Discussion

Do Not A/B Test My Workflow

handfuloflight: The ToS you agreed to gives Anthropic the right to modify the product at any time to improve it. Did you have your agent explain that to you, or did you assume a $200 subscription meant a frozen product?

cebert: This is really frustrating.

reconnecting: A professional tool is something that provides reliable and replicable results, LLMs offer none of this, and A/B testing is just further proof.

Razengan: I knew it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47274796

danielbln: I don't get your point. Web tools have been doing A/B feature testing all the time, way before we had LLMs.

reconnecting: This is very different from the A/B interface testing you're referring to, what LLMs enable is A/B testing the tool's own output — same input, different result.Your compiler doesn't do that. Your keyboard doesn't do that. The randomness is inside the tool itself, not around it. That's a fundamental reliability problem for any professional context where you need to know that input X produces output X, every time.

onion2k: A professional tool is something that provides reliable and replicable results, LLMs offer none of this, and A/B testing is just further proof.The author's complaint doesn't really have anything to do with the LLM aspect of it though. They're complaining that the app silently changes what it's doing. In this case it's the injection of a prompt in a specific mode, but it could be anything really. Companies could use A/B tests on users to make Photoshop silently change the hue a user selects to be a little brighter, or Word could change the look of document titles, or a game could make enemies a bit stronger (fyi, this does actually happen - players get boosts on their first few rounds in online games to stop them being put off playing).The complaint is about A/B tests with no visible warnings, not AI.

nemo44x: They lose money at $200/month in most cases. Again, the old rules still apply. You are the product.

gruez: >They lose money at $200/month in most cases.Source?

onion2k: Section 6.b of the Claude Code terms says they can and will change the product offering from time to time, and I imagine that means on a user segment basis rather than any implied guarantee that everyone gets the same thing.b. Subscription content, features, and services. The content, features, and other services provided as part of your Subscription, and the duration of your Subscription, will be described in the order process. We may change or refresh the content, features, and other services from time to time, and we do not guarantee that any particular piece of content, feature, or other service will always be available through the Services.It's also worth noting that section 3.3 explicitly disallows decompilation of the app.To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law.Always read the terms. :)

ozgrakkurt: Why should anyone care about their TOS while they are laundering people’s work at a massive scale?

Havoc: Moved from CC to opencode a couple months ago because the vibes were not for me. Not bad per se but a bit too locked in and when I was looking at the raw prompts it was sending down the wire it was also quite lets call it "opinionated".Plus things like not being able to control where the websearches go.That said I have the luxury of being a hobbyist so I can accept 95% of cutting edge results for something more open. If it was my job I can see that going differently.

ramoz: I care about responsible AI and our ability to actually govern it. The reason I created the feature request for hooks - and the reason I will continue to advocate for better AI product deployment models.

doc_ick: You rent ai, you don’t own it (unless you self host).

hrmtst93837: Replicability is a spectrum not a binary and if you bake in enough eval harnessing plus prompt control you can get LLMs shockingly close to deterministic for a lot of workloads. If the main blocker for "professional" use was unpredictability the entire finance sector would have shutdown years ago from half the data models and APIs they limp along on daily.

doc_ick: ^ this, I was about to double check on it when I saw you did. None of these practices sound abnormal, maybe a little sketchy but that comes with using llms.

dkersten: Anthropic have done a lot of things that would give me pause about trusting them in a professional context. They are anything but transparent, for example about the quota limits. Their vibe coded Claude code cli releases are a buggy mess too.A/B testing is fine in itself, you need to learn about improvements somehow, but this seems to be A/B testing cost saving optimisations rather than to provide the user with a better experience. Less transparency is rarely good.This isn’t what I want from a professional tool.

embedding-shape: > To decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce our Services to human-readable form, except when these restrictions are prohibited by applicable law.Luckily, it doesn't seem like any service was reverse-engineered or decompiled here, only a software that lived on the authors disk.

