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I’ve never used any of these tools. Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous

I’ve never used any of these tools. Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things. For my sanity. (I am genuinely uncertain, though I presume it’s at least somewhat exaggerated.)

dd8601fn 27d ago
No. It’s just a bunch of jokes rolled up into a big exaggeration. It’s funny because there are elements of truth in each bit of it, though.
retsibsi 27d ago
> Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things It's a pisstake, but (in the bits I read, and based on my own personal experience) the writing style is barely exaggerated, while the behaviour doesn't ring true at all.
- selestify 27d ago
  The behavior, while slightly exaggerated, rings entirely true for me. From the other comments in this thread, it seems I am prompting poorly in a similar way to the options offered. I am guessing you prompt differently than what is shown in the game?
  - deaux 26d ago
    I'm not the person you were replying to, but yes. Let me show you the issue. "Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button."; half the site isn't blue, why would you say that? What would "half the site" even mean? Ironically even in this satire supposed to make fun of how Claude responds to prompts, it is smart enough to ignore that. A better prompt would be "Why are many parts of the site, such as the Cancel button, now also blue?", though in this case it doesn't matter as the reply would be roughly the same. Next, Claude helpfully tells us we're dealing with a monstrosity of a codebase out of hell: "Seven components consume the token directly; another eleven reach it through aliases; three use it only in hover/focus state; and two appear to be accidental cross-role consumers" is such an insane codebase that the initial request was basically impossible to carry out. Claude made that perfectly clear, yet the next prompt choice just ignores that fact. "Revert everything except Add to Cart. That is the whole task." It just explained why this is impossible. It had only made one change, so there is no "revert everything except X"; there's only a single change to revert, which would mean Add to Cart too would no longer be blue. The human just chose to ignore that. The other option is "I do not care about the token architecture. I do not care why it happened. Put everything back the way it was and leave ONLY the Add to cart button blue. Please.". This has the same issue; "Put everything back and _leave_ only the button blue" is an impossible ask, which it just explained to you. So if you really don't want to deal with cleaning up some of the mess, instead only adding on to it but getting your blue button, then you'd want to say "Revert the change you made, then make a new change that scopes the new blue color to only the Cancel button". Ignoring the information it gives you, or telling it things that are incorrect, of course will lead to bad results. It's impossible not to.
- mrguyorama 27d ago
  The behavior is congruent with my experience in abstract, in that all models will regularly do things you didn't ask for, will regularly go "above and beyond" by their training I expect, will regularly make changes that are entirely orthogonal to the change you asked for. I've worked with Opus and Sonnet daily, and they are pretty great at generating functions and modules and components that have clear boundaries of concern, but I've recently been working some research tasks into our infrastructure and code and it seems impossible to coerce Sonnet into making only specific changes to a document you are working on. It also blatantly ignores instructions as a rule. "Don't disassemble java class files, just ask me to pull in the source code" worked less than half the time. The Intellij Copilot plugin just doesn't use the AGENTS.md and similar files, and there doesn't seem to be any meaningful activity in the bug reports of same. "Don't modify code unless I tell you to" had bad adherence as well. It also will read documentation and inform you that it says the opposite. This problem happened to me across models, across model updates, across months of real time. There's a specific example that I will not mention to avoid having it be trained on specifically. A distinct but similar problem is that it will take bad documentation and just pretend it has a good understanding. Claude gave me absurdly wrong descriptions for Splunk alert settings with absolute confidence. I don't think any agent can reliably figure out "I don't know"
wildzzz 27d ago
Sometimes you do get stuck on these weird tangents that feel like bike shedding. You end up wasting tokens because you left the AI to make decisions on ambiguous directions and then have to spend time diving down to fix it into what you actually wanted. Honestly it's not too different than working with people who don't exactly understand your grand plan but are technically adept. They can build whatever you want but only if you are clear with your instructions or have already developed the plan with them. Just like if you hired someone to make an app for you and it didn't quite do what you wanted it to, it's going to be expensive to make large changes. So you need to research (or at least have a conversation with the AI) about frameworks that best fit your needs and have the flexibility to add or change features after the core parts are stood up. It also helps to stage the project in phases so you're not distracting the AI from the critical aspects with aesthetic tweaks.
theandrewbailey 27d ago
I haven't been professionally responsible for code since before AI started eating everything, and haven't touched AI in the meantime. Is this representative of the BS that everyone else here puts up with on a day-to-day basis? Did we collectively burn trillions of dollars for this?
- t43562 27d ago
  Sometimes, yes, but obviously not everyone. I suspect that it depends what you're doing and how. Perhaps the AI has more difficulty understanding what some people want than what others want. I certainly have had a milder version of this and it neutralises the value of the tool because it keeps trying to do things you don't want in a way you don't want it to do them. I get annoyed at having to write huge explanations of how to do something and end up doing it myself sometimes.
- deaux 26d ago
  Not at all.
Foobar8568 27d ago
With weak models, yeah if you get things compiled, with any Opus 4.6 or Codex, not really... It's a sad parody that people will take as reality.
oblio 26d ago
> I’ve never used any of these tools. You probably should. It costs you about $20 and you will have an informed opinion on them.

