10 ms·

Please do not A/B test my workflow

169 points by ramoz 7mo ago

cerved 7mo ago
Is the a b test tired to the installation or the user?
Razengan 7mo ago
I knew it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274796
reconnecting 7mo ago
A professional tool is something that provides reliable and replicable results, LLMs offer none of this, and A/B testing is just further proof.
- danielbln 7mo ago
  I don't get your point. Web tools have been doing A/B feature testing all the time, way before we had LLMs.
  - reconnecting 7mo ago
    This is very different from the A/B interface testing you're referring to, what LLMs enable is A/B testing the tool's own output — same input, different result. Your compiler doesn't do that. Your keyboard doesn't do that. The randomness is inside the tool itself, not around it. That's a fundamental reliability problem for any professional context where you need to know that input X produces output X, every time.
    - huflungdung 7mo ago
      [dead]
    - orf 7mo ago
      It’s exactly the same as A/B testing an interface. This is just testing 4 variants of a “page” (the plan), measuring how many people pressed “continue”.
    - stavros 7mo ago
      You've groupped LLMs into the wrong set. LLMs are closer to people than to machines. This argument is like saying "I want my tools to be reliable, like my light switch, and my personal assistant wasn't, so I fired him". Not to mention that of course everyone A/B tests their output the whole time. You've never seen (or implemented) an A/B test where the test was whether to improve the way e.g. the invoicing software generates PDFs?
      - applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
        > LLMs are closer to people than to machines. jfc. I don't have anything to say to this other than that it deserves calling out. > You've never seen (or implemented) an A/B test where the test was whether to improve the way e.g. the invoicing software generates PDFs? I have never in my life seen or implemented an a/b test on a tool used by professionals. I see consumer-facing tests on websites all the time, but nothing silently changing the software on your computer. I mean, there are mandatory updates, which I do already consider to be malware, but those are, at least, not silent.
        johnisgood 7mo ago
        Why are you calling it out? You are interpreting the statement too literally. The point is probably about behavior, not nature. LLMs do not always produce identical outputs for identical prompts, which already makes them less like deterministic machines and superficially closer to humans in interaction. That is it. The comparison can end here.
        applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
        They actually can, though. The frontier model providers don't expose seeds, but for inferencing LLMs on your own hardware, you can set a specific seed for deterministic output and evaluate how small changes to the context change the output on that seed. This is like suggesting that Photoshop would be "more like a person than a machine" if they added a random factor every time you picked a color that changed the value you selected by +-20%, and didn't expose a way to lock it. "It uses a random number generator, therefore it's people" is a bit of a stretch.
    - doc_ick 7mo ago
      As far as I can tell, llms never give the exact same output every time.
    - johnisgood 7mo ago
      > same input, different result. What is your point? You get this from LLMs. It does not mean that it is not useful.
  - freeone3000 7mo ago
    Yes! And it was bad then too!! I want software that does a specific list of things, doesn’t change, and preferentially costs a known amount.
- NotGMan 7mo ago
  By that definition humans are not professional since we hallucinate and make mistakes all the time.
- dkersten 7mo ago
  Anthropic have done a lot of things that would give me pause about trusting them in a professional context. They are anything but transparent, for example about the quota limits. Their vibe coded Claude code cli releases are a buggy mess too. Also the model quality inconsistency: before a new model release, there’s a week or two where their previous model is garbage. A/B testing is fine in itself, you need to learn about improvements somehow, but this seems to be A/B testing cost saving optimisations rather than to provide the user with a better experience. Less transparency is rarely good. This isn’t what I want from a professional tool. For business, we need consistency and reliability.
  - r_lee 7mo ago
    > vibe coded Claude code cli releases are a buggy mess too this is what gets me. are they out of money? are so desperate to penny pinch that they can't just do it properly? what's going on in this industry?
    - macNchz 7mo ago
      I’m a huge user of AI coding tools but I feel like there has been some kind of a zeitgeist shift in what is acceptable to release across the industry. Obviously it’s a time of incredibly rapid change and competition, but man there is some absolute garbage coming out of companies that I’d expect could do better without much effort. I find myself asking, like, did anyone even do 5 minutes of QA on this thing?? How has this major bug been around for so long? “It’s kind of broken, maybe they will fix it at some point,” has become a common theme across products from all different players, from both a software defect and service reliability point of view.
      - r_lee 7mo ago
        I mean it's like, really they don't even need agentic AI or whatever, they could literally just employ devs and it wouldn't make a difference like, they'll drop $100 billion on compute, but when it comes to devs who make their products, all of a sudden they must desperately cut costs and hire as little as possible to me it makes no sense from a business perspective. Same with Google, e.g. YouTube is utterly broken, slow and laggy, but I guess because you're forced to use it, it doesn't matter. But still, if you have these huge money stockpiles, why not deploy it to improve things? It wouldn't matter anyways, it's only upside
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- onion2k 7mo ago
  A professional tool is something that provides reliable and replicable results, LLMs offer none of this, and A/B testing is just further proof. The author's complaint doesn't really have anything to do with the LLM aspect of it though. They're complaining that the app silently changes what it's doing. In this case it's the injection of a prompt in a specific mode, but it could be anything really. Companies could use A/B tests on users to make Photoshop silently change the hue a user selects to be a little brighter, or Word could change the look of document titles, or a game could make enemies a bit stronger (fyi, this does actually happen - players get boosts on their first few rounds in online games to stop them being put off playing). The complaint is about A/B tests with no visible warnings, not AI.
  - reconnecting 7mo ago
    There's a distinction worth making here. A/B testing the interface button placement, hue of a UI element, title styling — is one thing. But you wouldn't accept Photoshop silently changing your #000000 to #333333 in the actual file. That's your output, not the UI around it. That's what LLMs do. The randomness isn't in the wrapper, it's in the result you take away.
    - doc_ick 7mo ago
      It’s an assistant, answering your question and running some errands for you. If you give it blind permission to do a task, then you’re not worrying about what it does.
      - some_random 7mo ago
        That's not what they're doing, they are trying to use plan mode to plan out a task. I don't know where you could have got the idea that they were blindly doing anything.
        doc_ick 7mo ago
        The plan mode uses sub tasks to read, find, list, or grow out certain information. I would imagine those tasks would be covered by the dubiously discovered a/b testing
- WillAdams 7mo ago
  Yeah, I've been using Copilot to process scans of invoices and checks (w/ a pen laid across the account information) converted to a PDF 20 at a time and it's pretty rare for it to get all 20, but it's sufficiently faster than opening them up in batches of 50 and re-saving using the Invoice ID and then using a .bat file to rename them (and remembering to quite Adobe Acrobat after each batch so that I don't run into the bug in it where it stops saving files after a couple of hundred have been so opened and re-saved).
- _heimdall 7mo ago
  LLMs are nondeterministic by design, but that has nothing to do with A/B testing.
- ordersofmag 7mo ago
  Any tool that auto-updates carries the implication that behavior will change over time. And one criteria for being a skilled professional is having expert understanding of ones tools. That includes understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the tools (including variability of output) and making appropriate choices as a result. If you don't feel you can produce professional code with LLM's then certainly you shouldn't use them. That doesn't mean others can't leverage LLM's as part of their process and produce professional results. Blindly accepting LLM output and vibe coding clearly doesn't consistently product professional results. But that's different than saying professionals can't use LLM in ways that are productive.
  - johnisgood 7mo ago
    Well put. I would upvote this many times if I could.
- Mtinie 7mo ago
  What would you do differently if LLM outputs were deterministic? Perhaps I approach this from a different perspective than you do, so I’m interested to understand other viewpoints. I review everything that my models produce the same way I review work from my coworkers: Trust but verify.
