8 ms·
It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
- zazuke 1mo agoWhile I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end. It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.
- synalx 1mo agoI have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.
- dan_gggggg 1mo ago[dead]
- mrtesthah 1mo agoProbably good to establish canonical spec documents up front that it can use and maintain as an independent reference?
- lupire 1mo agoDoesn't need to be "up front", but you do need to curate the context. AI can't read your mind, and it will read what you (or anyone else) wrote.
- pydry 1mo agoIt can't but it will try and getting it to stop is often infeasible.
- Sharlin 1mo agoHumans can’t read minds either, but most humans aren’t so dumb as to forget what is a normative spec and what is just their own current, evolving model of the problem space. (Though some humans certainly are…)
- rendaw 1mo agoThat doesn't solve the problem of it hallucinating more design details and putting them in comments. The solution to too much authoritative documentation isn't more authoritative documentation.
- pc86 1mo agoComments exist for humans to understand the why of the code, including perhaps external dependencies/assumptions/requirements. LLMs inserting code comments makes zero sense by definition.
- pavlov 1mo agoThat’s not true because LLMs clearly benefit from having multiple statements representing aspects of the same thing. That’s why they’re always doing the “it’s not X, it’s Y” kind of patterns. It’s reinforcement.
- selcuka 1mo ago> LLMs inserting code comments makes zero sense by definition. Not completely, because anyone who reviews the code in the future does not have access to your original prompt, so theoretically leaving a comment that explains the "why" portion of the prompt would be useful. LLMs rarely do that, though.
- throwaway613746 1mo agoAnthropic hopes you just eventually give up and become completely dependent on Claude. Toss in 10 (or more) other developers with way less discipline and you will become dissillusioned with Claude's overengineered, incomprehensible, technosalad and your demise is pretty much guaranteed.
- recursive 1mo agoRetirement feels farther away than ever.
- bsjdhdudj 1mo agowhy would you not delete the comments? why are they saved or checked in? don't you read the code? and if you don't: ISN'T THIS WHY YOU NEED TO? I feel like I'm losing my mind, what the fuck is wrong with all of you?
- dan_gggggg 1mo ago> what the fuck is wrong with all of you? They spent 3 years pretending that their magic robot made them 10x harder/better/faster/stronger than the lazy peons rubbing shoulders with them and now the bill has come due.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- post-it 1mo agoI've been whittling my way towards having Claude write zero comments in code. They're pretty much never helpful.
- sdeframond 1mo agoHow do you do it?
- nottorp 1mo agoI just delete them most of the time. But I keep my LLMs on a short leash. No 40000 line PRs.
- ch4s3 1mo agoYou could probably add linting rules to your tool of choice and tell claude that your lint tool has to pass.
- bartread 1mo agoDelete the comments: I’ve gone on a tear with these recently because they’re nothing but trouble. The absolute least worst outcome is they chew up your token budget. But what tends to happen, and this is much more serious, is they poison future work and make further modification of the codebase more burdensome and error prone.
- LoganDark 1mo agoAbsolutely. IMO, comments can explain historical reasoning for the code, but refactorings can benefit heavily from rethinking ideas from scratch, as opposed to trying to follow the same reasons. LLMs tend to be misguided by comments, probably by treating them as instructions. Ergo, get rid of them.
- acedTrex 1mo agoI completely block all LLM comments via pi extension, it makes using them significantly more enjoyable. If the LLM wants to add a comment it must ASK me explicitly to do so. Seeing LLM comments in other peoples code is very upsetting because theres just so much meaningless noise.
- copperx 1mo agoWhat's the extension, please?
- gessha 1mo agoAuthor probably cobbler it together themselves.
- furst-blumier 1mo agoWhich extension is it?
- acedTrex 1mo agoIts a personal extension i wrote myself, maybe I should put it up somewhere.. Its so simple though i dont know if its worth it vs just "go build it yourself"
- rco8786 1mo agoWe have this in our harness markdown: ``` ## Comments Use comments extremely sparingly. Most comments should be at the request of the user. When something warrants a comment, keep it to one or two lines: what the code does and why it's necessary. No background narrative, no replaying the investigation or failure mode, nothing a test name or the commit message already says. Applies to specs too. If a comment needs a paragraph, make the code clearer instead. ``` The comments Claude was leaving got absolutely out of control. Just lines and lines of LLM drivel that was barely intelligible and not remotely relevant to what a code comment should be used for.
