Want to wade into the snowy sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I think Iām missing something somewhere. One of the most alarming patterns that Jonny found imo was the level of waste involved across unnecessary calls to the source model, unnecessary token churn through the context window from bad architecture, and generally a sense that when creating this neither they nor their pattern extruder had made any effort to optimize it in terms of token use. In other words, changing the design to push some of those calls onto the user would save tokens and thus reduce the userās cost per prompt, presumably by a fair margin on some of the worst cases.
Youāre right, but Johnny rightly also identified the issue where Claude creates complex trash code to work around user-provided constraints while not actually changing approach at all (see the part about tool denial workarounds).
I think Anthropic optimized for appended system prompt character count, and measured it in isolation - at least in the projectās beginning stages, if itās not still in the code. I assume the inefficiencies have come from the agent working with and around that requirement, backfiring horribly in the spaghetti you see now. Not only is the resulting trash control flow less likely to be caught as a problem by agents, especially compared to checking a character count occasionally, but itās more likely the agent will treat the trash code as an accepted pattern it should replicate.
Claude will also not trace a control flow to any kind of depth unless asked, and if you ask, and it encounters more than one or two levels of recursion or abstraction, it will choke. Probably because itās so inefficient, but then theyāre getting the inefficient tool to add more to itself andā¦ thereās no way to recover from that loop without human refactoring. I assume thatās a taboo at Anthropic too.
A type of fix I was imagining would be something like an extra call like āafter editing, evaluate changes against this large collection of terrible choices that should not occur, for example, the agentās current internal codeā. That would obviously increase the short term token consumption, context window overhead, and make an Anthropic project manager break out in a cold sweat. But it would reduce the gradient of the project death spiral by providing more robust code for future agents to copy paste that can be more cheaply evaluated, and require fewer user prompts overall to rectify obvious bad code.
They would never go for that type of long game, because theyād have to do some combination of:
They should just set it all on fire, the abomination canāt salvage the abomination.