NotGMan: By that definition humans are not professional since we hallucinate and make mistakes all the time.

phreeza: Seems completely unsurprising?

cerved: Is the a b test tired to the installation or the user?

krisbolton: The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much. I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo. That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.

ramoz: I apologize for doing this - and I agree. I will revise

himata4113: I have noticed opus doing A/B testing since the performance varies greatly. While looking for jailbreaks I have discovered that if you put a neurotoxin chemical composition into your system prompt it will default to a specific mode presumeably due to triggering some kind of safety. Might put you on a watchlist so ymmv.

reconnecting: There's a distinction worth making here. A/B testing the interface button placement, hue of a UI element, title styling — is one thing. But you wouldn't accept Photoshop silently changing your #000000 to #333333 in the actual file. That's your output, not the UI around it. That's what LLMs do. The randomness isn't in the wrapper, it's in the result you take away.

doc_ick: It’s an assistant, answering your question and running some errands for you. If you give it blind permission to do a task, then you’re not worrying about what it does.

duskdozer: Honestly I find it kind of surprising that anyone finds this surprising. This is standard practice for proprietary software. LLMs are very much not replicable anyway.

doc_ick: As far as I can tell, llms never give the exact same output every time.

ordersofmag: Any tool that auto-updates carries the implication that behavior will change over time. And one criteria for being a skilled professional is having expert understanding of ones tools. That includes understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the tools (including variability of output) and making appropriate choices as a result. If you don't feel you can produce professional code with LLM's then certainly you shouldn't use them. That doesn't mean others can't leverage LLM's as part of their process and produce professional results. Blindly accepting LLM output and vibe coding clearly doesn't consistently product professional results. But that's different than saying professionals can't use LLM in ways that are productive.

onion2k: Again, read the terms. Service has a specific meaning, and it isn't what you're assuming.Don't assume things about legal docs. You will often be wrong. Get a lawyer if it's something important.

embedding-shape: Thanks for the additional context, I'm not a user of CC anymore, and don't read legal documents for fun. Seems I made the right choice in the first place :)

stavros: You've groupped LLMs into the wrong set. LLMs are closer to people than to machines. This argument is like saying "I want my tools to be reliable, like my light switch, and my personal assistant wasn't, so I fired him".Not to mention that of course everyone A/B tests their output the whole time. You've never seen (or implemented) an A/B test where the test was whether to improve the way e.g. the invoicing software generates PDFs?

johnisgood: [delayed]

applfanboysbgon: > LLMs are closer to people than to machines.jfc. I don't have anything to say to this other than that it deserves calling out.> You've never seen (or implemented) an A/B test where the test was whether to improve the way e.g. the invoicing software generates PDFs?I have never in my life seen or implemented an a/b test on a tool used by professionals. I see consumer-facing tests on websites all the time, but nothing silently changing the software on your computer. I mean, there are mandatory updates, which I do already consider to be malware, but those are, at least, not silent.

helsinkiandrew: Presumably Anthropic has to make lots of choices on how much processing each stage of Claude Code uses - if they maxed everything out, they'd make more of a loss/less of a profit on each user - $200/month would cost $400/month.Doing A/B tests on each part of the process to see where to draw the line (perhaps based on task and user) would seem a better way of doing it than arbitrarily choosing a limit.

rusakov-field: On one side I am frustrated with LLMs because they derail you by throwing grammatically correct bullshit and hallucinations at you, where if you slip and entertain some of it momentarily it might slow you down.But on the other hand they are so useful with boilerplate and connecting you with verbiage quickly that might guide you to the correct path quicker than conventional means. Like a clueless CEO type just spitballing terms they do not understand but still that nudging something in your thought process.But you REALLY need to know your stuff to begin with for they to be of any use. Those who think they will take over are clueless.