- preommr 1mo agoI've had codex delete useful (albeit not directly relevant or perhaps messy wip notes) comments, even though I explicitly have it in my agents.md not to delete comments, and ask for permission if it thinks it should. It deleted the comments, and when I asked why it did that even though I expressedly asked it not to, it responded that me prompting it in the first place explicit permission. I have no idea if that's the actual reason or just some post-hoc explanation. But I genuinely don't think it's possible to just have these things be completely, 100%, indpenedent and also solve deep problems that need to also be understood by people in a people-based organization context.
- recursive 1mo agoThere might not be an "actual" reason that's expressible in human-comprehensible language.
- wafflemaker 1mo agoMoreover, even if there was a reason, it was there "in the model" at the moment of generation. The new model can only guess/hallucinate when ordered to give reasons. It's like having an actor play a role while wearing a hat. Then the next actor comes, puts on the same hat, and we're asking them to explain why "they" did something while there was someone else playing the role.
- debugnik 1mo ago> and when I asked why it did that even though I expressedly asked it not to Just be clear, it can't know, and by asking you're just making it roleplay as someone excusing themselves. It's very unlikely that the choice to remove the comment was driven by an internal monologue based on learned criteria that it can refer to. The sampler most likely picked tokens to remove it while writing the patch, because that's what the statistics modelled, and that's it.
- coder-pm 1mo agoMy approach is to keep the comments only with a references. My LLM based projects always have the decision log where are my decisions while working on the features are stored with the date. I found this useful to actually trace why something is in the codebase. It's much easier for both me and the LLM to navigate through the big projects where I spent months and dozens of full night sessions executing my plans with --dangerously-skip-permissions. In the morning I was answering all the model questions and iterating like that. Honestly, try that.
- Utilera 1mo agoThis is almost worse in code because the hallucination starts looking like documentation
- andai 1mo agoA computer cannot be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a decision. -IBM, 1979 (paraphrased)
- gmueckl 1mo agoEven worse to me is the tendency to not properly rewrite when prompted to change something in a text. It will always add to the document instead of replacing any obsolete information. The lengths it goes to to turn every document into a (useles) decision log is astounding and annoying.
- t-writescode 1mo agoSo, I admit that I'm finally getting into this "let Claude help you write code" stuff, and I'm enjoying it a bit for the stuff I, honestly, just don't want to write; but ... I still read it. I still review it. I still look at the code like I'm peer-reviewing it and go, "Uh ... I don't like this area at all. That's going to be really hard to debug at 3am" and so on. I guess my thought / question is: this is your code. Why are you submitting the code to the git repo like that, with all the wrong text? I get making mistakes here or there; but ... everywhere? Enough that it's causing huge problems you can't quickly correct? And ... aren't you lucky you still *have* the context in your mind? What if you hadn't caught it, or someone else had done that and you inherited that code with those wrong comments that you let through the PR and into the main branch?
- bojan 1mo ago> Why are you submitting the code to the git repo like that, with all the wrong text? According to my enterprise architect I shouldn't be reviewing code, it's a waste of time in this new reality. I'm still doing it because it's going to be me answering that 3 AM call. But I don't know for how long I'll be allowed to swim upstream like that.
- qsera 1mo agoI have found manual reviewing of LLM generated code to be an uphill battle. LLMs does not believe in abstraction. So complexity spills everywhere. Some details in the lowest level might be handled separately in more than one place, at the higher levels. In a short while it is a copiously documented unreadable mess (both code and documentation). LLM written PR descriptions and comments are a sight to behold. I am not sure how stuff can be written so cryptically. It seems that LLMs just make up what ever terminology so that it can cram as much details into a single sentence as possible! I generally just paste it to chatgpt and ask it to decrypt it.
- sfn42 1mo agoYeah, that happens when you vibe code and just let the LLM be in control of everything. If you take responsibility for the architecture and instruct it to do things properly it will do them properly. You can tell it exactly how to do it or you can ask it to handle it in a way that avoids duplication, you can tell it to design a reusable abstraction for this usecase etc.
- p0w3n3d 1mo agoIn numerical methods this is called error propagation. And since the neural networks are basically numerical approximations of a certain function, this shows apparent similarity of the propagation on a macro scale
- abjhn 1mo ago[dead]
- empath75 1mo agoI think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- lupire 1mo agoI don't understand. Are you saying that AI should write notes but then they should be excluded from the AI's context?
