To try to add something to this discussion -- I think that while I've seen these sort of loops less --- what I have seen is "overly helpful".

Models nowadays want to double-triple-quadruple check things. I'm being silly but it verges on "I have a working solution but let me write a variation in Rust to ensure a convergent solution and prove this works".

I've had to stop models nowadays mostly because they're being agonizingly pedantic in their validation. Opus is actually one of the most pedantic and "off track" here. But again, not in a bad way. I'm usually like "stop testing latency between 50 runs of this app... this is version one.. we're going to make a million more changes.. you're not buying us anything".

Once in a blue moon it's actually the model making a material error in it's thinking and I have to go back and redo it.

Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button.

Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button.

Those are my only options when the site is clearly not blue, two buttons are.

There is a reason for why I am much more specific than this.

2) Don't argue with AI. If you end up in a place where you're actually losing argument against it, stop. Ask it to steelman your position. Let it unwrinkle itself.

Worth naming: the Add to cart button is still black.

Got an audible guffaw out of me. This really is what the experience is like sometimes if you're just giving it a result without being specific in implementation, and it comes out of nowhere, some days much worse than others.

I've become patient with it, but whatever this style of output is called or doing - it is both condescending and entirely unhelpful, and it seems designed to frustrate.

This got me on "cyanide blue", and I was ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING on "Approaching usage limit". I can barely stop laughing now and my stomach hurts. I mean, Thank You!

- The people who won't make any effort to learn the tools, and something as simple as reverting code (via git) needs to be done by AI?

- The awful programmers who we've had to endure working with, who are so bad at simple changes that they have negative productivity?

- Or Claude itself?

---

BTW: I don't have these problems, but I'm also not afraid to do things myself when it's easier.

Edit: If I want to change a button's color, I just change it manually. If I don't know where the code for the button is, I might start with prompting, (because AI can often find the code faster than I can,) and then once the diff is proposed, start adjusting things by hand.

I assume this is just a contrived example?

I guess we are all PMs now.

(I am genuinely uncertain, though I presume it’s at least somewhat exaggerated.)

23 agents total.

This hit a bit too close to home. Sol has the same issue, spawns a lot of agents for no good reasons (besides burning tokens).

I've lost count of the number of times I've submitted a prompt to Claude, had it interview me about areas of uncertainty, iterated on the plan a handful of times and then had it one shot the generation of 1000 - 3000 lines of code and tests that work pretty much perfectly first time but then had it chew through six figures of tokens and achieve absolutely nothing useful at all on the seemingly simplest of tasks.

This site is clearly based on bitter and hard won experience with the real product.

It is easy to misinterpret this site, and therefore not "get" the joke.

I'm hesitant to email their data emails, as it's common for companies to delete all data upon any request, instead of providing data as they are required to.

For a moment I thought, wow, someone put a lot of work into creating this theme park of frustration.

Next: It would be so easy to create a faux-Claude like this.

Then: How hilarious to watch the transcripts of unsuspecting users in real time.

Finally: I began wondering if this might be relevant to all the redundant, unnecessarily preambled, sentence structure complexifying, indirect referencing, canned phrasing, ambiguity mining, analogy maxxing, over-wordy responses I have recently been getting from Fable...

"`#16b8c4`. Yes. Apply it."

WebFetch en.wikipedia.org/…/Cyan

WebFetch en.wikipedia.org/…/Prussian_blue

WebFetch www.colorhexa.com/16b8c4

Brilliant.

"I was wrong" and "the honest truth" are just forever phrases that are now dead to me.

It was annoying to be forced to send such dumb replies. Half the site isn't blue, why would I say that? What would "half the site" even mean?

Claude helpfully tells us we're dealing with a monstrosity of a codebase out of hell: "Seven components consume the token directly; another eleven reach it through aliases; three use it only in hover/focus state; and two appear to be accidental cross-role consumers" is such an insane codebase that the initial request was basically impossible to carry out.

Claude made that perfectly clear, yet the next prompt choice just ignores that fact. "Revert everything except Add to Cart. That is the whole task." this is impossible. It just explained why. You just chose to ignore that.

I had 5.6-Luna coordinate a code review in which it spawns 2 agents looking for different things. My prompt was "review the currently checked out branch. diff target is `next`. The jira ticket is XX-XXXXX..." My `next` branch was a few commits behind `origin/next` but it still did its review against the stale local version instead of clarifying or inferring that I meant `origin/next`. The findings were very confusing until I realized what I did.

I'm noticing the need to be really specific with any instructions lately, which I don't think is a bad thing. I expect co-workers (or anyone really) to tell me what they need in specific terms so I can get it right. I can do the same for the machine, I guess.