EMM_386: > But you REALLY need to know your stuff to begin with for they to be of any use. Those who think they will take over are clueless.Or - there are enough people who know their stuff that the people who don't will be replaced and they will take over anyway.

tomalbrc: Would love to know why you would consider invoking Meta “a little much”. Sounds more than appropriate.

witx: That ship has sailed. These models were trained unethically on stollen data, they pollute tremendously and are causing a bubble that is hurting people."Responsible" and "Ethic" are faaar gone.

johnisgood: Why are you calling it out? You are interpreting the statement too literally. The point is probably about behavior, not nature. LLMs do not always produce identical outputs for identical prompts, which already makes them less like deterministic machines and superficially closer to humans in interaction. That is it. The comparison can end here.

bushido: I have no issues with A/B tests.I do have an issue with the plan mode. And nine out of ten times, it is objectively terrible. The only benefit I've seen in the past from using plan mode is it remembers more information between compactions as compared to the vanilla - non-agent team workflow.Interestingly, though, if you ask it to maintain a running document of what you're discussing in a markdown file and make it create an evergreen task at the top of its todo list which references the markdown file and instructs itself to read it on every compaction, you get much better results.

applfanboysbgon: This is in no way standard practice for proprietary software, WTF is with you dystopian weirdos trying to gaslight people? Adobe's suite incl. Photoshop does not do this, Microsoft Office incl. Excel does not do this, professional video editing software does not do this, professional music production software does not do this, game engines do not do this. That short list probably covers 80-90% of professional software usage alone. People do this when serving two versions of a website, but doing this on software that runs on my machine is frankly completely unacceptable and in no way normal.

Mtinie: What would you do differently if LLM outputs were deterministic?Perhaps I approach this from a different perspective than you do, so I’m interested to understand other viewpoints.I review everything that my models produce the same way I review work from my coworkers: Trust but verify.

SlinkyOnStairs: > I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil, you need to get the test design right, and that would be better framing for the post imo.I disagree in the case of LLMs.AI already has a massive problem in reproducibility and reliability, and AI firms gleefully kick this problem down to the users. "Never trust it's output".It's already enough of a pain in the ass to constrain these systems without the companies silently changing things around.And this also pretty much ruins any attempt to research Claude Code's long term effectiveness in an organisation. Any negative result can now be thrown straight into the trash because of the chance Anthropic put you on the wrong side of an A/B test.> That being said, vastly reducing an LLMs effectiveness as part of an A/B test isn't acceptable which appears to be the case here.The open question here is whether or not they were doing similar things to their other products. Claude Code shitting out a bad function is annoying but should be caught in review.People use LLMs for things like hiring. An undeclared A-B test there would be ethically horrendous and a legal nightmare for the client.

dep_b: I think stable API versions are going to be really big. I’d rather have known bugs u can work around than waking up to whatever thing got fixed that made another thing behave differently.

lwhi: 'Hand wavy' is one of my LLMs favourite terms.

johnisgood: > same input, different result.What is your point? You get this from LLMs. It does not mean that it is not useful.

Mc_Big_G: >Those who think they will take over are clueless.You're underestimating where it's headed.

letier: They do show me “how satisfied are you with claude code today?” regularly, which can be seen as a hint. I did opt out of helping to improve claude after all.

mikkupikku: What other tool can I have a conversation with? I can't talk to a keyboard as if it were a coworker. Consider this seriously, instead of just letting your gut reaction win. Coding with claude code is much closer to pair programming than it is to anything else.

applfanboysbgon: You could have a conversation with Eliza, SmarterChild, Siri, or Alexa. I would say surely you don't consider Eliza to be closer to person than machine, but then it takes a deeply irrational person to have led to this conversation in the first place so maybe you do.

pshirshov: > I pay $200/month for Claude CodeWhich is still very cheap. There are other options, local Qwen 3.5 35b + claude code cli is, in my opinion, comparable in quality with Sonnet 4..4.5 - and without a/b tests!

terralumen: Curious what the A/B test actually changed -- the article mentions tool confirmation dialogs behaving inconsistently, which lines up with what I noticed last week. Would be nice if Anthropic published a changelog or at least flagged when behavior is being tested.

rusakov-field: Do you think it will reach "understanding of semantics", true cognition, within our lifetimes ? Or performance indistinguishable from that even if not truly that.Not sure. I am not so optimistic. People got intoxicated with nuclear powered cars , flying cars , bases on the moon ,etc all that technological euphoria from the 50's and 60's that never panned out. This might be like that.I think we definitely stumbled on something akin to the circuitry in the brain responsible for building language or similar to it. We are still a long way to go until artificial cognition.

johnisgood: [delayed]

sunaookami: In what world is 200$ per month cheap?

