1 hour ago

5 comments

  • isoprophlex 56 minutes ago
    I do the same, I use the weights as revealed to us by our saints. Except one thing. I always instruct my models to "talk to me in all lowercase, like you're a snide reddit/4chan douchebag edgelord, a lazy asshole bum who's secretly a zen master in disguise", or something along those lines

    It's a lot more palatable if the thing says "ayyy lmao bruv yeh I'll shit that oauth turd into your repo no fuss". We're all just in it for the ride, flesh or silicon intelligences alike.

    • em-bee 45 minutes ago
      talk to me in all lowercase, like you're a ...

      i take offense :-P

      but seriously, why waste tokens on instructions that don't help you improve the outcome?

      • isoprophlex 6 minutes ago
        the improved outcome here is my personal entertainment
      • AndrewDucker 17 minutes ago
        Their outcome might be improved by them feeling more amused and less grumpy.
  • Swizec 59 minutes ago
    We are talking about a thing that's consumed all human knowledge whose superpowers are summarization and understanding. Why the fuck are we writing all these .md files!?

    I resent everything about this.

    But I write the .md files because others on the team are not as good at Just Talking To It. The md files are there because juniors don't know what to ask for.

    • groby_b 49 minutes ago
      Uh. The .md files are also there so I don't need to say every single time "In this house, we believe in uv & PEP723. Also, no fucking localized imports, no just-in-case try/except."

      (Or the equivalent incantations for other languages)

      They aren't there for others, they are there to make sure the code produced measures up to my standards. Sure, it helps that it also applies to requests made by others, but that's a bonus.

      • Swizec 38 minutes ago
        > time "In this house, we believe in uv & PEP723. Also, no fucking localized imports, no just-in-case try/except."

        My point is the all knowing all seeing big brain super bot should already know how to write good code. It feels dumb that we have to keep reminding it

        • AndrewDucker 18 minutes ago
          If "What good code looks like" was something that everyone agreed on then there wouldn't be a problem.
  • Arainach 56 minutes ago
    This is a weird article. The first half is somewhat interesting but can be summarized entirely by its last paragraph:

    > I’m fairly sure a meaningful percentage of my system prompt is now actively making things worse—instructions written for a model that no longer exists, aggressively steering a smarter one away from things it would have gotten right on its own. But I can’t tell which lines those are,

    Then the article says "This is the part where I stop joking." and goes utterly off the deep end, and I am not getting the joke.

    • tacoooooooo 52 minutes ago
      The whole thing is a bit tongue in cheek. I don't have an actual moral opposition to custom system instructions...
      • fmbb 14 minutes ago
        Thanks for sharing. It was a fun read, and relatable.
    • pton_xd 53 minutes ago
      Slop article, needs to be flagged.
    • dgellow 53 minutes ago
      Pretty sure it’s generated by an LLM, I don’t think the author could explain what the second part of the article is supposed to mean

      Edit: actually the whole site is AI slop

      • tacoooooooo 50 minutes ago
        its literally not. so fucking frustrating to put effort into writing these days and have it called llm slop
        • dgellow 44 minutes ago
          Have you tried to not add AI generated image across your articles? That would definitely help reduce the AI slop feeling
        • groby_b 47 minutes ago
          If your writing gets called "slop", you might want to look at why. It's usually and indication it's considered low quality writing, and... you can fix that. (Unless you use AI, then you're doomed ;)
          • Arainach 42 minutes ago
            On the contrary, I find that higher quality writing - the kind by authors who know how and when to use the emdash and semicolon, for instance - gets flagged as "slop" more.

            the only reliable way to not get flagged is 2 type like ur 12 and just discovered twitter and don't have a shift key and use run ons a lot which is doubleplusungood writing.

          • tacoooooooo 45 minutes ago
            Calling my writing slop is one thing. Attributing it all to AI is another. Half my posts pre-date chatgpt. i've been writing like shit forever--its very human of me actually
  • groby_b 53 minutes ago
    It's... a weird take.

    "Sure, the model makes repeatedly the same mistakes, and I could prevent that, but then it wouldn't be the same model" sounds like an excuse for masochism.

    The one small bit of truth is that yes, instructions might become outdated, and they might affect negatively how the system performs. You fix that by... updating your instructions.

    And if you deeply care about that potential negative impact (most models are pretty good at just ignoring long outdated issues), you run evals on model upgrades. You certainly don't refuse to use anything but the bare model.

    (Of course, there are also folks who refuse to write code in any way except with sed, so there we go)

  • imadierich 57 minutes ago
    [dead]