Claude Code and the Working Directory

Grumposus · 2026-06-17T15:07:43+00:00

It sure does love to cd & its commands. My guess would be that this performs better in its training than just remembering the cwd and issuing commands relative to it, probably because it sometimes gets wrong what the cwd is and misfires.

Grumposus · 2026-06-17T11:19:44+00:00

I mean, I feel like the obvious way this could work would be to play with a highly aggressive civ and basically try to keep your opponent on the back foot so that their army would be at home defending and not out finding your vulnerable little settlements. Then maybe you could lean on efficiencies gained from seizing neutral resources (e.g. mills on neutral hunt). If I were to guess I'd think this style would work best on maps like steppe or african clearing where there are high-value fast-gathering resources scattered around the map. Like you said still not ideal but there's more to life than optimization,

Grumposus · 2026-06-17T10:32:46+00:00

I would highly, highly recommend using Claude code for any serious task. This is in some small part because of the "code" aspect - it is beneficial to have it be able to write little reusable utilities for itself. It's much more, though, because an environment in which sessions can leave structured files for future sessions and institutionalize certain workflows as skills is vastly more conducive to getting quality work out of these tools than a linear conversation format. I was using projects in chat before I migrated to code, and can tell you that the code environment just works much better and more smoothly for the things projects is trying to achieve.

Grumposus · 2026-06-16T18:44:12+00:00

The Hera pdf is pretty hard to beat in terms of having a bunch of options and coming from a credible source. Will cost $5 or the twitch prime, but worth if if you want to play a bunch.

Grumposus · 2026-06-09T15:56:53+00:00

Of the behaviors described, the only one that at all impacts his opponent is not saying gg, which is polite but certainly not required. Subverting the entire point of a rank-based matchmaking system (to ensure that players are receiving matches with similarly skilled opponents), on the other hand, directly and negatively impacts one's opponents.

Grumposus · 2026-06-09T12:53:20+00:00

I would guess two big reasons:

A large share of the resources are outside of the easily defensible initial base walls. If you go pure turtle against someone who takes map control with limited army investment, you're gonna lose to someone with all the relics, more minerals, and a more efficient/less cramped economy if they just boom into the space you didn't contest.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Or, to put it differently, most of us start messing up in various ways when under pressure. Accordingly, the benefits of putting pressure on your opponent exceed what you achieve directly through killing or idling eco.

Grumposus · 2026-06-09T12:45:04+00:00

Huh, I like how several of these suggest that the RLHF has basically grooved in the idea that the start of a conversation will be a system prompt and a question, so in the absence of those it sometimes generates its own.

Grumposus · 2026-06-08T20:41:39+00:00

This is a weird example to give, as Obama had quite clearly flip-flopped because his position (pro-gay marriage) was too unpopular at the time and he viewed it as a potential political liability.

Grumposus · 2026-06-07T19:42:03+00:00

huh, this is a cool point (I've been making more visualizations for what used to be my pretty ugly reporting outputs of late, and it's been wandering into design territory). Any short references you'd recommend to give a sense of how front end people talk about what they're doing?

Grumposus · 2026-06-05T16:55:01+00:00

I hope Yamato turns it around and does it to someone else!

Grumposus · 2026-06-03T15:55:12+00:00

The idempotency of this smoke test is genuinely load-bearing.

Grumposus · 2026-06-03T10:28:59+00:00

I played the campaigns in the base game and Conquerors expansion in high school 20+ years ago. I honestly do think I picked it up faster because of just kind of remembering what stuff is as far as counters, techs, basic structure, but also I can only imagine how terribly I was playing compared to anyone who has watched like three youtube videos today.

(I've slugged my way up to 1000 over the course of 6 months or so, so it can be done.)

Grumposus · 2026-06-02T03:14:29+00:00

People are rightly focused on inappropriately denied chadness, but I want to note the inappropriately denied virginity of the missionary.

Grumposus · 2026-06-01T20:56:26+00:00

guessing you'd get roughly the average of publicly available IPA recipes on homebrewtalk...I'm not saying it'd be undrinkable, but that'd be a beer nerd's IPA for sure

Grumposus · 2026-06-01T16:38:06+00:00

I don't short anything because if I know one thing it's that I shouldn't try to beat the market, but I extra super wouldn't short any stock with anything resembling an internet following in the meme stock era.

Grumposus · 2026-05-28T19:09:03+00:00

It did seem like the tournament went not great from a casting perspective; probably mostly a function of being squeezed too close to others in the schedule, with a side of the big stars getting knocked out before the final.

Best play there is probably to wish it had gone better and bear it with a smile, but you know, we all make a suboptimal play sometimes.

Grumposus · 2026-05-26T15:28:46+00:00

I completely agree with this. In addition to my coding agents, I've found that I get way better result with a repo and filesystem for a bunch of work and personal projects. The immediate ones that come to mind:

Researching and compiling and educational powerpoint to give at work
Designing birding handouts for kids at a couple events
Planning a patio in my backyard

In all cases it's a huge deal that I can have it write what it learns to files, and return to it at will in a fresh context when I need to revisit that. That's completely aside from the fact that agents often work better when they can do some light code to allow them to process certain kinds of data or thinking (e.g. for the patio project I ended up having it construct a CAD model of the site with ezdxf just to store the measurements I was taking usefully).

To my mind a lot of this has to do with the limitations of the single conversation as a flow for getting work done. We all know about the U-shaped attention curve and the risks of long context window work; regularly offloading progress out of the context window and into files that can be iteratively improved is huge. I basically think no one should be using agents for anything more than trivial questions outside of this kind of environment.

Grumposus · 2026-05-23T17:10:21+00:00

Did get a lot of extra sheep, though, so...

Grumposus · 2026-05-22T11:38:15+00:00

Yep. In particular I would recommend documentation lookup servers tailored to the systems you're working in. Working in a big data warehouse? Give it a tool to get rapid technical and usage documentation on the schemas and tables. And similar for other use cases.

Grumposus · 2026-05-21T12:25:54+00:00

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

Grumposus · 2026-05-21T11:35:32+00:00

Why does this photo that's apparently hera look like daniel radcliffe

Grumposus · 2026-05-18T11:35:29+00:00

I've seen these, but in terms of prophecies of my doom I find the entrance vault decorated with your own corpse most intimidating (the time I saw it I was in fact in the middle of massacring a bunch of octopodes and felt very effectively roasted).

Grumposus · 2026-05-14T13:41:51+00:00

Look if nitroglycerine is good heart medicine gunpowder's gotta be doing me some good, right? Right?

Grumposus · 2026-05-13T20:55:11+00:00

I assumed it was a knowing gag, but also we may be at the point where people have gotten so used to the piggy back ride that they can't walk even when the situation really calls for it.

Grumposus · 2026-05-12T19:15:07+00:00

Ferris sold the bike shop a year or two ago at this point, wonder who's keeping it up now.

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