6 ms·

> Filip also told me that he asked Claude to continue on the even case after the odd case had been resolved. “But there after a while it seemed to get stuck. In

> Filip also told me that he asked Claude to continue on the even case after the odd case had been resolved. “But there after a while it seemed to get stuck. In the end, it was not even able to write and run explore programs correctly anymore, very weird. So I stopped the search.” Interesting snippet towards the end. I wonder if they were using claude.ai or claude code. Sounds like they ran out of context and entered the "dumb zone."

afspear 7mo ago
What would be super cool is if this dumb zone could be quantified and surfaced to the user. I've noticed that copilot now has a little circle graph that indicates context use percentage and it changes color based on percentage. I'll bet these are very naive metrics on used tokens vs context availability. I wonder if there could be meta data streamed or sent along with the tokens that could show that you've entered the dumb zone.
simianwords 7mo ago
They mentioned plan document
joshrw 7mo ago
Then it needs to do context compacting, otherwise the results become garbage
brcmthrowaway 7mo ago
What is dumb zone?
- kami23 7mo ago
  When the LLMs start compacting they summarize the conversation up to that point using various techniques. Overall a lot of maybe finer points of the work goes missing and can only be retrieved by the LLM being told to search for it explicitly in old logs. Once you compact, you've thrown away a lot of relevant tokens from your problem solving and they do become significantly dumber as a result. If I see a compaction coming soon I ask it to write a letter to its future self, and then start a new session by having it read the letter. There are some days where I let the same session compact 4-5 times and just use the letter to future self method to keep it going with enough context because resetting context also resets my brain :) If you're ever curious in Claude once you compact you can read the new initial prompt after compaction and see how severe it gets cut down. It's very informative of what it forgets and deems not important. For example I have some internal CLIs that are horribly documented so Claude has to try a few flags a few times to figure out specifics and those corrections always get thrown away and it has to relearn them next time it wants to use the CLI. If you notice things like that happening constantly, my move is to codify those things into my CLAUDE.md or lately I've been making a small script or MCP server to run very specific flags of stuff.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - LPisGood 7mo ago
    > I ask it to write a letter to its future self, and then start a new session by having it read the letter Is that not one kf the primary technologies for compactification?
    - fourthark 7mo ago
      I think the point is that you have a better idea of what you want it to remember and even a small hint can have big impact. Just saying "write up what you know", with no other clues, should not perform any better than generic compaction.
    - kami23 7mo ago
      You should do your own experiment when you see compaction about to start use the end of your window to have it write one first, and then let the session compact and compare. I was surprised by how small the compact message is. When I tell it to write a letter to itself I usually phrase it. 'write a letter to yourself Make notes of any gotchas or any quirks that you learned and make sure to note them down.' It does get those into the letter but if you check compaction a lot of it is gone.
  - ulrikrasmussen 7mo ago
    So you use the letter to itself in addition to the compacted context? I am curious what you ask it to include in the letter and how it is different from a custom instruction passed to /compact?
  - kqr 7mo ago
    What prompt do you use for the letter-to-self? I've been trying that technique myself to manually reset context without losing the important parts (e.g. when it has barked up the wrong tree and I'm sensing that misstep might influence its current generation in a pathological way), but I've not had much success.
pcloadlett3r 7mo ago
In another part he says Filip restarted Claude many times so it seems they are aware of context polution and ways to avoid it (also why they kept telling Claude to write everything to a file). It could just be that Claude was caught between a rock and a hard place; dissapointing the user vs solving a problem it couldn't solve.

afspear 7mo ago

What would be super cool is if this dumb zone could be quantified and surfaced to the user. I've noticed that copilot now has a little circle graph that indicates context use percentage and it changes color based on percentage. I'll bet these are very naive metrics on used tokens vs context availability. I wonder if there could be meta data streamed or sent along with the tokens that could show that you've entered the dumb zone.

simianwords 7mo ago

They mentioned plan document

joshrw 7mo ago

Then it needs to do context compacting, otherwise the results become garbage

brcmthrowaway 7mo ago

What is dumb zone?

kami23 7mo ago
When the LLMs start compacting they summarize the conversation up to that point using various techniques. Overall a lot of maybe finer points of the work goes missing and can only be retrieved by the LLM being told to search for it explicitly in old logs. Once you compact, you've thrown away a lot of relevant tokens from your problem solving and they do become significantly dumber as a result. If I see a compaction coming soon I ask it to write a letter to its future self, and then start a new session by having it read the letter. There are some days where I let the same session compact 4-5 times and just use the letter to future self method to keep it going with enough context because resetting context also resets my brain :) If you're ever curious in Claude once you compact you can read the new initial prompt after compaction and see how severe it gets cut down. It's very informative of what it forgets and deems not important. For example I have some internal CLIs that are horribly documented so Claude has to try a few flags a few times to figure out specifics and those corrections always get thrown away and it has to relearn them next time it wants to use the CLI. If you notice things like that happening constantly, my move is to codify those things into my CLAUDE.md or lately I've been making a small script or MCP server to run very specific flags of stuff.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- LPisGood 7mo ago
  > I ask it to write a letter to its future self, and then start a new session by having it read the letter Is that not one kf the primary technologies for compactification?
  - fourthark 7mo ago
    I think the point is that you have a better idea of what you want it to remember and even a small hint can have big impact. Just saying "write up what you know", with no other clues, should not perform any better than generic compaction.
  - kami23 7mo ago
    You should do your own experiment when you see compaction about to start use the end of your window to have it write one first, and then let the session compact and compare. I was surprised by how small the compact message is. When I tell it to write a letter to itself I usually phrase it. 'write a letter to yourself Make notes of any gotchas or any quirks that you learned and make sure to note them down.' It does get those into the letter but if you check compaction a lot of it is gone.
- ulrikrasmussen 7mo ago
  So you use the letter to itself in addition to the compacted context? I am curious what you ask it to include in the letter and how it is different from a custom instruction passed to /compact?
- kqr 7mo ago
  What prompt do you use for the letter-to-self? I've been trying that technique myself to manually reset context without losing the important parts (e.g. when it has barked up the wrong tree and I'm sensing that misstep might influence its current generation in a pathological way), but I've not had much success.

pcloadlett3r 7mo ago

In another part he says Filip restarted Claude many times so it seems they are aware of context polution and ways to avoid it (also why they kept telling Claude to write everything to a file). It could just be that Claude was caught between a rock and a hard place; dissapointing the user vs solving a problem it couldn't solve.