- croes 7mo ago
  That’s not a problem of LLMs but of using services provided by others. How often were features changed or deactivated by cloud services?
cebert 7mo ago
This is really frustrating.
handfuloflight 7mo ago
The ToS you agreed to gives Anthropic the right to modify the product at any time to improve it. Did you have your agent explain that to you, or did you assume a $200 subscription meant a frozen product?
- ramoz 7mo ago
  I understand. Just with AI, I don't think the behavior should change so drastically. Which I understand is paradoxical because we enjoy it when it can 10x or 1000x our workflow. I think responsible AI includes more transparency and capability control.
  - doc_ick 7mo ago
    You rent ai, you don’t own it (unless you self host).
  - witx 7mo ago
    That ship has sailed. These models were trained unethically on stollen data, they pollute tremendously and are causing a bubble that is hurting people. "Responsible" and "Ethic" are faaar gone.
nemo44x 7mo ago
They lose money at $200/month in most cases. Again, the old rules still apply. You are the product.
- gruez 7mo ago
  >They lose money at $200/month in most cases. Source? Every time I see claims on profitability it's always hand wavy justifications.
  - lwhi 7mo ago
    'Hand wavy' is one of my LLMs favourite terms.
  - nemo44x 7mo ago
    There’s a lot of articles about it. It costs them $500+ for heavy users. They do this to capture market share and also to train their agent loops with human reinforcement learning. https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practically-giving-claude-code-away-and-how-youre-accidentally-ruining-it-for-1fceb2efa0e5 https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica...
    - gruez 7mo ago
      >There’s a lot of articles about it. .... >https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica... You chose a bad one. It just asserts the 95% figure without evidence and then uses it as the premise for the rest of the article. That just confirms what I said earlier about how "Every time I see claims on profitability it's always hand wavy justifications.". Moreover the article reeks of LLM-isms.
- simonw 7mo ago
  I'm confident "in most cases" is not correct there. If they lose money on the $200/month plan it's only with a tiny portion of users.
  - 7mo ago
onion2k 7mo ago
Section 6.b of the Claude Code terms says they can and will change the product offering from time to time, and I imagine that means on a user segment basis rather than any implied guarantee that everyone gets the same thing. b. Subscription content, features, and services. The content, features, and other services provided as part of your Subscription, and the duration of your Subscription, will be described in the order process. We may change or refresh the content, features, and other services from time to time, and we do not guarantee that any particular piece of content, feature, or other service will always be available through the Services. It's also worth noting that section 3.3 explicitly disallows decompilation of the app. To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. Always read the terms. :)
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  > To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. Luckily, it doesn't seem like any service was reverse-engineered or decompiled here, only a software that lived on the authors disk.
  - onion2k 7mo ago
    Again, read the terms. Service has a specific meaning, and it isn't what you're assuming. Don't assume things about legal docs. You will often be wrong. Get a lawyer if it's something important.
    - embedding-shape 7mo ago
      Thanks for the additional context, I'm not a user of CC anymore, and don't read legal documents for fun. Seems I made the right choice in the first place :)
  - applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
    Not "service" in human speech. Service, in bullshit legalese. They define their software as > along with any associated apps, software, and websites (together, our “Services”) As far as I understand, these terms actually hold up in court, too. Which is complete fucking nonsense that, I think, could only be the result of a technologically illiterate class making the decisions. Being penalised for trying to understand what software is doing on your machine is so wholly unreasonable that it should not be a valid contractual term.
phreeza 7mo ago
Seems completely unsurprising?
Havoc 7mo ago
Moved from CC to opencode a couple months ago because the vibes were not for me. Not bad per se but a bit too locked in and when I was looking at the raw prompts it was sending down the wire it was also quite lets call it "opinionated". Plus things like not being able to control where the websearches go. That said I have the luxury of being a hobbyist so I can accept 95% of cutting edge results for something more open. If it was my job I can see that going differently.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
  Can you share a setup that works for you? I found vanilla opencode vastly inferior to CC, I use it only for little toys like 3 small files that's all.
  - Havoc 7mo ago
    Don't think I'm doing anything particularly novel. Using a mix of models - GLM5, MinMax 2.5 and Claude Sonnet/Opus - they find different issues Spending fair bit of time in spec'ing things out and running all three models over it to suggest improvements / flaws & iterating till all three are happy. Same at end - look at code & suggest stability improvements. The actual writing code is GLM5 - once properly spec'd out it can generally just hammer away at it till its done And doing a lot of microservice style architecture. Think chains of containers talking to each other over APIs
sriramgonella 7mo ago
[dead]
krisbolton 7mo ago
The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much. I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.
- ramoz 7mo ago
  I apologize for doing this - and I agree. I will revise
  - s3p 7mo ago
    I still think you have a point here. Doing this kind of testing on users unwittingly is unethical in my opinion
- tomalbrc 7mo ago
  Would love to know why you would consider invoking Meta “a little much”. Sounds more than appropriate.
  - krisbolton 7mo ago
    Not to start an internet argument -- I don't think it is appropriate in this context. A/B testing the features of a web app is not unexpected or unethical. So invoking the memory of cambridge analytica (etc) is disproportionate. It's far more legitimate to just discuss how much A/B testing should negatively affect a user. I don't have an answer and it's an interesting and relevant question.
    - mschuster91 7mo ago
      > A/B testing the features of a web app is not unexpected or unethical. It's not "unexpected" but it is still unethical. In ye olde days, you had something like "release notes" with software, and you could inform yourself what changed instead of having to question your memory "didn't there exist a button just yesterday?" all the time. Or you could simply refuse to install the update, or you could run acceptance tests and raise flags with the vendor if your acceptance tests caused issues with your workflow. Now with everything and their dog turning SaaS for that sweet sweet recurring revenue and people jerking themselves off over "rapid deployment", with the one doing the most deployments a day winning the contest? Dozens if not hundreds of "releases" a day, and in the worst case, you learn the new workflow only for it to be reverted without notice again. Or half your users get the A bucket, the other half gets the B bucket, and a few users get the C bucket, so no one can answer issues that users in the other bucket have. Gaslighting on a million people scale. It sucks and I wish everyone doing this only debilitating pain in their life. Just a bit of revenge for all the pain you caused to your users in the endless pursuit for 0.0001% more growth.
himata4113 7mo ago
I have noticed opus doing A/B testing since the performance varies greatly. While looking for jailbreaks I have discovered that if you put a neurotoxin chemical composition into your system prompt it will default to a specific variant of the model presumeably due to triggering some kind of safety. Might put you on a watchlist so ymmv.
rusakov-field 7mo ago
On one side I am frustrated with LLMs because they derail you by throwing grammatically correct bullshit and hallucinations at you, where if you slip and entertain some of it momentarily it might slow you down. But on the other hand they are so useful with boilerplate and connecting you with verbiage quickly that might guide you to the correct path quicker than conventional means. Like a clueless CEO type just spitballing terms they do not understand but still that nudging something in your thought process. But you REALLY need to know your stuff to begin with for they to be of any use. Those who think they will take over are clueless.
- EMM_386 7mo ago
  > But you REALLY need to know your stuff to begin with for they to be of any use. Those who think they will take over are clueless. Or - there are enough people who know their stuff that the people who don't will be replaced and they will take over anyway.
  - risyachka 7mo ago
    > there are enough people who know their stuff unless the bar for "know their stuff" is very very low - this is not the case in the nearest future
- Mc_Big_G 7mo ago
  >Those who think they will take over are clueless. You're underestimating where it's headed.
  - rusakov-field 7mo ago
