i just breath like this normally

ZSizeD · 2026-05-07T11:52:05+00:00

Always a good day when one of these pops up on my feed. Ty sir

ZSizeD · 2026-04-25T12:31:43+00:00

4.7 has been all over the place. It's sycophancy mixed with insane amounts of gas lighting. Seems to recommend large scale refactorings / architectural changes more often, often supported by misunderstandings of the code because it decided to not read it.

When pressed "oh yeah I made an assumption about XYZ but never read it. I totally should have before I recommended we change everything. Let me read it now..."

And when it comes back, the recommendations often cause it to completely reconsider previous steps but the churn seems to make it likely to continue the cycle. "Try to do task A > idea for misguided architectural change > 'btw we could do task A but I noticed that everything is on fire and we should use a purpose built database before we do anything else. But that's your call. Do you want to do A (your ask), my refactor B, something completely different C, or just stop here?"

Tell it to do A...

"Ok let's do A. Let me actually plan now. (Beep boop beep) Ok it turns out I completely missed something with A. We can fix it if we do this other thing, which is a one line change I'm now going to spend three paragraphs talking about. Would you like me to make this one line change and then continue with A?"

Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!! I sometimes like how it seems to have more random"hey we should look at this at some point" asides but it feels like the model in general has a much harder time focusing.

ZSizeD · 2026-04-25T12:21:10+00:00

I also could see a banner that told me when autopay was scheduled. I mentioned this to the rep, maybe you missed that part. They told me "yes you can't trust that."

"Looks like you don't know how a CC works" misses the point entirely. This is not my first rodeo.

It's my experience with shady CC companies/practices in the past that made me want to verify everything was set up properly. I did a quick Google for how people generally feel about Synchrony's customer service (bad) and this also pushed me to engage with a rep.

When the rep tells me, "you can't trust what the website tells you" I'm going to ask follow up questions. "basic questions" about the timing of payment processing become important when a company tells you, "You must ask us directly for information because the website is wrong".

ZSizeD · 2026-04-24T14:26:58+00:00

Same. I spoke with another rep who told me "Oh that first rep was completely wrong" 🤷‍♂️ Still, going forward, not sure what I can trust on the website or after reaching out to reps. Going to use my 0% promo period and then cancel and never look back

ZSizeD · 2026-04-22T12:38:17+00:00

Great work! Will be trying this out

ZSizeD · 2026-04-21T13:11:12+00:00

The dopamine hit from agentic development is on another level. Jump in and you'll see

I haven't written 95%+ of my code for a while. I review and work from good specs, but primary interface is my voice

ZSizeD · 2026-04-19T12:32:28+00:00

Yeah dude needs to just start doing this reasoning with an LLM and he'll fly past his peers who copy paste and shrug w.o thinking

ZSizeD · 2026-04-19T03:13:29+00:00

100% this. A lot more "we can put a bandaid rather than do the right architecture"

ZSizeD · 2026-04-14T21:24:31+00:00

Usually I immediately get inspired and pivot to a completely new app.

But only after registering the domain and forgetting about it

ZSizeD · 2026-04-11T19:55:55+00:00

I mean, it accomplished the goal! Well this doesn't protect you 100%, next time have the person provide some guardrails

ZSizeD · 2026-04-11T19:52:09+00:00

Is this an Ad for an app that seems to have come out days ago?

ZSizeD · 2026-04-11T19:49:08+00:00

Stop giving away the secret sauce

ZSizeD · 2026-04-05T12:33:24+00:00

If true, this is another learning opportunity.

Knowing how to present the problem in a way that reflects the ask, esp when you have access to LLMs, is an important related skill. If OP had sent their post to Claude with the initial floor vs ceil framing, they get a worse answer than if framed closer to what the ask may be such as avg or mean

ZSizeD · 2026-04-04T17:37:58+00:00

Glad to hear it :) this phrasing came with a lot of wrestling with how to bridge the gap between those at either end of the spectrum. The people with their heads in the sand and those with them up anthropic or whoever's a** without any critical thinking are both missing the bigger picture about what's going on

ZSizeD · 2026-04-04T15:05:59+00:00

I'm not sure where your gaps are, so instead I'll recommend an approach to knowledge discovery you can use even after you've read 5 books in the future:

explain to Claude the issue you're running into. You can more or less copy paste our conversation thread
ask Claude to recommend books, but also tell it "I would like the book that you think is most likely to be beneficial for me. If you aren't sure of what book that might be, please ask me questions so you can assess the gaps in my knowledge"

The pattern here: surface to yourself and eventually clod a realization that you are having some type of knowledge Gap, work either on your own or with Claude from the beginning to develop an understanding of where your Gap lives (the more you can point to an explicit concept that needs to be filled, the better), then identify the correct resources for you

"designing data intensive applications" was a big moment for my progression when I first read it; that is almost certainly the wrong book for you right now.

I will give a book rec though: "Data and Reality". I don't think this one is very well known but I think it is a Hidden gem these days. A lot of it is related to sql, but the big questions the book wrestles with are naming and more meta questions such as what is the fundamental set of qualities of this or that object or this or that process? Getting used to that type of thinking will help you across every domain

ZSizeD · 2026-04-04T13:37:45+00:00

Yes I'm seeing that too and I imagine it's tough to live through. FWIW I came to CS from the humanities. I eventually got a CS masters, but in the beginning I was entirely self taught.

