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Seriously, when you're conversing with a person would you prefer they start rambling on their own interpretation or would you prefer they ask you to clarify? Th

Seriously, when you're conversing with a person would you prefer they start rambling on their own interpretation or would you prefer they ask you to clarify? The latter seems pretty natural and obvious. Edit: That said, it's entirely possible that large and sophisticated LLMs can invent some pretty bizarre but technically possible interpretations, so maybe this is to curb that tendency.

gausswho 6mo ago
Socrates would agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
- gck1 6mo ago
  I have a fun little agent in my tmux agent orchestration system - Socratic agent that has no access to codebase, can't read any files, can only send/receive messages to/from the controlling agent and can only ask questions. When I task my primary agent with anything, it has to launch the Socratic agent, give it an overview of what are we working on, what our goals are and what it plans to do. This works better than any thinking tokens for me so far. It usually gets the model to write almost perfectly balanced plan that is neither over, nor under engineered.
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    Sounds pretty neat! Is there an written agent.md for that you could share for that?
embedding-shape 6mo ago
> The latter seems pretty natural and obvious. To me too, if something is ambigious or unclear when I'm getting something to do from someone, I need to ask them to clarify, anything else be borderline insane in my world. But I know so many people whose approach is basically "Well, you didn't clearly state/say X so clearly that was up to me to interpret however I wanted, usually the easiest/shortest way for me", which is exactly how LLMs seem to take prompts with ambigiouity too, unless you strongly prompt them to not "reasonable attempt now without asking questions".
eastbound 6mo ago
—So what would theoretically happen if we flipped that big red switch? —Claude Code: FLIPS THE SWITCH, does not answer the question. Claude does that in React, constantly starting a wrong refactor. I’ve been using Claude for 4 weeks only, but for the last 10 days I’m getting anger issues at the new nerfing.
- tobyhinloopen 6mo ago
  Yeah this happens to me all the time! I have a separate session for discussing and only apply edits in worktrees / subagents to clearly separate discuss from work and it still does it
- ashdksnndck 6mo ago
  I sometimes prompt with leading questions where I actually want Claude to understand what I’m implying and go ahead and do it. That’s just part of my communication style. I suppose I’m the part of the distribution that ruins things for you.
adw 6mo ago
When you’re staffing work to a junior, though, often it’s the opposite.
- PunchyHamster 6mo ago
  So you are saying they are trying for the whole Artificial Intern vibe ?
- majormajor 6mo ago
  IME "don't ask questions and just do a bunch of crap based on your first guess that we then have to correct later after you wasted a week" is one of the most common junior-engineer failure modes and a great way for someone to dead-end their progression.

gausswho 6mo ago

Socrates would agree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

gck1 6mo ago
I have a fun little agent in my tmux agent orchestration system - Socratic agent that has no access to codebase, can't read any files, can only send/receive messages to/from the controlling agent and can only ask questions. When I task my primary agent with anything, it has to launch the Socratic agent, give it an overview of what are we working on, what our goals are and what it plans to do. This works better than any thinking tokens for me so far. It usually gets the model to write almost perfectly balanced plan that is neither over, nor under engineered.
- fragmede 6mo ago
  Sounds pretty neat! Is there an written agent.md for that you could share for that?

embedding-shape 6mo ago

> The latter seems pretty natural and obvious. To me too, if something is ambigious or unclear when I'm getting something to do from someone, I need to ask them to clarify, anything else be borderline insane in my world. But I know so many people whose approach is basically "Well, you didn't clearly state/say X so clearly that was up to me to interpret however I wanted, usually the easiest/shortest way for me", which is exactly how LLMs seem to take prompts with ambigiouity too, unless you strongly prompt them to not "reasonable attempt now without asking questions".

eastbound 6mo ago

—So what would theoretically happen if we flipped that big red switch? —Claude Code: FLIPS THE SWITCH, does not answer the question. Claude does that in React, constantly starting a wrong refactor. I’ve been using Claude for 4 weeks only, but for the last 10 days I’m getting anger issues at the new nerfing.

tobyhinloopen 6mo ago
Yeah this happens to me all the time! I have a separate session for discussing and only apply edits in worktrees / subagents to clearly separate discuss from work and it still does it
ashdksnndck 6mo ago
I sometimes prompt with leading questions where I actually want Claude to understand what I’m implying and go ahead and do it. That’s just part of my communication style. I suppose I’m the part of the distribution that ruins things for you.

adw 6mo ago

When you’re staffing work to a junior, though, often it’s the opposite.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago
So you are saying they are trying for the whole Artificial Intern vibe ?
majormajor 6mo ago
IME "don't ask questions and just do a bunch of crap based on your first guess that we then have to correct later after you wasted a week" is one of the most common junior-engineer failure modes and a great way for someone to dead-end their progression.