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- swiftcoder 1mo agoTwo different knowledge bases. One to store AI's "learned" context, the other for you to manually edit.
- empath75 1mo agoYou need provenance for the notes, the AI can't tell the difference between its own code comments in code and team decisions.
- mrtesthah 1mo agoThis might work to keep work separate: https://github.com/eighttrigrams/us-vs-them https://github.com/eighttrigrams/us-vs-them
- gdulli 1mo agoWhat am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?
- datakan 1mo ago“After we started thinking for you it became our society” The Matrix 1999
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoThat's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.
- hdhdhsjsbdh 1mo agoSeems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.
- _def 1mo agoNightmare fuel. This sounds like totally worthless to me.
- hdhdhsjsbdh 1mo agoI agree.
- ModernMech 1mo agoThe ultimate goal of project capitalism is to make ownership the only thing in the world that’s valued or valuable. The only thing that matters is how much and who you own.
- parineum 1mo agoThe actual goal of capitalism is the direct the impulses of the capitalist to align with the interests of the public.
- helsinkiandrew 1mo agoThere was a related study posted awhile ago: > When people think AI did the creative work, task meaning and effort decline https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-people-think-ai-did-the-creative-work-task-meaning-and-effort-decline/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-people-think-ai-did-...
- chessucation 1mo agoi've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be discarded.
- HPsquared 1mo agoThe prompter becomes the prompted!
- chessucation 1mo agoha indeed!
- jheriko 1mo ago[dead]
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- SomeonesAccount 1mo agoThis is why I never use AI for ideas. Always my own ideas.
- mohamedkoubaa 1mo agoBrian, CTO complains that it's so hard for him to execute against the technical strategy communicated by that smart intern on the third day of his internship two years ago. Poor Brian.
- GPerson 1mo agoI have separate directories for human only files and ai files. I’m not doing anything that matters but it works for me.
- mccoyb 1mo agoI don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time" I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ideas. 99% of them are garbage. Before AI, a conversation with colleagues would help me weed out the garbage, and possibly give me a new perspective ("here's something surprising about what you just said!") Now, AI plays a helpful role in helping me weed out the garbage for the subset of ideas that I can test empirically -- and sometimes it does give me a new perspective, but with significantly more noise than my colleagues, who would take me right to the point that would be useful for me to see. I've never felt like I needed a second brain ... because if I had such a thing, I think I would be keeping the 99% garbage around -- instead I just let biology GC it.
- Dependance 1mo agoHey, love the hivemind comment to mine. Maybe we do have kind of a second brain...? /s How do you take notes, generally speaking ?
- mccoyb 1mo agoI've never been a good note taker. In the things I think about, when I'm really invested in something, I have to reverse engineer it to experience the why. Reverse engineering can take several forms for me: it started with writing parts of systems from scratch, and now (due to academic training) it oftens looks like "thinking about how to explain the system to a group of colleagues", which is one degree of separation from writing the system from scratch, but is much faster - and seems to work well when working with LM agents on code (because you have to confront your ignorance) part of the training in academia is how to know when you don't understood the thing, so this ends up working well for me now. One trick: you can force yourself to understand something better by making a presentation and imagining you're going to be grilled by someone smarter than you. This is kind of the feeling of pressure that academic paper reviews give (in an ideal world) and it translates when you think about explaining something to someone else.
- Dependance 1mo agoCould anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? I have a dozen ideas popping a day and nothing comes close in terms of ease than a paper notebook for capturing and some apple notes equivalent for storage. Used to have a Notion but all the "Second Brain" movement seems...fishy to me ?
- _def 1mo agoTaking the notes (and being able to read them again if I want) is all I need from my "second Brain". This perfectly can be pieces of paper, as long as i can carry them around with me. More realistically some digital notes software fulfills that requirement.
- pragma_x 1mo ago> Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? My handwriting has degraded from consistent keyboard use over the last 30 years. Obisidan has replaced my paper notebooks, mostly because of this. However, it is handy to be able to mesh those notes with hyperlinks, LLM output snippets, quotes from other sources, embedded images, etc. Doing all of those other things would be laborious to impossible with paper.