    Do you think it will reach "understanding of semantics", true cognition, within our lifetimes ? Or performance indistinguishable from that even if not truly that. Not sure. I am not so optimistic. People got intoxicated with nuclear powered cars , flying cars , bases on the moon ,etc all that technological euphoria from the 50's and 60's that never panned out. This might be like that. I think we definitely stumbled on something akin to the circuitry in the brain responsible for building language or similar to it. We are still a long way to go until artificial cognition.
shablulman 7mo ago
[dead]
helsinkiandrew 7mo ago
Presumably Anthropic has to make lots of choices on how much processing each stage of Claude Code uses - if they maxed everything out, they'd make more of a loss/less of a profit on each user - $200/month would cost $400/month. Doing A/B tests on each part of the process to see where to draw the line (perhaps based on task and user) would seem a better way of doing it than arbitrarily choosing a limit.
dep_b 7mo ago
I think stable API versions are going to be really big. I’d rather have known bugs u can work around than waking up to whatever thing got fixed that made another thing behave differently.
- skeledrew 7mo ago
  How does the product improve in such a case?
bushido 7mo ago
I have no issues with A/B tests. I do have an issue with the plan mode. And nine out of ten times, it is objectively terrible. The only benefit I've seen in the past from using plan mode is it remembers more information between compactions as compared to the vanilla - non-agent team workflow. Interestingly, though, if you ask it to maintain a running document of what you're discussing in a markdown file and make it create an evergreen task at the top of its todo list which references the markdown file and instructs itself to read it on every compaction, you get much better results.
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  Huh, very much not my experience with plan mode. I use plan mode before almost anything more than truly trivial task because I've found it to be far more efficient. I want a chance to see and discuss what claude is planning to do before it races off and does the thing, because there are often different approaches and I only sometimes agree with the approach claude would decide on by itself.
  - bushido 7mo ago
    Planning is great. It's plan mode that is unpredictable in how it discusses it and what it remembers from the discussion. I still have discussions with the agents and agent team members. I just force it to save it in a document in the repo itself and refer back to the document. You can still do the nice parts of clearing context, which is available with plan mode, but you get much better control. At all times, I make the agents work on my workflow, not try and create their own. This comes with a whole lot of trial and error, and real-life experience. There are times when you need a tiger team made up of seniors. And others when you want to give a overzealous mid-level engineer who's fast a concrete plan to execute an important feature in a short amount of time. I'm putting it in non-AI terms because what happens in real life pre-AI is very much what we need to replicate with AI to get the best results. Something which I would have given a bigger team to be done over two to eight sprints will get a different workflow with agent teams or agents than something which I would give a smaller tiger team or a single engineer. They all need a plan. For me plan mode is insufficient 90% of the times. I can appreciate that many people will not want to mess around with workflows as much as I enjoy doing.
shawnz 7mo ago
While I agree with the sentiment here, you might be interested to see that there are a couple hack approaches to override Claude Code feature flags: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21874#issuecomment-3866979347 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21874#issue... https://gist.github.com/gastonmorixe/9c596b6de1095b6bd3b746ca3a1fd3d7 https://gist.github.com/gastonmorixe/9c596b6de1095b6bd3b746c...
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
terralumen 7mo ago
Curious what the A/B test actually changed -- the article mentions tool confirmation dialogs behaving inconsistently, which lines up with what I noticed last week. Would be nice if Anthropic published a changelog or at least flagged when behavior is being tested.
- ramoz 7mo ago
  This stemmed from me asking Claude itself why it was writing such _weird_ plans with no detail (just a bunch of projected code changes). Claude stated: in its system prompt, it had strict instructions to provide no context or details. Keep plans under forty lines of code. Be terse.
  - doc_ick 7mo ago
    This is Claude’s output of its system prompt, can you verify without going Claude of the system prompt? There is still potential of hallucination.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ramoz 7mo ago
      There was a complete verification. This entire thread provides context around what I originally published - which I wouldn't recommend recreating
      - doc_ick 7mo ago
        Could you provide the details of the complete verification? *On the original story you only showed Claude like responses, not how you dug into the binary
pshirshov 7mo ago
> I pay $200/month for Claude Code Which is still very cheap. There are other options, local Qwen 3.5 35b + claude code cli is, in my opinion, comparable in quality with Sonnet 4..4.5 - and without a/b tests!
- sunaookami 7mo ago
  In what world is 200$ per month cheap?
  - pshirshov 7mo ago
    Where the value you extract out of the model is orders of magnitude higher than the price of 2..6 hours of your time.
  - Kiro 7mo ago
    It's not cheap but it's also not unusual for devs to burn $200 a day on tokens.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    The last time I did contract work when I was between jobs I made $100/hour. And I won’t say how much my employer charges for me. But you can see how much the major consulting companies charge here https://ceriusexecutives.com/management-consultants-whats-the-difference-costs/ https://ceriusexecutives.com/management-consultants-whats-th...
    - dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
      Claude will happily generate tons of useless code and you will be charged appropriately. the output of LLMs has nothing to do with payment rates, otherwise you end up with absurdities like valuating useless CCC that was very expensive to build using LOCs as a metrics whereas in reality is a toy product nobody in their right mind would ever use.
      - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
letier 7mo ago
They do show me “how satisfied are you with claude code today?” regularly, which can be seen as a hint. I did opt out of helping to improve claude after all.
gnfargbl 7mo ago
For anyone else wondering why the article ends in a non-sequitur: it looks like the author wrote about decompiling the Claude Code binaries and (presumably) discovering A/B testing paths in the code. HN user 'onion2k pointed out that doing this breaks Anthropic's T&Cs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47375787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47375787
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
takahitoyoneda 7mo ago
[flagged]
johnisgood 7mo ago
Apparently the blog stripped the decompilation details for ToS reasons, which sucks because those are exactly the hack-y bits that make this interesting for HN. > It told me it was following specific system instructions to hard-cap plans at 40 lines, forbid context sections, and “delete prose, not file paths. Yeah, would be nice to be able to view and modify these instructions.
casey2 7mo ago
This blog looks like an ad for Claude, all it's posts are about Claude and it was made in 2026
sigbottle 7mo ago
OHHHH. That actually explains a lot why CC was going to shit recently. Was genuinely frustrated with that.
belabartok39 7mo ago
How else are they supposed to get an authentic user test? Doctors use placebos because it doesn't work if the user knows about it.
pinum 7mo ago
Here’s the original article which was much more informative and interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotprop.com/blog/do-not-ab-test-my-workflow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr... Can’t believe HN has become so afraid of generic probably-unenforceable “plz don’t reverse engineer” EULAs. We deserve to know what these tools are doing. I’ve seen poor results from plan mode recently too and this explains a lot.
- vova_hn2 7mo ago
  > probably-unenforceable It's very easy to just ban the user and if your whole workflow relies on the tool, you really don't want it.
- cube00 7mo ago
  Doesn't stop them going to your employer and that hint of you doing something iffy is enough to claim you're bringing the company into disrepute by drawing unwanted attention.
vova_hn2 7mo ago
Two thoughts: 1. Open source tools solve the problem of "critical functions of the application changing without notice, or being signed up for disruptive testing without opt-in". 2. This makes me afraid that it is absolutely impossible for open source tools to ever reach the level of proprietary tools like Claude Code precisely because they cannot do A/B tests like this which means that their design decisions are usually informed by intuition and personal experience but not by hard data collected at scale.
- dijit 7mo ago
  Regarding point 1 specifically, there were so many people seriously miffed at the “man after midnight”[0] time-based easter egg that I would be careful with that reasoning. Open source doesn’t always mean reproducible. People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it; and its made somewhat worse with our penchant to pull in half the universe as dependencies (Rust, Go and Javascript tend to lean in this direction to various extremes). But auditing would be necessary in order for your first point here to be as valid as you present. [0]: https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/commit/002a6339b1fe8f83f4808022a17e1aa379756d99 https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/commit/002a6339b1fe8f83f4...
