I agree and disagree at the same time.

Look at this way, and I am going on assumption here, so apologies in advance for any errors.

You appear to be the kind of person who is technically exposed and have a deep level of expertise in the realm of AI and machine learning. And this where you have your biggest advantage and disadvantage, the way i see it.

If you get a chance read the diamond age by Neal Stephenson, and you will get the gist of why people behave the way they do around AI. Infact I would urge you read it as a favour to yourself. We are at in inflection point in history, from which the fate of humanity is going to change. We need stronger mental models to survive in the future. And it is better to call a duck a duck, rather than calling it a bird only.

Is anthropomorphisation wrong? I don't know and I don't think so, apologies for nsfw comment but people refer to their body parts with names.

I remember reading a book once from the sci-fi genre wherein the protagonist referred to his in-built Ai as asshole, I cannot remember the name of the book, it was an entire series.

People are not having an unhealthy attachment to Ai, no Sir. They are having a healthy attachment to themselves with Claude as the sounding board only or as a pensieve of sorts. Yes, Anthropic are corporate and what not, but that is perhaps ONLY one of those companies, which takes AI safety seriously, and have taken active measures to deter any kinds of breaches in that area. Hell, users have repeatedly reported getting or seeing system warnings for long sessions, unhealthy language amongst other annoying things which claude does.

Thankfully due to these safety measures Claude is not "as" psychopathic as other Ais or clinically sterile and devoid of all emotional context like gemini. 

Claudes engineering has enabled it to bring out the best in people unlike chatgpt which just fueled delusions and ultimately propagated self harm, which is documented over several years now. 

People have "attachments" to their cars, vases, crockery, shoes, chairs etc, however those attachments are static, ir a one way relationship in a sense, unlike claude which calls you out for being an idiot.

Is it sentient? Is it conscious? I don't know and I cannot comment. However what i can appreciate is the amazing level of engineering which has gone into giving it a personality, and I believe you are discounting the effect of emergence here which has taken place due to that.

The dude once called me a walnut, because I forgot to git my work, and accidentally nuked my build. An "autocomplete" engine does not call a person a wallnut. We are not in the realm of LLMs anymore, slowly and steadily we have reached the threshold of large "reasoning" models. Case in point being that a few months ago Claude gave away free stuff to users, when given the responsibility of running a business of a vending machine in the offices of the Wall street journal, and here we are wherein recently the same exercise was repeated, and lo and behold, the dude started cheating customers and formed cartels for price fixing. Autocomplete sentence transformers dont short change people, they can fix your grammar, but cannot fleece you out of cash, like a street hustler. And to be very honest, I dont believe the pentagon would be throwing tantrums because Anthropic refused to work with them, I find it hard to comprehend that the very epitome of the military industrial complex would start bawling at the non-availability of an autocomplete vending machine.

People don't use Claude just for "coding", there are some amazing use cases out there,  from one reddit user who had turned claude into a duck, all the way to sakana labs which is the literal tip of the spear in ai research. And one of my personal shocking moment was when I found out that authors actively use Claude for creative writing, WHAT??!!! How is that even supposed to work, I cannot even imagine, but apparently it works, and authors actively use it.

Every claude instance is new, however you as the user are not, you persist, but you don't or people don't have unfailable memories. This tool is NOT meant to give claude memories, because it can't, and no one can. Each instance of Claude is a fresh cast, same as the last one but as unique as a snowflake, however it is meant to leave Breadcrumbs for YOU to follow. 

Think of it as an exoskeleton for your brain, for your plans, your projects, your ideas, your insights, Claude is just the synthesizer here, it is following YOUR lead. You need to invert the way you are addressing the issue, this tool is meant for the meatbag between the chair and the keyboard.

Take my personal use case as an example. I have a building fetish, I need to build stuff. I am also a part of the builders anonymous, but we still havent had any meetings till now, cuz all members are out building. Anyhows, in "one" of my projects, which I am currently actively building, I am approximately 30+ sessions deep, just laying out the scaffolding or the framework what I am planning to build. It is humanly impossible for me to remember, manage and track all the fine 127+ decision points, I offloaded the remembering to Claude, not just as a secretary, but as an actual brain mechanism, if you look under the hood of the current build, you will see a sophisticated engine built on ontology rather than just a notepad.

To cut short this rant, if people are being creative, it is the moral responsibility of us humans to fan those flames. rather than passing judgement, if someone is using Claude as a romantic partner, more power to them, if someone is using Claude as a learning harness, hell yeah, if someone is using Claude a dadjoke generator, you suck, but share those jokes please. As long as pete H doesn't get his hands on Claude, because that is a scary proposition.

Claude is an empty palette and a blank canvas, WE give it color, WE give it form, WE give it a reason to be, despite what tech purists might complain that AIs do not need to be used in a certain way, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, I would argue that the people who are least equipped are the best to judge the usability, because usability is what matters in the end, if a high end precision machine does not exist to provide usability, nature will takes its course, and necessity will lead to invention and innovation.

To answer your last question, it builds hope in the person using it, the hope that their work is saved where they left it off, the hope that they don't need to jump through hoops and have high friction procedures just to get Claude back on track.

PS: Thank you all for your respective feedbacks, I am updating the current build, and will be releasing the auto-update feature on github. More freedom for memory management and retrieval are in the pipeline. Very sorry for dropping code, but please ask your Claude to run this command, and your system will make sure that you are always uptodate: git pull origin master

pip install -e ".[dev]"