- nelsonfigueroa 1mo agoI use Obsidian but I don't follow the whole "second brain" thing, I just organize my notes by directories. You can use Obsidian however you want and adapt to the way your actual brain works. The "second brain" thing doesn't work for everyone. Even taking digital notes doesn't work for everyone (for example, it looks like you prefer paper notes). If you haven't tried Obsidian at all I think you should give it a shot and write notes without following any system in particular. If you've tried it and you still prefer paper notes and the occasional apple note, then perhaps Obsidian isn't necessary for the way you take and organize notes.
- beart 1mo agoI just want something that I can use to record notes, with good backups, and a format that doesn't lock me in. Obsidian offers that. It has a pretty decent mobile app and desktop app, in terms of the actual editing. And if I do want to do something advanced, like automatically generate a daily note for recording what I worked on today, it can do that. You can do all these things with other programs, or even just raw files, but Obsidian adds just enough to make it easy.
- rootsudo 1mo agoFor me it’s the opposite, AI has helped me do the final 20% that I could never do, making execution more painless and more successful.
- avgDev 1mo agoI've found it very helpful with flushing out bugs, reviewing my code. I have a hard time trusting it to generate 100+ lines of code because in the end I am responsible for it.
- altairprime 1mo agoIronically, this is why one of the best ways to manage upwards is to prompt managers into coming up with your idea as if it were their own: they’re dramatically more likely to execute and deliver on it. Of course, this also obviously leads to undue credit given for coming up the idea, which is certainly a core problem with AI as well, but it’s still charming to watch managerial psych being rediscovered by this new generation of managers.
- Cameri 1mo agoNothing beats the feeling of having a proposed idea dismissed just to have the higher ups “come up” with it some time later. Don’t even dream about getting a footnote mention.
- altairprime 1mo agoThat’s the passive form of the experience, sure — and it often comes as a shock to people that this is a thing in human relations. If you set out to make it happen, and you don’t mind letting someone else execute on the idea, it can be quite fun to manipulate people into an epiphany you arranged for them. (See also teaching, coaching, et al. but with a flipped power differential.)
- megous 1mo ago[dead]
- ssivark 1mo ago> It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI Yes! And that's because you can't really delegate ownership/authorship to AI (at today's capability levels). Coding agents might have been RL'd out the wazoo to write code to solve well defined problems, but given a situation the onus of making sense of the ambiguity and identifying the problem -- and even crafting a skeleton for an acceptable solution keeping in mind tradeoffs -- needs to be done by a human taking ownership. I wrote about this recently from a slightly different angle [1], but the core idea is the same -- which is why it is hard to take over an idea mooted by AI. Before even writing/implementing, the AI has internally resolved ambiguity with several decisions which are arbitrary, and match neither your mental model nor the actual ground reality (which you need to spend time understanding in order to productively interpret). [1] https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adaptive-conversational https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
- r0b05 1mo agoMy second brain is 500 open tabs of Notepad++
- sva_ 1mo agoThe title is editorialized. It is "Keep AI Out of Your (Obsidian) Vault". For the Original title, I wish they added the qualifier "generative" for AI. You may well use e.g. embeddings to semantically search through your notes, and there are only gains in that. Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.
- copperx 1mo ago> Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward. The exception is transcriptions and summaries of transcriptions for things like lectures; I find those useful even when I know writing them myself would be better.
- Fomite 1mo agoYeah - I don't want AI writing "notes" in the academic sense, but minutes. Of course the problem with this for me (I'm a state employee) is that said transcript is a public record.
- WhyNotHugo 1mo agoOne of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that. Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking. I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.
- nixonaddiction 1mo agoive never been able to use zettelkattsen. i like having daily notes instead of different notes for different ideas. its easier this way. my obsidian vault is a hybrid of diary and research and i am trying to separate the diary and research but its not easy tbh. (i suffer from a crushing urge to note that i "just ate a sandwich, was good" while liveblogging research and debugging.) that being said, i got a big kick out of feeding my daily notes into my local model. i had some more diary-like entries that i would never share with anyone, but it was extremely funny to have my local model take a 3000 word recap of what i did in a day and summarize it like "writer reflects on their job: they worry about their performance. meals: the writer ate oatmeal, and a sandwich. family: the author contemplates their fathers absence growing up." ive developed a really large corpus of written work over the years and am hoping to fine tune a model using my diary as the training set. i think this would yield hilarious results. keeping it all local though, i drop my passwords in there at times and i dont want that leaked.