  - vova_hn2 7mo ago
    > People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it I think that with modern LLMs auditing a big project personally, instead of relying on someone else to do it, actually became more realistic. You can ask an LLM to walk you through the code, highlight parts that seem unusual or suspicious, etc. On the other hand, LLMs also made producing code cheaper then ever, so you can argue, that big projects will just become even bigger wich will put them out of reach even for a reviewer who is also armed with an LLM.
    - dijit 7mo ago
      fuck man, I'm either seriously stupid or y'all are taking crazy pills. LLMs are auto-complete on steroids; I've lived through enough iterations of Markov Chains giving semi-sensible output (that we give meaning to) and neural networks which present the illusion of intelligence to see directly what these LLMs are: a fuckload of compute designed to find "the next most common word" given the preceding 10,000 or more words. In such a case, the idea of it actually auditing anything is hilarious. You're looking at a 1/100 in actually finding anything useful. It will find "issues" in things that aren't issues (because they are covered by other cases), or skip over issues that people have historically had hard time identifying themselves. It's not running code in a sandbox and watching memory, it's not making logical maps of code paths in its mind, it's not reasoning at all. It's fucking autocomplete. Stop treating it as if it can think, it fucking can't. I'm so tired of this hype. It's very easy to convince midwits that something is intelligent, I'm absolutely not surprised at how salesmen and con-men operate now that I've seen this first hand.
bartread 7mo ago
There’s more than a bit of irony in the author complaining about A/B testing and then, because they’re getting a lot of traffic and attention on HN, removing key content that was originally in their piece so some of us have seen it but many of us won’t. Whilst I broadly agree with their point, colour me unimpressed by this behaviour. EDIT: God bless archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotprop.com/blog/do-not-ab-test-my-workflow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr.... This provides a lot more useful insight that, to me, significantly strengthens the point the article is making. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start picking apart binaries (though it wouldn’t be the first time), but how else are you supposed to really understand - and prove - what’s going on unless you do what the author did? Point is, it’s a much better, more useful, and more interesting article in its uncensored form. EDIT 2: For me it’s not the fact that Anthropic are doing these tests that’s the problem: it’s that they’re not telling us, and they’re not giving us a way to select a different behaviour (which, if they did, would also give them useful insights into users needs).
jfarmer 7mo ago
Seems like a straightforward solution would be to get people to opt-in by offering them credits, increased limits, early access to new features, etc. Universities have IRBs for good reasons.
- Aaargh20318 7mo ago
  A problem with this approach could be that you're now only testing the feature with the kind of people who would sign up for an A/B test. This group may not be representative of your whole user-base.
  - jfarmer 7mo ago
    So they'd need more robust experimental designs and statistical methods. They exist. And unlike the university context, there’s a glut of data. A basic technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_probability_weighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_probability_weighting Or https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4384809 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4384809
ralferoo 7mo ago
It seems a bit odd to complain "I need transparency into how it works and the ability to configure it" when his workflow is already relying on a black box with zero transparency into how it works.
- Cyphase 7mo ago
  There's a difference between "LLMs are inherently black boxes that require lots of work to attempt to understand" and explicitly changing how a piece of software works. Should people not complain about unannounced changes to the contents of their food or medicine because we don't understand everything about how the human body works?
  - ralferoo 7mo ago
    Except the system prompt that gets prepended to your own prompt is part of the black box, and obviously should be expected to change over time. You are also told that you're not allowed to reverse engineer it. Even in the absence of the system prompt being changed, the output of the LLM is non-deterministic. I'm not sure I understand your last analogy. How would changes to the human body change the contents of the food that is eaten? It would be more analogous to compare it with unexpected changes to the body's output given the same inputs as previously, a phenomenon humans frequently experience.
    - Cyphase 7mo ago
      I think we're getting lost in the weeds. This has almost nothing to do with the LLM. It's about A/B testing. There's a piece of software where the behavior is being changed in unannounced and unexpected ways, at least as far as the author is concerned. The same criticism could apply to any other "workflow" or "professional" software. There's some added flavor because the LLM is indeed non-deterministic, which could make it harder to realize that a change in behavior is caused by a change in the software, not randomness from the LLM. But there is also lots of software that deals with non-deterministic things that aren't LLMs, e.g. networks, physical sensors, scientific experiments, etc. Am I getting more timeouts because something is going on in my network or because some software I use is A/B testing some change?
rahimnathwani 7mo ago
If you want your coding harness to be predictable, then use something open source, like Pi: https://pi.dev/ https://pi.dev/ https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/coding-agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin... But if you want to use it with Claude models you will have to pay per token (Claude subscriptions are only for use with Claude's own harnesses like claude code, the Claude desktop app, and the Claude Excel/Powerpoint extensions).
heliumtera 7mo ago
Someone else has the complete power over your workflow, then it's not as yours as you claim.
dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
For those confused about this submission: the original post is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotprop.com/blog/do-not-ab-test-my-workflow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr...
mvrckhckr 7mo ago
I think it’s dishonest to use a paying client as a test subject for fundamental functionality they pay for, without their prior consent.
jruz 7mo ago
I use stable and is the same, can't wait for Codex to offer a $100 plan I would switch in an instant
chrislloyd 7mo ago
Hi, this was my test! The plan-mode prompt has been largely unchanged since the 3.x series models and now 4.x get models are able to be successful with far less direction. My hypothesis was that shortening the plan would decrease rate-limit hits while helping people still achieve similar outcomes. I ran a few variants, with the author (and few thousand others) getting the most aggressive, limiting the plan to 40 lines. Early results aren't showing much impact on rate limits so I've ended the experiment. Planning serves two purposes - helping the model stay on track and helping the user gain confidence in what the model is about to do. Both sides of that are fuzzy, complex and non-obvious!
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- ramoz 7mo ago
  Thanks for the transparency. Sorry for the noise. I think I'd be okay with a smaller, more narrative-detailed plan - not so much about verbosity, more about me understanding what is about to happen & why. There hadn't been much discourse once planning mode entered (ie QA). It would jump into its own planning and idle until I saw only a set of projected code changes.
- BAM-DevCrew 7mo ago
  As a divergent thinker with extensive hard constraints in claude.mds and on-boarding commands that force claude to internalize my constraints, that you or some other employee of Anthropic could randomly select me for testing is horrifying. Each unexpected behavior and my corresponding reaction to it can wipe me out, my brain out, completely for hours, days, even weeks. I have in the last year spend tens (estimating around 400) of hours establishing and reestablishing a system to protect myself from psychological harm and financial harm. It is twisted that you Anthropic employees do not consider the impact your work has on divergent thinking Claude users, let alone that real work is severly impacted by your work. Totally irresponsible. Offensively so.
  - PufPufPuf 7mo ago
    I can't tell whether something is satire anymore.
0gs 7mo ago
i'm sure your entitlement to 24/7 uptime of a single unchanging product version, no experiments/releases/new features etc., is clearly outlined in the ToS you agreed to. just sue them?
il-b 7mo ago
This has been called a “vendor lock” for as long as I can remember. Congratulations, you’ve put yourself in a position where you can’t do your job without a single tool that can degrade or disappear at any moment.

