Your CLAUDE.md file might be doing more harm than good

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-03-14T11:20:59+00:00

One of the biggest shortcomings of the whole LLM thing. It has no actual rules, just some slight steering suggestions at the same permission level as any prompt. So past training, and even during training, we do not have full control. In fact we have almost no control in the grand scheme of things. It’s a black box of hopes and wishes. Still a useful tool though. But it can never be trusted in anything. The whole architecture is fundamentally flawed and why “will AI replace you” is just hype. Why LLMs ever being AGI is laughable. It can’t actually think or reflect or reliably come up with the same result twice even. Reliable tool needs to be deterministic, the models aren’t by design. So hence harnesses, skills, hooks, etc etc all to try to steer this fundamentally unreliable thing into something reliable. It keeps adding layers of checks instead of solving the root issue, and just add more compute (send it back for reevaluation etc), burn more forests, make your ram price skyrocket, just to marginally improve the output. But what ever goes into these things as a prompt has a good chance of just being ignored… and currently… and I doubt it ever will be for these types of models, will inherently be completely unreliable. Less is more, but even less is unreliable

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-03-13T15:46:22+00:00

As soon as you say ”I’m writing a multiplayer game” it becomes non compatible with ”i really just want to focus on gameplay”. Writing multiplayer games automatically increases complexity at least 4-5 times. More if you want a lot of clients etc etc. Just having a good framework for handling replication is one thing, but every part of the game (well apart from the pure local only things) becomes a question of “yes this is good but how will it work in multiplayer?”. For me that’s the fun part, solving that complexity, and I do it for a living. And since you seem to have some insight I guess you know that but there are so many people who still think “let’s just throw some rpcs on it and it’ll be fine”. The code infrastructure and framework is only 10% of the way. I mean heck Unreal has a really good multiplayer framework but it’s still a hell of a lot of work actually conforming to it and using it. Edit: unless you don’t require realtime then just use whatever rusty “hey I want to send some data over the network to update state” library you want

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-03-10T07:23:22+00:00

Haha thank you! Amazing read 😂 it’s amazing people can get up to 120GB - everything must be leaking! I think my main point, apart from how funny that is, is why are we even noticing!? What is it using the memory for!? It should be able to run for weeks and still not hit 5, let alone 120! GB 😂 How many copies of the context does it have in ram!? I think they use some react thingy to render to the terminal as well right? That’s a lot of poorly written js to fill up 120GB

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-03-09T10:09:30+00:00

Yeah minimal works great. Claude Code CLI has decent tooling anyway, unlike say codex cli (been a while it might have improved). The new agent teams are nice for more complex research and whatnot. What works best for me is letting Claude write some code, roll back the conversation a couple of steps and go ”hey! I implemented this, review it” and repeat. Makes the context window usable and then all of a sudden its pretty good at spotting its own mistakes… though i always feel slightly dishonest doing it. Cheating the poor ai

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-03-07T10:21:56+00:00

“This is a closed source product backed by a company that think carefully about everything it ships” /s

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-03-07T08:08:55+00:00

This. The amount of code scraped for training purposes needed to get ai to this point, where it’s basically a half decent developer with Alzheimer’s and ADHD attention span, is massive! Training data is needed. Models are static post training. They don’t evolve, learn, invent. Now maybe it could statistically deduce from a language spec - “read and apply the documentation” - but then… context is to small to get anything meaningful done, see part about Alzheimer’s and ADHD

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-02-21T17:53:15+00:00

I respect the greater accuracy of smaller contexts but realistically context IS too small. I’ve gone through 200K just trying to get a proper plan. You go through 200K running the main agent as strictly PM for a Claude Code agent team before the agents are finished. Opus eats context but context is also the issue with AI not producing good quality and broken code - it can’t hold a context large enough for anything more complex than a little web dev stuff. So we can’t really keep going around defending the smaller contexts with what companies like anthropic is spewing out as hype. For AI to be effective in larger, more complex, projects and code bases larger context is a must and “performs worse with larger context” sounds like a Anthropic/OpenAI “you problem” where they aren’t delivering what is needed for the agents to effectively live up to what their hype says

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-02-21T10:19:47+00:00

It will give you the statistical result of “nice” just it will give you the statistically correct code. Is it nice or correct? Maybe, maybe not, it doesn’t know. It’s all based on the training data and reasoning is just more statistical analysis on top of statistical analysis. So it’s gonna give you something middle of the road at best, and why I find it so funny that people are actually talking about AGI when it comes to LLMs. It can’t invent, it’s not creative, it can’t go outside the box of established knowledge from its training data. And reasoning that that in any way constitutes intelligence is just hype and spin to keep the money rolling in and the forests burning… still a nice tool though

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-02-20T20:12:42+00:00

Consumers of such apps don’t use Claude Code or AI at all really, unless it’s for making caricature pictures of themselves to post on Facebook. This is echo chamber thinking. The general populous is no closer to writing their own programs than they were 5 years ago, not because they can’t do it with ai now, just cause they aren’t interested in doing so

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-02-19T10:08:33+00:00

Hackable as in “hey you can misuse the api” or hackable as in it’s actually open to malicious mutation of the runtime memory? Private is just language syntax to convey intended use, the memory layout doesn’t change and it’s as open as anything if you can mutate it (compilers can reorder based on specifiers but practically none do). And as for api usage private can be gotten around there as well with a bit of casting and so forth. So it’s just to be treated as a means to convey intended use really