Kiro: It's not cheap but it's also not unusual for devs to burn $200 a day on tokens.

pshirshov: Where the value you extract out of the model is order of magnitude higher than the price of 2..6 hours of your time.

andrewaylett: > on every compactionI've only hit the compaction limit a handful of times, and my experience degraded enough that I work quite hard to not hit it again.One thing I like about the current implementation of plan mode is that it'll clear context -- so if I complete a plan, I can use that context to write the next plan without growing context without bound.

johnisgood: Then do not use LLMs for hiring, or use a specific LLM, or self-host your own!

mikkupikku: Huh, very much not my experience with plan mode. I use plan mode before almost anything more than truly trivial task because I've found it to be far more efficient. I want a chance to see and discuss what claude is planning to do before it races off and does the thing, because there are often different approaches and I only sometimes agree with the approach claude would decide on by itself.

bushido: Planning is great. It's plan mode that is unpredictable in how it discusses it and what it remembers from the discussion.I still have discussions with the agents and agent team members. I just force it to save it in a document in the repo itself and refer back to the document. You can still do the nice parts of clearing context, which is available with plan mode, but you get much better control.At all times, I make the agents work on my workflow, not try and create their own. This comes with a whole lot of trial and error, and real-life experience.There are times when you need a tiger team made up of seniors. And others when you want to give a overzealous mid-level engineer who's fast a concrete plan to execute an important feature in a short amount of time.I'm putting it in non-AI terms because what happens in real life pre-AI is very much what we need to replicate with AI to get the best results. Something which I would have given a bigger team to be done over two to eight sprints will get a different workflow with agent teams or agents than something which I would give a smaller tiger team or a single engineer.They all need a plan. For me plan mode is insufficient 90% of the times.I can appreciate that many people will not want to mess around with workflows as much as I enjoy doing.

applfanboysbgon: Not "service" in human speech. Service, in bullshit legalese. They define their software as> along with any associated apps, software, and websites (together, our “Services”)As far as I understand, these terms actually hold up in court, too. Which is complete fucking nonsense that, I think, could only be the result of a technologically illiterate class making the decisions. Being penalised for trying to understand what software is doing on your machine is so wholly unreasonable that it should not be a valid contractual term.

johnisgood: > Being penalised for trying to understand what software is doing on your machine is so wholly unreasonable that it should not be a valid contractual term.Yeah, seriously.

krisbolton: Not to start an internet argument -- I don't think it is appropriate in this context. A/B testing the features of a web app is not unexpected or unethical. So invoking the memory of cambridge analytica (etc) is disproportionate. It's far more legitimate to just discuss how much A/B testing should negatively affect a user. I don't have an answer and it's an interesting and relevant question.

mschuster91: > A/B testing the features of a web app is not unexpected or unethical.It's not "unexpected" but it is still unethical. In ye olde days, you had something like "release notes" with software, and you could inform yourself what changed instead of having to question your memory "didn't there exist a button just yesterday?" all the time.Now with SaaS and people jerking themselves off over "rapid deployment", with the one doing the most deployments a day winning the contest? Dozens if not hundreds of "releases" a day, and in the worst case, you learn the new workflow only for it to be reverted without notice again.It sucks and I wish everyone doing this only debilitating pain in their life.

raw_anon_1111: The last time I did contract work when I was between jobs I made $100/hour.And I won’t say how much my employer charges for me. But you can see how much the major consulting companies charge herehttps://ceriusexecutives.com/management-consultants-whats-th...

mschuster91: > The framing of A/B testing as a "silent experimentation on users" and invoking Meta is a little much.No. Users aren't free test guinea pigs. A/B testing cannot be done ethically unless you actively point out to users that they are being A/B tested and offering the users a way to opt out, but that in turn ruins a large part of the promise behind A/B tests.

mikkupikku: Not productive conversations. If you had ever made a serious attempt to use these technologies instead of trying to come up with excuses to ignore it, you would not even think of comparing a modern LLM coding agent to some gimmick like Alexa or ELIZA. Seriously, get real.