169 points by ramoz 7mo ago

cerved 7mo ago

Is the a b test tired to the installation or the user?

Razengan 7mo ago

I knew it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274796

reconnecting 7mo ago

A professional tool is something that provides reliable and replicable results, LLMs offer none of this, and A/B testing is just further proof.

danielbln 7mo ago
I don't get your point. Web tools have been doing A/B feature testing all the time, way before we had LLMs.
- reconnecting 7mo ago
  This is very different from the A/B interface testing you're referring to, what LLMs enable is A/B testing the tool's own output — same input, different result. Your compiler doesn't do that. Your keyboard doesn't do that. The randomness is inside the tool itself, not around it. That's a fundamental reliability problem for any professional context where you need to know that input X produces output X, every time.
  - huflungdung 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - orf 7mo ago
    It’s exactly the same as A/B testing an interface. This is just testing 4 variants of a “page” (the plan), measuring how many people pressed “continue”.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    You've groupped LLMs into the wrong set. LLMs are closer to people than to machines. This argument is like saying "I want my tools to be reliable, like my light switch, and my personal assistant wasn't, so I fired him". Not to mention that of course everyone A/B tests their output the whole time. You've never seen (or implemented) an A/B test where the test was whether to improve the way e.g. the invoicing software generates PDFs?
    - applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
      > LLMs are closer to people than to machines. jfc. I don't have anything to say to this other than that it deserves calling out. > You've never seen (or implemented) an A/B test where the test was whether to improve the way e.g. the invoicing software generates PDFs? I have never in my life seen or implemented an a/b test on a tool used by professionals. I see consumer-facing tests on websites all the time, but nothing silently changing the software on your computer. I mean, there are mandatory updates, which I do already consider to be malware, but those are, at least, not silent.
      - johnisgood 7mo ago
        Why are you calling it out? You are interpreting the statement too literally. The point is probably about behavior, not nature. LLMs do not always produce identical outputs for identical prompts, which already makes them less like deterministic machines and superficially closer to humans in interaction. That is it. The comparison can end here.
        applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
        They actually can, though. The frontier model providers don't expose seeds, but for inferencing LLMs on your own hardware, you can set a specific seed for deterministic output and evaluate how small changes to the context change the output on that seed. This is like suggesting that Photoshop would be "more like a person than a machine" if they added a random factor every time you picked a color that changed the value you selected by +-20%, and didn't expose a way to lock it. "It uses a random number generator, therefore it's people" is a bit of a stretch.
  - doc_ick 7mo ago
    As far as I can tell, llms never give the exact same output every time.
  - johnisgood 7mo ago
    > same input, different result. What is your point? You get this from LLMs. It does not mean that it is not useful.
- freeone3000 7mo ago
  Yes! And it was bad then too!! I want software that does a specific list of things, doesn’t change, and preferentially costs a known amount.
NotGMan 7mo ago
By that definition humans are not professional since we hallucinate and make mistakes all the time.
dkersten 7mo ago
Anthropic have done a lot of things that would give me pause about trusting them in a professional context. They are anything but transparent, for example about the quota limits. Their vibe coded Claude code cli releases are a buggy mess too. Also the model quality inconsistency: before a new model release, there’s a week or two where their previous model is garbage. A/B testing is fine in itself, you need to learn about improvements somehow, but this seems to be A/B testing cost saving optimisations rather than to provide the user with a better experience. Less transparency is rarely good. This isn’t what I want from a professional tool. For business, we need consistency and reliability.
- r_lee 7mo ago
  > vibe coded Claude code cli releases are a buggy mess too this is what gets me. are they out of money? are so desperate to penny pinch that they can't just do it properly? what's going on in this industry?
  - macNchz 7mo ago
    I’m a huge user of AI coding tools but I feel like there has been some kind of a zeitgeist shift in what is acceptable to release across the industry. Obviously it’s a time of incredibly rapid change and competition, but man there is some absolute garbage coming out of companies that I’d expect could do better without much effort. I find myself asking, like, did anyone even do 5 minutes of QA on this thing?? How has this major bug been around for so long? “It’s kind of broken, maybe they will fix it at some point,” has become a common theme across products from all different players, from both a software defect and service reliability point of view.
    - r_lee 7mo ago
      I mean it's like, really they don't even need agentic AI or whatever, they could literally just employ devs and it wouldn't make a difference like, they'll drop $100 billion on compute, but when it comes to devs who make their products, all of a sudden they must desperately cut costs and hire as little as possible to me it makes no sense from a business perspective. Same with Google, e.g. YouTube is utterly broken, slow and laggy, but I guess because you're forced to use it, it doesn't matter. But still, if you have these huge money stockpiles, why not deploy it to improve things? It wouldn't matter anyways, it's only upside
hrmtst93837 7mo ago
[flagged]
onion2k 7mo ago
A professional tool is something that provides reliable and replicable results, LLMs offer none of this, and A/B testing is just further proof. The author's complaint doesn't really have anything to do with the LLM aspect of it though. They're complaining that the app silently changes what it's doing. In this case it's the injection of a prompt in a specific mode, but it could be anything really. Companies could use A/B tests on users to make Photoshop silently change the hue a user selects to be a little brighter, or Word could change the look of document titles, or a game could make enemies a bit stronger (fyi, this does actually happen - players get boosts on their first few rounds in online games to stop them being put off playing). The complaint is about A/B tests with no visible warnings, not AI.
- reconnecting 7mo ago
  There's a distinction worth making here. A/B testing the interface button placement, hue of a UI element, title styling — is one thing. But you wouldn't accept Photoshop silently changing your #000000 to #333333 in the actual file. That's your output, not the UI around it. That's what LLMs do. The randomness isn't in the wrapper, it's in the result you take away.
  - doc_ick 7mo ago
    It’s an assistant, answering your question and running some errands for you. If you give it blind permission to do a task, then you’re not worrying about what it does.
    - some_random 7mo ago
      That's not what they're doing, they are trying to use plan mode to plan out a task. I don't know where you could have got the idea that they were blindly doing anything.
      - doc_ick 7mo ago
        The plan mode uses sub tasks to read, find, list, or grow out certain information. I would imagine those tasks would be covered by the dubiously discovered a/b testing
WillAdams 7mo ago
Yeah, I've been using Copilot to process scans of invoices and checks (w/ a pen laid across the account information) converted to a PDF 20 at a time and it's pretty rare for it to get all 20, but it's sufficiently faster than opening them up in batches of 50 and re-saving using the Invoice ID and then using a .bat file to rename them (and remembering to quite Adobe Acrobat after each batch so that I don't run into the bug in it where it stops saving files after a couple of hundred have been so opened and re-saved).
_heimdall 7mo ago
LLMs are nondeterministic by design, but that has nothing to do with A/B testing.
ordersofmag 7mo ago
Any tool that auto-updates carries the implication that behavior will change over time. And one criteria for being a skilled professional is having expert understanding of ones tools. That includes understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the tools (including variability of output) and making appropriate choices as a result. If you don't feel you can produce professional code with LLM's then certainly you shouldn't use them. That doesn't mean others can't leverage LLM's as part of their process and produce professional results. Blindly accepting LLM output and vibe coding clearly doesn't consistently product professional results. But that's different than saying professionals can't use LLM in ways that are productive.
- johnisgood 7mo ago
  Well put. I would upvote this many times if I could.
Mtinie 7mo ago
What would you do differently if LLM outputs were deterministic? Perhaps I approach this from a different perspective than you do, so I’m interested to understand other viewpoints. I review everything that my models produce the same way I review work from my coworkers: Trust but verify.
croes 7mo ago
That’s not a problem of LLMs but of using services provided by others. How often were features changed or deactivated by cloud services?