dd8601fn 27d ago

No. It’s just a bunch of jokes rolled up into a big exaggeration. It’s funny because there are elements of truth in each bit of it, though.

retsibsi 27d ago

> Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things It's a pisstake, but (in the bits I read, and based on my own personal experience) the writing style is barely exaggerated, while the behaviour doesn't ring true at all.

selestify 27d ago
The behavior, while slightly exaggerated, rings entirely true for me. From the other comments in this thread, it seems I am prompting poorly in a similar way to the options offered. I am guessing you prompt differently than what is shown in the game?
- deaux 26d ago
  I'm not the person you were replying to, but yes. Let me show you the issue. "Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button."; half the site isn't blue, why would you say that? What would "half the site" even mean? Ironically even in this satire supposed to make fun of how Claude responds to prompts, it is smart enough to ignore that. A better prompt would be "Why are many parts of the site, such as the Cancel button, now also blue?", though in this case it doesn't matter as the reply would be roughly the same. Next, Claude helpfully tells us we're dealing with a monstrosity of a codebase out of hell: "Seven components consume the token directly; another eleven reach it through aliases; three use it only in hover/focus state; and two appear to be accidental cross-role consumers" is such an insane codebase that the initial request was basically impossible to carry out. Claude made that perfectly clear, yet the next prompt choice just ignores that fact. "Revert everything except Add to Cart. That is the whole task." It just explained why this is impossible. It had only made one change, so there is no "revert everything except X"; there's only a single change to revert, which would mean Add to Cart too would no longer be blue. The human just chose to ignore that. The other option is "I do not care about the token architecture. I do not care why it happened. Put everything back the way it was and leave ONLY the Add to cart button blue. Please.". This has the same issue; "Put everything back and _leave_ only the button blue" is an impossible ask, which it just explained to you. So if you really don't want to deal with cleaning up some of the mess, instead only adding on to it but getting your blue button, then you'd want to say "Revert the change you made, then make a new change that scopes the new blue color to only the Cancel button". Ignoring the information it gives you, or telling it things that are incorrect, of course will lead to bad results. It's impossible not to.
mrguyorama 27d ago
The behavior is congruent with my experience in abstract, in that all models will regularly do things you didn't ask for, will regularly go "above and beyond" by their training I expect, will regularly make changes that are entirely orthogonal to the change you asked for. I've worked with Opus and Sonnet daily, and they are pretty great at generating functions and modules and components that have clear boundaries of concern, but I've recently been working some research tasks into our infrastructure and code and it seems impossible to coerce Sonnet into making only specific changes to a document you are working on. It also blatantly ignores instructions as a rule. "Don't disassemble java class files, just ask me to pull in the source code" worked less than half the time. The Intellij Copilot plugin just doesn't use the AGENTS.md and similar files, and there doesn't seem to be any meaningful activity in the bug reports of same. "Don't modify code unless I tell you to" had bad adherence as well. It also will read documentation and inform you that it says the opposite. This problem happened to me across models, across model updates, across months of real time. There's a specific example that I will not mention to avoid having it be trained on specifically. A distinct but similar problem is that it will take bad documentation and just pretend it has a good understanding. Claude gave me absurdly wrong descriptions for Splunk alert settings with absolute confidence. I don't think any agent can reliably figure out "I don't know"

wildzzz 27d ago

Sometimes you do get stuck on these weird tangents that feel like bike shedding. You end up wasting tokens because you left the AI to make decisions on ambiguous directions and then have to spend time diving down to fix it into what you actually wanted. Honestly it's not too different than working with people who don't exactly understand your grand plan but are technically adept. They can build whatever you want but only if you are clear with your instructions or have already developed the plan with them. Just like if you hired someone to make an app for you and it didn't quite do what you wanted it to, it's going to be expensive to make large changes. So you need to research (or at least have a conversation with the AI) about frameworks that best fit your needs and have the flexibility to add or change features after the core parts are stood up. It also helps to stage the project in phases so you're not distracting the AI from the critical aspects with aesthetic tweaks.

theandrewbailey 27d ago

I haven't been professionally responsible for code since before AI started eating everything, and haven't touched AI in the meantime. Is this representative of the BS that everyone else here puts up with on a day-to-day basis? Did we collectively burn trillions of dollars for this?

t43562 27d ago
Sometimes, yes, but obviously not everyone. I suspect that it depends what you're doing and how. Perhaps the AI has more difficulty understanding what some people want than what others want. I certainly have had a milder version of this and it neutralises the value of the tool because it keeps trying to do things you don't want in a way you don't want it to do them. I get annoyed at having to write huge explanations of how to do something and end up doing it myself sometimes.
deaux 26d ago
Not at all.

Foobar8568 27d ago

With weak models, yeah if you get things compiled, with any Opus 4.6 or Codex, not really... It's a sad parody that people will take as reality.

oblio 26d ago

> I’ve never used any of these tools. You probably should. It costs you about $20 and you will have an informed opinion on them.