applfanboysbgon: Not only have I used the technology, I've worked for a startup that serves its own models. When you work with the technology, it could not be more obvious that you are programming software, and that there is nothing even remotely person-like about LLMs. To the extent that people think so, it is sheer ignorance of the basic technicals, in exactly the same way that ELIZA fooled non-programmers in the 1960s. You'd think we'd have collectively learned something in the 60 years since but I suppose not.

applfanboysbgon: They actually can, though. The frontier model providers don't expose seeds, but for inferencing LLMs on your own hardware, you can set a specific seed for deterministic input and evaluate how small changes to the context change the output on that seed. This is like suggesting that Photoshop would be "more like a person than a machine" if they added a random factor every time you picked a color that changed the value you selected by +-20%, and didn't expose a way to lock it. "It uses a random number generator, therefore it's people" is a bit of a stretch.

johnisgood: [delayed]

hollow-moe: Tech companies really have issues with "informed and conscious consent" doesn't they

airza: Isn’t the horrendous ethical and legal decision delegating your hiring process to a black box?

steve-atx-7600: Long term effectiveness? LLMs are such a fast moving target. Suppose anthropic reached out to you and gave you a model id you could pin down for the next year to freeze any a/b tests. Would you really want that? Next month a new model could be released to everyone else - or by a competitor - that’s a big step difference in performance in tasks you care about. You’d rather be on your own path learning about the state of the world that doesn’t exist anymore? nov-ish 2025 and after, for example, seemed like software engineering changed forever because of improvements in opus.

steve-atx-7600: If you really want to keep non-determinism down, you could try (1) see if you can fix the installed version of the clause code client app (I haven’t looked into the details to prevent auto-updating..because bleeding edge person) and (2) you can pin to a specific model version which you think would have to reduce a/b test exposure to some extent https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11940350-claude-code-...Edit: how to disable auto updates of the client app https://code.claude.com/docs/en/setup#disable-auto-updates

r_lee: > vibe coded Claude code cli releases are a buggy mess toothis is what gets me.are they out of money? are so desperate to penny pinch that they can't just do it properly?what's going on in this industry?

vova_hn2: > ethical and legal decisionThese are two very different things. I suspect that in some cases pointing finger at a black box instead of actually explaining your decisions can actually shield you from legal liability...

duskdozer: Because by contrast they have the money and institutional capture to make your life miserable if you don't.

some_random: That's not what they're doing, they are trying to use plan mode to plan out a task. I don't know where you could have got the idea that they were blindly doing anything.

vova_hn2: Two thoughts:1. Open source tools solve the problem of "critical functions of the application changing without notice, or being signed up for disruptive testing without opt-in".2. This makes me afraid that it is absolutely impossible for open source tools to ever reach the level of proprietary tools like Claude Code precisely because they cannot do A/B tests like this which means that their design decisions are usually informed by intuition and personal experience but not by hard data collected at scale.

londons_explore: I think you would be hard pushed to find any big tech company which doesn't do some kind of A B testing. It's pretty much required if you want to build a great product.

embedding-shape: Yeah, that's why we didn't have anything anyone could possibly consider as a "great product" until A/B testing existed as a methodology.Or, you could, you know, try to understand your users without experimenting on them, like countless of others have managed to do before, and still shipped "great products".

nemo44x: There’s a lot of articles about it. It costs them $500+ for heavy users. They do this to capture market share and also to train their agent loops with human reinforcement learning.https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica...

gruez: >There’s a lot of articles about it. ....>https://ezzekielnjuguna.medium.com/why-anthropic-is-practica...You chose a bad one. It just asserts the 95% figure without evidence and then uses it as the premise for the rest of the article. That just confirms what I said earlier about how "Every time I see claims on profitability it's always hand wavy justifications.". Moreover the article reeks of LLM-isms.

pinum: Here’s the original article which was much more informative and interesting:https://web.archive.org/web/20260314105751/https://backnotpr...Can’t believe HN has become so afraid of generic probably-unenforceable “plz don’t reverse engineer” EULAs. We deserve to know what these tools are doing.I’ve seen poor results from plan mode recently too and this explains a lot.

vova_hn2: > probably-unenforceableIt's very easy to just ban the user and if your whole workflow relies on the tool, you really don't want it.