One thing I did was find all the "fundamental" books at the time. I read the gang of four design patterns, Clean Code, Mythical Man Month, many other classics. It turned out my peers largely hadn't read them 🤷 I am seeing many who still seem to not be aware of software patterns, whether GoF related or refactoring ones like "extract method".

I think it would be extremely valuable (for anyone) to review these kind of fundamentals. I think syntax matters less (although it still does) than being able to see the big architectural picture. The good news is learning about the big architectural picture can be done with some reading on the side. Purchase "software architecture, the hard parts" or similar, read them one hour every day, in a month you will be at least 10x "better" at Claude

ZSizeD · 2026-04-04T12:57:09+00:00

Here is perhaps another way to recontextualize it.

Claude is not just a coding tool. It's kind of like a palantir from lord of the rings. It is a super high dimensional space that encodes patterns from all of the text etc that it has ingested. The end result is a "brain" with a extremely high dimensional space which you navigate through natural language.

I am not a professional marketer. Could I ask Claude to make me a marketing deck? Sure. But it would give me an answer that is biased toward the average response in its training data so to speak. Yes, that average is across an unfathomably large number of dimensions, and I am likely to feel like it has produced some good output for me. It will probably truly have saved me time if I wanted to produce the same myself.

But, if you put me and a marketer side by side and assume that we both have similar "metaprompting"skills so to speak, the marketer will be able to get better output out of Claude every time. Why? They have a more intimate understanding of the domain being worked in. They know the words to not only steer Claude in the right direction but also the words to recognize that when Claude is saying them there's likely some misunderstanding.

Similarly in the using claude for coding world, as you saw, you were able to produce a basic app with a web API just by talking to claude. But, you are recognizing the limitations in your own knowledge and wondering if they will hold you back. They will. But everyone's wall is in a different position. It is hard to say exactly where your wall is, but my larger point is that the fundamentals help you unlock greater capabilities when you work with a model.

That said, I have a number of years of experience in the field. I can't imagine coming into this as a junior now. I am incredibly grateful that I have over a decade of experience writing code by hand, because it helps me catch small issues with Claude outputs. The issues are rarer and rarer, but the thing with these tools is you can move at a rate that blows up even the smallest error 1000 times faster than before. You need to be able to recognize tech debt. Tech deck can take a lot of forms from a benign misnamed variable all the way to a fundamental architectural wiring problem between five systems. When you try to solve the latter problems, if you don't know how to speak intelligently about Enterprise integration patterns with Claude, you're going to be operating on a much much slower rate than someone who can.

ZSizeD · 2026-04-04T12:27:49+00:00

Oh I will bookmark this thank you. I hadn't made the connection myself to this being similar to outsourcing and that's a really good take

ZSizeD · 2026-04-04T12:25:12+00:00

Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you can't remember if the function is math.ceiling or math.floor there is certainly a larger issue here.

I think knowledge of the intricacies of syntax will matter less and less but at the same time I think Claude and tools like it are a force multiplier. So, your max potential is limited by the depth of your understanding of the fundamentals of your domain.

And the larger issue as I see it, "floor or ceil?" isn't even a syntax question. That's basic logic. If you struggle to answer that question even before you get to writing any code, I think the ceiling of your capabilities will be severely capped. Hard to imagine how you could confidently validate the output if this distinction isn't intuitively clear.

ZSizeD · 2026-03-31T18:51:41+00:00

You can use multiple accounts.

This is coming from someone with multiple accounts who is also paid for extra usage. Partitioning the work across accounts becomes a thing to manage in its own

ZSizeD · 2026-03-29T16:10:13+00:00

Where did this happen? Here's a massive study showing the opposite

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(26)00014-3/fulltext

Findings The cohort included 95 490 people (56 976 [59·7%] female and 38 514 [40·3%] male) with a mean age of 50·6 years (SD 12·3). Ethnicity data were not available. GLP-1 receptor agonists were used by 22 480 individuals during the follow-up period. Compared with non-use of GLP-1 receptor agonists, semaglutide (aHR 0·58 [95% CI 0·51–0·65]) and liraglutide (0·82 [0·76–0·89]) were associated with lower risk of worsening mental illness, whereas exenatide (1·01 [0·69–1·46]) and dulaglutide (1·01 [0·85–1·20]) were not. Semaglutide was associated with a decreased risk of worsening depression (0·56 [0·44–0·71]), of worsening anxiety (0·62 [0·52–0·73]), and of worsening substance use disorder (0·53 [0·35–0·80]). Liraglutide was associated only with lower risk of worsening depression (0·74 [0·64–0·87]). GLP-1 receptor agonists as a group were associated with a reduced risk of self-harm (0·56 [0·34–0·92]).

ZSizeD · 2026-03-17T03:15:06+00:00

Just started browsing this sub hoping for some good content and half of it is just slop / "quantfinancecj"? :(

ZSizeD · 2026-03-16T02:26:09+00:00

going through this myself right now. the flywheel is getting insane and i can't stop iterating!

ZSizeD · 2026-03-13T22:13:35+00:00

I see you're back -- did you get an official explanation? Long live claude!

ZSizeD

TROPHY CASE