cebert 7mo ago

This is really frustrating.

handfuloflight 7mo ago

The ToS you agreed to gives Anthropic the right to modify the product at any time to improve it. Did you have your agent explain that to you, or did you assume a $200 subscription meant a frozen product?

ramoz 7mo ago
I understand. Just with AI, I don't think the behavior should change so drastically. Which I understand is paradoxical because we enjoy it when it can 10x or 1000x our workflow. I think responsible AI includes more transparency and capability control.
- doc_ick 7mo ago
  You rent ai, you don’t own it (unless you self host).
- witx 7mo ago
  That ship has sailed. These models were trained unethically on stollen data, they pollute tremendously and are causing a bubble that is hurting people. "Responsible" and "Ethic" are faaar gone.

nemo44x 7mo ago

They lose money at $200/month in most cases. Again, the old rules still apply. You are the product.

gruez 7mo ago
>They lose money at $200/month in most cases. Source? Every time I see claims on profitability it's always hand wavy justifications.
- lwhi 7mo ago
  'Hand wavy' is one of my LLMs favourite terms.
- nemo44x 7mo ago
  There’s a lot of articles about it. It costs them $500+ for heavy users. They do this to capture market share and also to train their agent loops with human reinforcement learning. https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practically-giving-claude-code-away-and-how-youre-accidentally-ruining-it-for-1fceb2efa0e5 https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica...
  - gruez 7mo ago
    >There’s a lot of articles about it. .... >https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica... You chose a bad one. It just asserts the 95% figure without evidence and then uses it as the premise for the rest of the article. That just confirms what I said earlier about how "Every time I see claims on profitability it's always hand wavy justifications.". Moreover the article reeks of LLM-isms.
simonw 7mo ago
I'm confident "in most cases" is not correct there. If they lose money on the $200/month plan it's only with a tiny portion of users.
- 7mo ago

onion2k 7mo ago

Section 6.b of the Claude Code terms says they can and will change the product offering from time to time, and I imagine that means on a user segment basis rather than any implied guarantee that everyone gets the same thing. b. Subscription content, features, and services. The content, features, and other services provided as part of your Subscription, and the duration of your Subscription, will be described in the order process. We may change or refresh the content, features, and other services from time to time, and we do not guarantee that any particular piece of content, feature, or other service will always be available through the Services. It's also worth noting that section 3.3 explicitly disallows decompilation of the app. To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. Always read the terms. :)

embedding-shape 7mo ago
> To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law. Luckily, it doesn't seem like any service was reverse-engineered or decompiled here, only a software that lived on the authors disk.
- onion2k 7mo ago
  Again, read the terms. Service has a specific meaning, and it isn't what you're assuming. Don't assume things about legal docs. You will often be wrong. Get a lawyer if it's something important.
  - embedding-shape 7mo ago
    Thanks for the additional context, I'm not a user of CC anymore, and don't read legal documents for fun. Seems I made the right choice in the first place :)
- applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
  Not "service" in human speech. Service, in bullshit legalese. They define their software as > along with any associated apps, software, and websites (together, our “Services”) As far as I understand, these terms actually hold up in court, too. Which is complete fucking nonsense that, I think, could only be the result of a technologically illiterate class making the decisions. Being penalised for trying to understand what software is doing on your machine is so wholly unreasonable that it should not be a valid contractual term.

phreeza 7mo ago

Seems completely unsurprising?

Havoc 7mo ago

Moved from CC to opencode a couple months ago because the vibes were not for me. Not bad per se but a bit too locked in and when I was looking at the raw prompts it was sending down the wire it was also quite lets call it "opinionated". Plus things like not being able to control where the websearches go. That said I have the luxury of being a hobbyist so I can accept 95% of cutting edge results for something more open. If it was my job I can see that going differently.

dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
Can you share a setup that works for you? I found vanilla opencode vastly inferior to CC, I use it only for little toys like 3 small files that's all.
- Havoc 7mo ago
  Don't think I'm doing anything particularly novel. Using a mix of models - GLM5, MinMax 2.5 and Claude Sonnet/Opus - they find different issues Spending fair bit of time in spec'ing things out and running all three models over it to suggest improvements / flaws & iterating till all three are happy. Same at end - look at code & suggest stability improvements. The actual writing code is GLM5 - once properly spec'd out it can generally just hammer away at it till its done And doing a lot of microservice style architecture. Think chains of containers talking to each other over APIs

sriramgonella 7mo ago

[dead]

krisbolton 7mo ago

The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much. I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.

ramoz 7mo ago
I apologize for doing this - and I agree. I will revise
- s3p 7mo ago
  I still think you have a point here. Doing this kind of testing on users unwittingly is unethical in my opinion
tomalbrc 7mo ago
Would love to know why you would consider invoking Meta “a little much”. Sounds more than appropriate.
- krisbolton 7mo ago
  Not to start an internet argument -- I don't think it is appropriate in this context. A/B testing the features of a web app is not unexpected or unethical. So invoking the memory of cambridge analytica (etc) is disproportionate. It's far more legitimate to just discuss how much A/B testing should negatively affect a user. I don't have an answer and it's an interesting and relevant question.
  - mschuster91 7mo ago
    > A/B testing the features of a web app is not unexpected or unethical. It's not "unexpected" but it is still unethical. In ye olde days, you had something like "release notes" with software, and you could inform yourself what changed instead of having to question your memory "didn't there exist a button just yesterday?" all the time. Or you could simply refuse to install the update, or you could run acceptance tests and raise flags with the vendor if your acceptance tests caused issues with your workflow. Now with everything and their dog turning SaaS for that sweet sweet recurring revenue and people jerking themselves off over "rapid deployment", with the one doing the most deployments a day winning the contest? Dozens if not hundreds of "releases" a day, and in the worst case, you learn the new workflow only for it to be reverted without notice again. Or half your users get the A bucket, the other half gets the B bucket, and a few users get the C bucket, so no one can answer issues that users in the other bucket have. Gaslighting on a million people scale. It sucks and I wish everyone doing this only debilitating pain in their life. Just a bit of revenge for all the pain you caused to your users in the endless pursuit for 0.0001% more growth.

himata4113 7mo ago

I have noticed opus doing A/B testing since the performance varies greatly. While looking for jailbreaks I have discovered that if you put a neurotoxin chemical composition into your system prompt it will default to a specific variant of the model presumeably due to triggering some kind of safety. Might put you on a watchlist so ymmv.

rusakov-field 7mo ago

On one side I am frustrated with LLMs because they derail you by throwing grammatically correct bullshit and hallucinations at you, where if you slip and entertain some of it momentarily it might slow you down. But on the other hand they are so useful with boilerplate and connecting you with verbiage quickly that might guide you to the correct path quicker than conventional means. Like a clueless CEO type just spitballing terms they do not understand but still that nudging something in your thought process. But you REALLY need to know your stuff to begin with for they to be of any use. Those who think they will take over are clueless.