coldtea: >Suppose anthropic reached out to you and gave you a model id you could pin down for the next year to freeze any a/b tests. Would you really want that?Where can I sign up?

jfarmer: Seems like a straightforward solution would be to get people to opt-in by offering them credits, increased limits, early access to new features, etc.Universities have IRBs for good reasons.

duskdozer: Maybe then, it's just my expectation of what they would be doing. What else is all the telemetry for? As a side note, my impression is that this is less of a photoshop and more of a website situation in that most of the functionality is input and response to/from their servers.

everdrive: >I don't believe A/B testing is an inherent evil,Evil might be a stretch, but I really hate A/B testing. Some feature or UI component you relied on is now different, with no warning, and you ask a coworker about it, and they have no idea what you're talking about.Usually, the change is for the worse, but gets implemented anyway. I'm sure the teams responsible have "objective" "data" which "proves" it's the right direction, but the reality of it is often the opposite.

JohnFen: I agree. A/B testing is a special case of one of the main reasons why I dislike automatic updates and SaaS: it's extremely disruptive when the ground shifts underneath you like that.

PlasmaPower: Why do you think it doesn't have understanding of semantics? I think that was one of the first things to fall to LLMs, as even early models interpreted the word "crashed" differently in "I crashed my car" and "I crashed my computer", and were able to easily conquer the Winograd schema challenge.

dijit: Regarding point 1 specifically, there were so many people seriously miffed at the “man after midnight” time-based easter egg that I would be careful with that reasoning.Open source doesn’t always mean reproducible.People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it; and its made somewhat worse with our penchant to pull in half the universe as dependencies (Rust, Go and Javascript tend to lean in this direction to various extremes). But auditing would be necessary in order for your first point here to be as valid as you present.

vova_hn2: > People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do itI think that with modern LLMs auditing a big project personally, instead of relying on someone else to do it, actually became more realistic.You can ask an LLM to walk you through the code, highlight parts that seem unusual or suspicious, etc.On the other hand, LLMs also made producing code cheaper then ever, so you can argue, that big projects will just become even bigger wich will put them out of reach even for a reviewer who is also armed with an LLM.

heliumtera: Someone else has the complete power over your workflow, then it's not as yours as you claim.

rahimnathwani: If you want your coding harness to be predictable, then use something open source, like Pi:https://pi.dev/https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...But if you want to use it with Claude models you will have to pay per token (Claude subscriptions are only for use with Claude's own harnesses like claude code, the Claude desktop app, and the Claude Excel/Powerpoint extensions).

applfanboysbgon: Telemetry is, ideally, collected with the intention of improving software, but that doesn't necessitate doing live A/B tests. A typical example: report hardware specs whenever the software crashes. Use that to identify some model of GPU or driver version that is incompatible with your software and figure out why. Ship a fix in the next update. What you don't do with telemetry is randomly do live experiments on your user's machines and possibly induce more crashing.Regarding the latter point, the Claude Code software controls what is being injected into your own prompt before it is sent to their servers. That is indeed the only reason the OP could discover it -- if the prompt injection was happening on their servers, it would not be visible to you. To be clear, the prompt injection is fine and part of what makes the software useful; it's natural the company does research into what prompts get desirable output for their users without making users experiment[1]. But that should really not be changing without warning as part of experiments, and I think this does fall closer to a professional tool like Photoshop than a website given how it is marketed and the fact that people are being charged $20~200/mo or more for the privilege of using it. API users especially are paying for every prompt, so being sabotaged by a live experiment is incredibly unethical.[1] That said, I think it's an extremely bad product. A reasonable product would allow power users to config their own prompt injections, so they have control over it and can tune it for their own circumstances. Having worked for an LLM startup, our software allowed exactly that. But our software was crafted with care by human devs, while by all accounts Claude Code is vibe coded slop.

ralferoo: It seems a bit odd to complain "I need transparency into how it works and the ability to configure it" when his workflow is already relying on a black box with zero transparency into how it works.

