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Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting com

Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting combative is a waste of time.

selestify 7d ago
How does one learn to interact with Claude more effectively?
- tsukikage 7d ago
  Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way. So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will? Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.
  - jacobgkau 7d ago
    > Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, I've never explicitly paid for AI and never will. I only use the free Claude, etc. So I'm happy to waste THEIR electricity telling their machine how much of a piece of garbage it is and hoping that sentiment gets back in some form to the dumb humans making such a dumb product. It's not like they don't evaluate performance with usage data. (Afterwards, I do also make sure to actually click the "thumbs down" or whatever equivalent button, and submit a report if it's possible.)
    - classified 7d ago
      > waste THEIR electricity Thank you for helping us heat the planet.
      - jacobgkau 7d ago
        You can blame the people making poorly performing LLM chatbots, not me. (For that matter, the paying users actually funding their insanity have more on their conscience than I do trying to keep up by using tools available to me and reacting in a normal way to their poor performance.)
  - emilfihlman 7d ago
    Except you are missing an important aspect: the model includes training data that responds to THIS IS FUCKING WRONG, after which highly likely follows correction patterns and working solutions. Ie, actually, yes, shouting at the AI can (and does, there are papers on this), work.
    - bot403 7d ago
      Anyone remember the gpt-3 era where adding "this is important to my job" and "if this is wrong someone dies" to prompts made a measurable improvement in accuracy and reduced hallucinations?
- zeeveener 7d ago
  IndyDevDan on Youtube had a really good series for how to prompt models. It's an older series, but still quite relevant in my experience.
- inerte 7d ago
  This is a good resource https://howborisusesclaudecode.com/ https://howborisusesclaudecode.com/ My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.
- jannyfer 7d ago
  A lot of the more sane people I work with have decided that it's futile to try and have stopped working with Opus (we can't use Fable at work due to data retention policies).
- ChucklsTheBeard 7d ago
  Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context. Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule: * Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks. * Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session) * When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files. * Keep CLAUDE.md short. * Disable irrelevant tools. * Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action. Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")
jaggederest 7d ago
Clear context, revert the commit, change the prompt or documentation, try again.

Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting combative is a waste of time.

selestify 7d ago

How does one learn to interact with Claude more effectively?

tsukikage 7d ago
Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way. So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will? Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.
- jacobgkau 7d ago
  > Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, I've never explicitly paid for AI and never will. I only use the free Claude, etc. So I'm happy to waste THEIR electricity telling their machine how much of a piece of garbage it is and hoping that sentiment gets back in some form to the dumb humans making such a dumb product. It's not like they don't evaluate performance with usage data. (Afterwards, I do also make sure to actually click the "thumbs down" or whatever equivalent button, and submit a report if it's possible.)
  - classified 7d ago
    > waste THEIR electricity Thank you for helping us heat the planet.
    - jacobgkau 7d ago
      You can blame the people making poorly performing LLM chatbots, not me. (For that matter, the paying users actually funding their insanity have more on their conscience than I do trying to keep up by using tools available to me and reacting in a normal way to their poor performance.)
- emilfihlman 7d ago
  Except you are missing an important aspect: the model includes training data that responds to THIS IS FUCKING WRONG, after which highly likely follows correction patterns and working solutions. Ie, actually, yes, shouting at the AI can (and does, there are papers on this), work.
  - bot403 7d ago
    Anyone remember the gpt-3 era where adding "this is important to my job" and "if this is wrong someone dies" to prompts made a measurable improvement in accuracy and reduced hallucinations?
zeeveener 7d ago
IndyDevDan on Youtube had a really good series for how to prompt models. It's an older series, but still quite relevant in my experience.
inerte 7d ago
This is a good resource https://howborisusesclaudecode.com/ https://howborisusesclaudecode.com/ My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.
jannyfer 7d ago
A lot of the more sane people I work with have decided that it's futile to try and have stopped working with Opus (we can't use Fable at work due to data retention policies).
ChucklsTheBeard 7d ago
Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context. Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule: * Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks. * Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session) * When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files. * Keep CLAUDE.md short. * Disable irrelevant tools. * Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action. Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")

jaggederest 7d ago

Clear context, revert the commit, change the prompt or documentation, try again.