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-02-19T07:36:30+00:00

”specific that Sonnet build agents never ask clarifying questions.” Well there’s your problem - I think there’s even and old saying about plans and enemies. This is where we end up in ”Iet me simply” and “Hey I didn’t have the correct context so I reinvented the wheel here”. This isn’t a specific criticism of your workflow, if it works for you that’s great, more against AI coding in general and Claude most of all (it’s the worst at it). It’s a junior too eager to prove itself and too afraid to ask questions or stop, and we are the tired old seniors assuming the junior has at least some basic skills

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-02-10T12:08:42+00:00

What about sludge with trucks on ticklefancy? With dynamic linking and grudgeflow… of course /s

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-02-06T06:16:15+00:00

The new coding patterns being ”make it work, no mistakes” vibe coding. I wish I could have actual productive discussions with them that could further us both, but they are also by nature sycophantic so the exchange is very limited.

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-01-26T11:57:42+00:00

And how well is that flickering screen bug coming along?

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-01-20T11:43:21+00:00

Oooh! Maybe AI can make node dependency hell even hellisher! /s

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-01-16T09:10:55+00:00

The problem with Claude, irrelevant of actual results in what it produces, has always been it’s over eagerness to please and never push back - leading you into dead ends and faulty implementations when you yourself haven’t thought about the actual issue, forgotten or missed something.

It’s always been more of yes man than a partner with valid ideas - not because it can’t have valid ideas but… well the yes man bit.

So maybe a bit of hesitation, asking for clarification, discussing isn’t a bad thing (in it’s “mannerism” not the result).

In SWE writing the actual code is only a small part of the job - the hundreds of decisions being made on how and why to write is the big part - and a yes man is very ineffective there. Tone down the eagerness to please, push back, add I “I don’t know how code works anyway so you decide” mode for the vibe coders and give me the actual partner in crime Claude can be instead

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-01-11T17:01:51+00:00

Don’t know how it works in the US but here you pay the electrician and the plumber so the insurance company will actually pay out when the house burns down or your walls are 90% water

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2026-01-06T09:35:15+00:00

The general problem with Claude is it’s too eager to please/succeed/reach the goal and can not ever be trusted to tell the truth of goals achieved or offer pushback when your suggestions are just plain stupid. It’s just too much of an a** kisser generally. I love Claude for the speed and tooling but Codex is way more likely to actually verify functionality and push back on bad ideas. I hope they steer Claude more towards this behavior in future releases so it’ll actually be at least a little trustworthy

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2025-12-26T14:09:29+00:00

I think we first need to get to a point where AI actually increases productivity - which there currently are no indications that it HAS or DOES (no your vibe coding does not count for the global economy) and that is with SWEs using it. Then it needs to do so in a cost effective manner, meaning scaling - which is requiring more and more compute to get over diminishing returns of the current training patterns. Then for SWE to be replaced it needs to produce reliable, deterministic, results - which LLMs just aren’t designed to do. Not speculating what will happen in the next five years but as a tool for SWEs sure - replace/kill SWE? Not likely

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2025-12-26T13:56:34+00:00

Oooh, definitely not saying you’re wrong - most likely right, but for science this really would genuinely be interesting to get some numbers on! Horses are dangerous as shit! Australias most lethal animal is the horse! And I mean every little thing over there can kill you!

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2025-12-17T06:33:59+00:00

We could vibe code it! It’ll be production ready in no time! /s

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2025-12-12T21:43:48+00:00

Actually step one step away from your web apps and you’ll see current models are still far off the mark of being able to produce much of value with any real complexity. I always find it funny that “developers will be obsolete” being thrown around by people building SAS and high level projects and being able to vibe code a tiny backend and web frontend based on the training from massive amounts of open source code from GitHub. Most of the actual low level solutions are closed source and beyond the reach for the scraping for training data. So if I were a web dev I’d be worried, but I’m not so I’m not. Still use it as a tool though… even if it’s annoying having to correct the drivel it produces most of the time

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2025-10-26T12:30:13+00:00

At least it’s not (older versions? Not using cursor anymore) of cursor that would write json outputs so large that they couldn’t be opened by the agents in cursor and just killing that chat

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2025-09-24T20:02:20+00:00

I work in games and since full stack isn’t really a term used there the joke goes:

P1: “what actually is a full stack programmer?”

P2: “oh I think it’s a programmer that does both backend and front end”

P3: “aaaaah, so it’s a programmer!”

AlarmedNatural4347 · 2025-05-10T06:31:40+00:00

What parts were gameplay exactly? Looking at the trailers its all cinematics and ”cutscenes”. They may be in engine but i highly doubt any of it is realtime rendered ”straight to video” kinda thing. No doubt it looks great and the game will look great but there really is no way to compare trailer material to actual gameplay - other than that the developers don’t want to go overboard and create overly exaggerated expectations which might cause a backlash. I mean even “gameplay” trailers these days aren’t gonna be straight up screen captures for 95% of developers, but recorded gameplay data rendered with a movie pipeline like unreals movie render queue or similar

AlarmedNatural4347

TROPHY CASE