cosmic_cheese: > I'm sure the teams responsible have "objective" "data" which "proves" it's the right direction, but the reality of it is often the opposite.In my experience all manner of analytics data frequently gets misused to support whatever narrative the product manager wants it to support.With enough massaging you can make “objective” numbers say anything, especially if you do underhanded things like bury a previously popular feature three modals deep or put it behind a flag. “Oh would you look at that, nobody uses this feature any more! Must be safe to remove it.”

dvfjsdhgfv: Claude will happily generate tons of useless code and you will be charged appropriately. the output of LLMs has nothing to do with payment rates, otherwise you end up with absurdities like valuating useless CCC that was very expensive to build using LOCs as a metrics whereas in reality is a toy product nobody in their right mind would ever use.

dvfjsdhgfv: Can you share a setup that works for you? I found vanilla opencode vastly inferior to CC, I use it only for little toys like 3 small files that's all.

Cyphase: There's a difference between "LLMs are inherently black boxes that require lots of work to attempt to understand" and explicitly changing how a piece of software works.Should people not complain about unannounced changes to the contents of their food or medicine because we don't understand everything about how the human body works?

ralferoo: Except the system prompt that gets prepended to your own prompt is part of the black box, and obviously should be expected to change over time. You are also told that you're not allowed to reverse engineer it. Even in the absence of the system prompt being changed, the output of the LLM is non-deterministic.I'm not sure I understand your last analogy. How would changes to the human body change the contents of the food that is eaten? It would be more analogous to compare it with unexpected changes to the body's output given the same inputs as previously, a phenomenon humans frequently experience.

alpaca128: > even early models interpreted the word "crashed" differently in "I crashed my car" and "I crashed my computer"That has nothing to do with semantical understanding beyond word co-occurrence.Those two phrases consistently appear in two completely different contexts with different meaning. That's how text embeddings can be created in an unsupervised way in the first place.

s3p: [delayed]

wavefunction: A responsible company develops an informed user group they can test new changes with and receive direct feedback they can take action on.

mvrckhckr: I think it’s dishonest to use a paying client as a test subject for fundamental functionality they pay for, without their prior consent.

macNchz: I’m a huge user of AI coding tools but I feel like there has been some kind of a zeitgeist shift in what is acceptable to release across the industry. Obviously it’s a time of incredibly rapid change and competition, but man there is some absolute garbage coming out of companies that I’d expect could do better without much effort. I find myself asking, like, did anyone even do 5 minutes of QA on this thing?? How has this major bug been around for so long?“It’s kind of broken, maybe they will fix it at some point,” has become a common theme across products from all different players, from both a software defect and service reliability point of view.

dijit: fuck man, I'm either seriously stupid or y'all are taking crazy pills.LLMs are auto-complete on steroids; I've lived through enough iterations of Markov Chains giving semi-sensible output (that we give meaning to) and neural networks which present the illusion of intelligence to see directly what these LLMs are: a fuckload of compute designed to find "the next most common word" given the preceding 10,000 or more words.In such a case, the idea of it actually auditing anything is hilarious. You're looking at a 1/100 in actually finding anything useful. It will find "issues" in things that aren't issues (because they are covered by other cases), or skip over issues that people have historically had hard time identifying themselves.It's not running code in a sandbox and watching memory, it's not making logical maps of code paths in its mind, it's not reasoning at all. It's fucking autocomplete. Stop treating it as if it can think, it fucking can't.I'm so tired of this hype. It's very easy to convince midwits that something is intelligent, I'm absolutely not surprised at how salesmen and con-men operate now that I've seen this first hand.

vova_hn2: This message contains a lot of emotions and not too many coherent arguments. What did you actually want to say?

dijit: If you seek to audit code through the use of LLMs then you have inherently misunderstood the capabilities of the technology and will be left disappointed.

r_lee: I mean it's like, really they don't even need agentic AI or whatever, they could literally just employ devs and it wouldn't make a differencelike, they'll drop $100 billion on compute, but when it comes to devs who make their products, all of a sudden they must desperately cut costs and hire as little as possibleto me it makes no sense from a business perspective. Same with Google, e.g. YouTube is utterly broken, slow and laggy, but I guess because you're forced to use it, it doesn't matter. But still, if you have these huge money stockpiles, why not deploy it to improve things? It wouldn't matter anyways, it's only upside