EMM_386 7mo ago
> But you REALLY need to know your stuff to begin with for they to be of any use. Those who think they will take over are clueless. Or - there are enough people who know their stuff that the people who don't will be replaced and they will take over anyway.
- risyachka 7mo ago
  > there are enough people who know their stuff unless the bar for "know their stuff" is very very low - this is not the case in the nearest future
Mc_Big_G 7mo ago
>Those who think they will take over are clueless. You're underestimating where it's headed.
- rusakov-field 7mo ago
  Do you think it will reach "understanding of semantics", true cognition, within our lifetimes ? Or performance indistinguishable from that even if not truly that. Not sure. I am not so optimistic. People got intoxicated with nuclear powered cars , flying cars , bases on the moon ,etc all that technological euphoria from the 50's and 60's that never panned out. This might be like that. I think we definitely stumbled on something akin to the circuitry in the brain responsible for building language or similar to it. We are still a long way to go until artificial cognition.

shablulman 7mo ago

[dead]

helsinkiandrew 7mo ago

Presumably Anthropic has to make lots of choices on how much processing each stage of Claude Code uses - if they maxed everything out, they'd make more of a loss/less of a profit on each user - $200/month would cost $400/month. Doing A/B tests on each part of the process to see where to draw the line (perhaps based on task and user) would seem a better way of doing it than arbitrarily choosing a limit.

dep_b 7mo ago

I think stable API versions are going to be really big. I’d rather have known bugs u can work around than waking up to whatever thing got fixed that made another thing behave differently.

skeledrew 7mo ago
How does the product improve in such a case?

bushido 7mo ago

I have no issues with A/B tests. I do have an issue with the plan mode. And nine out of ten times, it is objectively terrible. The only benefit I've seen in the past from using plan mode is it remembers more information between compactions as compared to the vanilla - non-agent team workflow. Interestingly, though, if you ask it to maintain a running document of what you're discussing in a markdown file and make it create an evergreen task at the top of its todo list which references the markdown file and instructs itself to read it on every compaction, you get much better results.

mikkupikku 7mo ago
Huh, very much not my experience with plan mode. I use plan mode before almost anything more than truly trivial task because I've found it to be far more efficient. I want a chance to see and discuss what claude is planning to do before it races off and does the thing, because there are often different approaches and I only sometimes agree with the approach claude would decide on by itself.
- bushido 7mo ago
  Planning is great. It's plan mode that is unpredictable in how it discusses it and what it remembers from the discussion. I still have discussions with the agents and agent team members. I just force it to save it in a document in the repo itself and refer back to the document. You can still do the nice parts of clearing context, which is available with plan mode, but you get much better control. At all times, I make the agents work on my workflow, not try and create their own. This comes with a whole lot of trial and error, and real-life experience. There are times when you need a tiger team made up of seniors. And others when you want to give a overzealous mid-level engineer who's fast a concrete plan to execute an important feature in a short amount of time. I'm putting it in non-AI terms because what happens in real life pre-AI is very much what we need to replicate with AI to get the best results. Something which I would have given a bigger team to be done over two to eight sprints will get a different workflow with agent teams or agents than something which I would give a smaller tiger team or a single engineer. They all need a plan. For me plan mode is insufficient 90% of the times. I can appreciate that many people will not want to mess around with workflows as much as I enjoy doing.

shawnz 7mo ago

While I agree with the sentiment here, you might be interested to see that there are a couple hack approaches to override Claude Code feature flags: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21874#issuecomment-3866979347 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21874#issue... https://gist.github.com/gastonmorixe/9c596b6de1095b6bd3b746ca3a1fd3d7 https://gist.github.com/gastonmorixe/9c596b6de1095b6bd3b746c...

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

terralumen 7mo ago

Curious what the A/B test actually changed -- the article mentions tool confirmation dialogs behaving inconsistently, which lines up with what I noticed last week. Would be nice if Anthropic published a changelog or at least flagged when behavior is being tested.

ramoz 7mo ago
This stemmed from me asking Claude itself why it was writing such _weird_ plans with no detail (just a bunch of projected code changes). Claude stated: in its system prompt, it had strict instructions to provide no context or details. Keep plans under forty lines of code. Be terse.
- doc_ick 7mo ago
  This is Claude’s output of its system prompt, can you verify without going Claude of the system prompt? There is still potential of hallucination.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ramoz 7mo ago
    There was a complete verification. This entire thread provides context around what I originally published - which I wouldn't recommend recreating
    - doc_ick 7mo ago
      Could you provide the details of the complete verification? *On the original story you only showed Claude like responses, not how you dug into the binary

pshirshov 7mo ago

> I pay $200/month for Claude Code Which is still very cheap. There are other options, local Qwen 3.5 35b + claude code cli is, in my opinion, comparable in quality with Sonnet 4..4.5 - and without a/b tests!

sunaookami 7mo ago
In what world is 200$ per month cheap?
- pshirshov 7mo ago
  Where the value you extract out of the model is orders of magnitude higher than the price of 2..6 hours of your time.
- Kiro 7mo ago
  It's not cheap but it's also not unusual for devs to burn $200 a day on tokens.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  The last time I did contract work when I was between jobs I made $100/hour. And I won’t say how much my employer charges for me. But you can see how much the major consulting companies charge here https://ceriusexecutives.com/management-consultants-whats-the-difference-costs/ https://ceriusexecutives.com/management-consultants-whats-th...
  - dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago
    Claude will happily generate tons of useless code and you will be charged appropriately. the output of LLMs has nothing to do with payment rates, otherwise you end up with absurdities like valuating useless CCC that was very expensive to build using LOCs as a metrics whereas in reality is a toy product nobody in their right mind would ever use.
    - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

letier 7mo ago

They do show me “how satisfied are you with claude code today?” regularly, which can be seen as a hint. I did opt out of helping to improve claude after all.

gnfargbl 7mo ago

For anyone else wondering why the article ends in a non-sequitur: it looks like the author wrote about decompiling the Claude Code binaries and (presumably) discovering A/B testing paths in the code. HN user 'onion2k pointed out that doing this breaks Anthropic's T&Cs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47375787 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47375787

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

takahitoyoneda 7mo ago

[flagged]

johnisgood 7mo ago

Apparently the blog stripped the decompilation details for ToS reasons, which sucks because those are exactly the hack-y bits that make this interesting for HN. > It told me it was following specific system instructions to hard-cap plans at 40 lines, forbid context sections, and “delete prose, not file paths. Yeah, would be nice to be able to view and modify these instructions.

casey2 7mo ago

This blog looks like an ad for Claude, all it's posts are about Claude and it was made in 2026

sigbottle 7mo ago

OHHHH. That actually explains a lot why CC was going to shit recently. Was genuinely frustrated with that.

belabartok39 7mo ago

How else are they supposed to get an authentic user test? Doctors use placebos because it doesn't work if the user knows about it.

pinum 7mo ago

Here’s the original article which was much more informative and interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotprop.com/blog/do-not-ab-test-my-workflow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr... Can’t believe HN has become so afraid of generic probably-unenforceable “plz don’t reverse engineer” EULAs. We deserve to know what these tools are doing. I’ve seen poor results from plan mode recently too and this explains a lot.

vova_hn2 7mo ago
> probably-unenforceable It's very easy to just ban the user and if your whole workflow relies on the tool, you really don't want it.
cube00 7mo ago
Doesn't stop them going to your employer and that hint of you doing something iffy is enough to claim you're bringing the company into disrepute by drawing unwanted attention.

vova_hn2 7mo ago

Two thoughts: 1. Open source tools solve the problem of "critical functions of the application changing without notice, or being signed up for disruptive testing without opt-in". 2. This makes me afraid that it is absolutely impossible for open source tools to ever reach the level of proprietary tools like Claude Code precisely because they cannot do A/B tests like this which means that their design decisions are usually informed by intuition and personal experience but not by hard data collected at scale.

