Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
I have a completely different experience than you, but I have also invested quite a bit of effort into the issue. I will agree that with simple prompting and without reminders, models do not do this sort of thing well or consistently. On the other hand I have two skills that I use regularly `/atomic-commits` and `/split-branch` that do exactly what you're describing. It has been an exercise in taking the time to put to words the concepts you're describing, which has been very interesting because it's forced me to put to words many thoughts on the subject I had never formalized, and you're correct, there's a lot of theory of mind and considering of other people's perspectives that go into it.

* Does the series of commits tell a cohesive story of the feature, each commit building on the last one? It's surprisingly easy to have an ordering of commits where each one builds, but the ordering is nonsense. * Is each commit scoped to the right size? Not too big of course, describes a single idea or concept. That same rule can also lead to commits that are comically small or separates two changes that can obviously be argued are "two different things" but that make more sense when seen together as a single conceptual change. * When is it appropriate to split up disparate changes within a single file, interwoven together, and how to correctly orchestrate that with git commands.

I care _deeply_ about commit hygiene and presentation because it's a foundation for making code review a smooth process and in the Before Times™ I would spend a _substantial_ amount of time reworking my own commits to ensure they were up to my own standards. I can count on two hands the number of commits I've authored on my own in the last year, and the process is immediately replicated and standardized across our entire engineering organization.

It is perfect 100% of the time? No, every once in a while I'll hit some weird case and need to issue some corrective instructions, or more likely ask the model why things are like that to see if there's tuning we need to do.

Commits are effectively like automated code-formatting now. This isn't years in the future, this is already _old news_.

Comment · 6 months ago
I've been playing around with this recently too and started getting much better results when I told it how to produce rendered PNGs of the file and to inspect it from several angles during iteration. I'm really only just getting going with it though, so if you have any tricks to share, I'd love to hear them!
Comment · 7 months ago
FWIW I've only ever been on the API based plan at work and we never seem to run into the majority of the problems people seem to be very vocal about. Outages still affect us, and we do have the intermittent voodoo feeling of "Claude seems stupider today", but nothing persistent.

Of course it's a stupid amount of money sometimes, but I generally feel like we get what we're paying for.

Comment · 11 months ago
Do your markdown files have frontmatter configuration?
Comment · 1 year ago
We use them extensively in our agent framework at work for all sort of things. You can make up whatever you want, if the tags are semantic enough it just gets it, or you can add a bit of explanation about it in the system prompt or whatever.

  - Circuit breakers when it seem like it's stuck in a loop
  - Warnings about running low on context
  - Reminders about task lists (or anything)
  - All sorts of warnings about whatever
Comment · 1 year ago
We've done varying forms of this to differing degrees of success at work.

Dynamic, on-the-fly generation & execution is definitely fascinating to watch in a sandbox, but is far to scary (from a compliance/security/sanity perspective) without spending a lot more time on guardrails.

We do however take note of hallucinated tool calls and have had it suggest an implementation we start with and have several such tools in production now.

It's also useful to spin up any completed agents and interrogate them about what tools they might have found useful during execution (or really any number of other post-process questionnaire you can think of).

Comment · 1 year ago
Probably less sensible than you think. How many terms would they need to do this over? How many terms would they need to do it for _at once_? How many tokens would that add to every prompt that comes in?

Let alone that dynamically modifying the base system prompt would likely break their entire caching mechanism given that caching is based on longest prefix, and I can't imagine that the model's system prompt is somehow excluded from this.

Comment · 1 year ago
Thank you for saying this out loud. I've been losing my mind wondering where the discussion on this was. LLMs without Tool Use/Function Calling is basically a non starter for anything I want to do.
Comment · 1 year ago
What do you find difficult about distilling your own prompts?

After any back and forth session I have reasonably good results asking something like "Given this workflow, how could I have prompted this better from the start to get the same results?"

Comment · 1 year ago
I believe if you read carefully, it's not blocked, it's rate limited to once daily, with very clear remediation steps included in the response.
Comment · 2 years ago
> The officials each responded with “that very tired mantra: ‘But the virus is worse,’” Dr. Murphy recalled. “Yes, the virus is worse, but that doesn’t obviate doing research to make sure that there may be other options.”
Comment · 2 years ago
We had a version of Bomberman that was written in some version of BASIC in high school (maybe QBasic?). It was great because we could hack on it to modify the game and immediately play with those modifications.
Comment · 2 years ago

  aria-hidden=true
Comment · 2 years ago
Other people have said it in this thread, but I think your experience is being severely clouded by Oracle. Postgres, MySql, and all have the `TEXT` datatype which are variable length (though with some upper bound)
Comment · 2 years ago
Thanks for this, I"d been meaning to work up the energy to deal with their retention ops, but this was super easy.

For anyone else looking to do this, the trick is to choose "Other" instead of "Too expensive" or "My rate is going up" as the reason for cancelling. The later will just result in them trying to sell other standard subscription offers to you.

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