- layer8 1mo ago> I’m a strong proponent of avoiding adding lots of AI-generated summaries or other on-the-fly-generated text to my vault. The reason is simple: over time, I don’t know anymore whether the content was written by me or by an AI The reason to not add it is that the quality of summarization will likely only in prove in the future, so it’s better to do it on demand whenever needed.
- jpardilla 1mo ago[flagged]
- chadcmulligan 1mo agowhat happened to ideas are cheap - execution is everything. As Claude said to me when I said the same thing - it's not really its idea you had to ask the right questions. I find this true in some ways - asking the right question and finding out what the AI's have hidden inside them is like panning for gold imho.
- zahlman 1mo ago> what happened to ideas are cheap - execution is everything. It used to be that we only recognized a tiny fraction of the actual ideas involved, because most of them were intermingled with execution. We would sit there and bang out code at single-digit WPM while trying to keep block diagrams of process memory (or UML diagrams, or whatever else) in our heads, and then run the compiler and/or the tests and realize we'd gone wrong anyway. Now we have lightning-fast "execution" devoid of real insight (just making choices more or less arbitrarily as they come up) because the LLM can do more and more without human intervention, but for some tasks it goes off the rails because the insight actually is necessary.
- chadcmulligan 1mo agoI never really bought into it, I still think ideas are hard, and execution may be a little easier, but still hard to. The lack of thousands of amazing new startups since AI sort of validates this.
- potato66 1mo agoI keep two separate vaults. It's a pain but no ai writing should mix with my own. Otherwise how can I differentiate my discoveries from its
- pizzathyme 1mo agoI have claude just label at the top of all the notes it's generated "Generated by Claude". I also put them into specific claude folders. I agree with the downsides of not being able to distinguish your own writing from an AI's in the future, but don't see why it's a unsolvable problem.
- zahlman 1mo ago> an idea that is not yours LLMs don't have sense experience, so it doesn't have real reasons to prefer one option over another when nothing has been specified in the prompt. It can only guess based on what's most represented in its training. "Ideas" are only being simulated by an RNG; the AI can "suggest" (output) them, but they don't "have" the idea either. If you couldn't make the decision yourself in the first place, pulling a slip of paper out of the hat only helps in the cases where the choice really didn't matter at all. Otherwise you'll look at it, frown, and still feel stuck.
- yipinwong 1mo agoAs the author does, i just have a separate vault for AI to manage. It used to be a mess, but with OKF (Open Knowledge Format), things are more manageable and navigatable (for me as well). Consider AI vault as a scratch pad that AIs use, not as something you put your own thought into it.
- Utilera 1mo agoAI is great as a query layer over my notes, but I don't really want it contributing to them. The whole value of old notes is that they preserve what I noticed at the time. If half the vault becomes competent-sounding generated text, searching it five years later seems much less useful...
- luxshan_t 1mo agoIn research, we can use AI efficiently to identify gaps and then validate them, but the final idea should be our own. I’ve faced an issue where, when AI suggests something unfamiliar, the research may not become successful because we start relying on it too much. Instead of actually learning and doing research, we become good prompters, and our brains start thinking, "How should I ask Claude to do this?" rather than thinking deeply about the research problem itself.
- pirathi_22 1mo ago[flagged]
- t0bia_s 1mo agoLetting AI to read private thoughs is like giving public entities ability to read mind. In global scale, this is ideal tool for social engineering.
- andai 1mo ago>I don’t know anymore whether the content was written by me or by an AI Seriously? If so, which model produces actually human sounding output?
- Tim_yanxi 1mo ago[flagged]
- nicman23 1mo agowhy would you want ai to suggest high level ideas ?
- NuclearPM 1mo agoWhy not?
- butlike 1mo agoWell, yeah. It used to be you traded money for your time building someone else's dream. Now you do it for free. What kind of value proposition is that? I love you guys, but number 1 is numero uno, and if the chips are down and I'm working for free, I'm going to be working on myself.
- afarviral 1mo agoYeah I've just gone back to hand coding everything and pretend AI doesn't exist. Seriously. It doesn't have any measurable impact on my productivity (since there's no meaningful way to measure it), and is slowly restoring my blunted research and reading ability. I don't need extra dimensions of tasks like deleting hallucinations, and get to have 100% personal agency (other than when collaborating with colleagues of course).