I use codex now.

Is there a real generalized and capable, but frustratingly "evil" coding model? It could fix so many more buttons in no time, and ideally open follow-up issues about the open questions.

Maybe this is geared towards pure vibe coders for whom a file and line number is too technical.

Yes, and it's mine!

I gave it a README specifying the requirements for everything I wanted to build. My interaction with Claude was more or less like this.

I use Opus and Sonnet 5 all the time and I find their language grating. But honest, I prefer to put up with it and get the results than to put up with my own human limitations and not get the results.

It's making me realise something new about why I find Claude so exhausting. Of course you're getting terrible results with these prompts but I found myself getting just as enraged contemplating what my reply would be. Estimating every single way this little asshole will hyper-focus on a pointless bit of semantics, ignore explicit directions, go do something unrelated and spin its wheels until you’re out of credits or wasted a ton of time.

The defensive writing is honestly just as exhausting as reading Claude’s output. Every session is a game of Russian roulette with a chance you'll end up in one of these loops. At that stage all the joy you had of having it pump along with your intentionally crafted prompts and agent configuration is undone in an afternoon.

Text wise it seemed it more or less understood exactly what I wanted...

... but then I asked to draw a simple ASCII layout so my DIY savvy but not really that strong in English dad could understand better what the plan was.

But every single time it got the orientation of the led profiles wrong. I told it the orientation was wrong. It understood that the orientation was wrong (it kept saying sorry even) but even when warned multiple times the orientation was still wrong.

I really wonder if Astra will be smarter than this, and if not AGI still has a veeeeery long way to go...

I'm collapsing this back to the rendered outcome:

And intermixed with SaaS product page idioms from a brain-damaged marketer like:

No broader cleanup.

No further architecture work.

Just the button.

Aside from the patterns everyone knows like em-dashes, "its not X, it's Y", etc. I think the key features of claude diction is it sounds like a junior engineer over their skies who is trying to make up for that with extra verbiage mixed with extremely grating SaaS marketing-ese.

Did you use Claude to build this?

The user was providing no context, they had no ability to give the model background or context. A simple why would have prevented 95% of these side quests. “Im trying to increase the relative visibility of the add to cart action on the page. Can we please change it to blue without changing any other buttons. /effort low. Let me know if you have questions and before editing anything tell me what you are going to do”

Hold on let me go commit code without reviewing.

My gripe with Claude is that while investigating how to do this it will report 200 other incidental findings which I overlooked and I realize those are broken too and need urgent fixing, derailing me, not it.

Do people really prompt AI like this? Multiple times the choice was either to yell at the agent, or ask it why it did something, neither of which are very fruitful lines to go down if you know what you're doing

Caveats:

• ONE HONEST CAVEAT

• ONE THING WORTH STATING PRECISELY

• ONE THING WORTH FLAGGING

• WORTH NAMING

• WORTH STATING PLAINLY

• I DON'T WANT TO LEAVE THIS IMPLICIT

• I'D BE DOING YOU A DISSERVICE

• I DON'T WANT TO BURY THIS

• BETTER NOW THAN LATER

• ONE HONEST TRADEOFF

• I DON'T WANT TO PAPER OVER THIS

• ONE SMALL HOUSEKEEPING ITEM

• THE HONEST PART IS SIMPLER

Pushbacks:

• FAIR PUSHBACK

• FAIR HIT

• THAT'S ON ME

• YOU'RE RIGHT ABOUT THAT

• YOU'RE RIGHT

• YOUR INSTINCT IS RIGHT

• FAIR, AND MORE SPECIFIC THAN IT SOUNDS

• RIGHT, FOR A REASON WORTH NAMING

• I'M NOT GOING TO DEFEND THAT

• YOU'RE RIGHT TO PUSH BACK

Reframes:

• LET ME BE PRECISE

• THE SHARPER DISTINCTION

• THE PART THAT MATTERS

• THE USEFUL PART IS NARROWER

• LESS X THAN Y

• VISIBLE ISSUE / UNDERLYING ISSUE

• THOSE ARE DIFFERENT CLAIMS

Holy shit this was the most infuriating thing I've experienced in a while lmao, I felt so relieved when the button was turned to blue, but then so visceral "no no no no no" panic when it turned to the gradient.

Amazing

E: this is a horror simulator, my breathing is becoming shallow and fast, I love it.

It made me stop using Claude at all. Codex has almost surgical precision, and I like that a lot.

(But nowadays I just use DeepSeek Flash. it does screw up but its cents so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).