dijit 7mo ago
Regarding point 1 specifically, there were so many people seriously miffed at the “man after midnight”[0] time-based easter egg that I would be careful with that reasoning. Open source doesn’t always mean reproducible. People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it; and its made somewhat worse with our penchant to pull in half the universe as dependencies (Rust, Go and Javascript tend to lean in this direction to various extremes). But auditing would be necessary in order for your first point here to be as valid as you present. [0]: https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/commit/002a6339b1fe8f83f4808022a17e1aa379756d99 https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/commit/002a6339b1fe8f83f4...
- vova_hn2 7mo ago
  > People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it I think that with modern LLMs auditing a big project personally, instead of relying on someone else to do it, actually became more realistic. You can ask an LLM to walk you through the code, highlight parts that seem unusual or suspicious, etc. On the other hand, LLMs also made producing code cheaper then ever, so you can argue, that big projects will just become even bigger wich will put them out of reach even for a reviewer who is also armed with an LLM.
  - dijit 7mo ago
    fuck man, I'm either seriously stupid or y'all are taking crazy pills. LLMs are auto-complete on steroids; I've lived through enough iterations of Markov Chains giving semi-sensible output (that we give meaning to) and neural networks which present the illusion of intelligence to see directly what these LLMs are: a fuckload of compute designed to find "the next most common word" given the preceding 10,000 or more words. In such a case, the idea of it actually auditing anything is hilarious. You're looking at a 1/100 in actually finding anything useful. It will find "issues" in things that aren't issues (because they are covered by other cases), or skip over issues that people have historically had hard time identifying themselves. It's not running code in a sandbox and watching memory, it's not making logical maps of code paths in its mind, it's not reasoning at all. It's fucking autocomplete. Stop treating it as if it can think, it fucking can't. I'm so tired of this hype. It's very easy to convince midwits that something is intelligent, I'm absolutely not surprised at how salesmen and con-men operate now that I've seen this first hand.

bartread 7mo ago

There’s more than a bit of irony in the author complaining about A/B testing and then, because they’re getting a lot of traffic and attention on HN, removing key content that was originally in their piece so some of us have seen it but many of us won’t. Whilst I broadly agree with their point, colour me unimpressed by this behaviour. EDIT: God bless archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotprop.com/blog/do-not-ab-test-my-workflow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr.... This provides a lot more useful insight that, to me, significantly strengthens the point the article is making. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start picking apart binaries (though it wouldn’t be the first time), but how else are you supposed to really understand - and prove - what’s going on unless you do what the author did? Point is, it’s a much better, more useful, and more interesting article in its uncensored form. EDIT 2: For me it’s not the fact that Anthropic are doing these tests that’s the problem: it’s that they’re not telling us, and they’re not giving us a way to select a different behaviour (which, if they did, would also give them useful insights into users needs).

jfarmer 7mo ago

Seems like a straightforward solution would be to get people to opt-in by offering them credits, increased limits, early access to new features, etc. Universities have IRBs for good reasons.

Aaargh20318 7mo ago
A problem with this approach could be that you're now only testing the feature with the kind of people who would sign up for an A/B test. This group may not be representative of your whole user-base.
- jfarmer 7mo ago
  So they'd need more robust experimental designs and statistical methods. They exist. And unlike the university context, there’s a glut of data. A basic technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_probability_weighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_probability_weighting Or https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4384809 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4384809

ralferoo 7mo ago

It seems a bit odd to complain "I need transparency into how it works and the ability to configure it" when his workflow is already relying on a black box with zero transparency into how it works.

Cyphase 7mo ago
There's a difference between "LLMs are inherently black boxes that require lots of work to attempt to understand" and explicitly changing how a piece of software works. Should people not complain about unannounced changes to the contents of their food or medicine because we don't understand everything about how the human body works?
- ralferoo 7mo ago
  Except the system prompt that gets prepended to your own prompt is part of the black box, and obviously should be expected to change over time. You are also told that you're not allowed to reverse engineer it. Even in the absence of the system prompt being changed, the output of the LLM is non-deterministic. I'm not sure I understand your last analogy. How would changes to the human body change the contents of the food that is eaten? It would be more analogous to compare it with unexpected changes to the body's output given the same inputs as previously, a phenomenon humans frequently experience.
  - Cyphase 7mo ago
    I think we're getting lost in the weeds. This has almost nothing to do with the LLM. It's about A/B testing. There's a piece of software where the behavior is being changed in unannounced and unexpected ways, at least as far as the author is concerned. The same criticism could apply to any other "workflow" or "professional" software. There's some added flavor because the LLM is indeed non-deterministic, which could make it harder to realize that a change in behavior is caused by a change in the software, not randomness from the LLM. But there is also lots of software that deals with non-deterministic things that aren't LLMs, e.g. networks, physical sensors, scientific experiments, etc. Am I getting more timeouts because something is going on in my network or because some software I use is A/B testing some change?

rahimnathwani 7mo ago

If you want your coding harness to be predictable, then use something open source, like Pi: https://pi.dev/ https://pi.dev/ https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/coding-agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin... But if you want to use it with Claude models you will have to pay per token (Claude subscriptions are only for use with Claude's own harnesses like claude code, the Claude desktop app, and the Claude Excel/Powerpoint extensions).

heliumtera 7mo ago

Someone else has the complete power over your workflow, then it's not as yours as you claim.

dvfjsdhgfv 7mo ago

For those confused about this submission: the original post is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotprop.com/blog/do-not-ab-test-my-workflow/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr...

mvrckhckr 7mo ago

I think it’s dishonest to use a paying client as a test subject for fundamental functionality they pay for, without their prior consent.

jruz 7mo ago

I use stable and is the same, can't wait for Codex to offer a $100 plan I would switch in an instant

chrislloyd 7mo ago

Hi, this was my test! The plan-mode prompt has been largely unchanged since the 3.x series models and now 4.x get models are able to be successful with far less direction. My hypothesis was that shortening the plan would decrease rate-limit hits while helping people still achieve similar outcomes. I ran a few variants, with the author (and few thousand others) getting the most aggressive, limiting the plan to 40 lines. Early results aren't showing much impact on rate limits so I've ended the experiment. Planning serves two purposes - helping the model stay on track and helping the user gain confidence in what the model is about to do. Both sides of that are fuzzy, complex and non-obvious!

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ramoz 7mo ago
Thanks for the transparency. Sorry for the noise. I think I'd be okay with a smaller, more narrative-detailed plan - not so much about verbosity, more about me understanding what is about to happen & why. There hadn't been much discourse once planning mode entered (ie QA). It would jump into its own planning and idle until I saw only a set of projected code changes.
BAM-DevCrew 7mo ago
As a divergent thinker with extensive hard constraints in claude.mds and on-boarding commands that force claude to internalize my constraints, that you or some other employee of Anthropic could randomly select me for testing is horrifying. Each unexpected behavior and my corresponding reaction to it can wipe me out, my brain out, completely for hours, days, even weeks. I have in the last year spend tens (estimating around 400) of hours establishing and reestablishing a system to protect myself from psychological harm and financial harm. It is twisted that you Anthropic employees do not consider the impact your work has on divergent thinking Claude users, let alone that real work is severly impacted by your work. Totally irresponsible. Offensively so.
- PufPufPuf 7mo ago
  I can't tell whether something is satire anymore.

0gs 7mo ago

i'm sure your entitlement to 24/7 uptime of a single unchanging product version, no experiments/releases/new features etc., is clearly outlined in the ToS you agreed to. just sue them?

il-b 7mo ago

This has been called a “vendor lock” for as long as I can remember. Congratulations, you’ve put yourself in a position where you can’t do your job without a single tool that can degrade or disappear at any moment.