Sometimes you actually are holding it wrong. It's pretty reasonable to think that Fable isn't worth the massive increase in cost, but if you think it outright doesn't have any benefits over Opus 4.8 then your workflow is probably not making good use of the tools.
I couldn't imagine being so presumptuous as to know that my workflow fits all sizes, and all others are just holding it wrong – or worse, they're not doing real work. It would take a bigger ego on my part, or maybe less social awareness, to presume this.
> but if you think it outright doesn't have any benefits over Opus 4.8 then your workflow is probably not making good use of the tools.
I don't even use claude, I give exactly zero shits about fable or opus or bingus bongus.
The unfortunate part is that he became someone you’re happy to see out. I think he’s absolutely become a net negative for Wordpress, but that wasn’t always the case.
"Make the Add to Cart button blue" is fine as a first step. When that doesn't have the desired result, I would simply revert the change, start a new session, and do something like "Give the Add to Cart button its own theme separate from the default button theme. Make the color for this new theme blue.". If this gives almost the correct result (e.g. it's not the shade of blue I want) I'd do a followup like "change the Add to Cart theme from #00FF00 to #16b8c4" with no implication that the previous step was wrong. If it's wildly incorrect I'd start over and try to specify in more detail about what exactly should happen.
If I don't understand why changing one button changed them all, I would use an entirely separate session to ask questions about how the site theming works. The fact that the site has a bunch of weird coupling between themes is useful information, and if I don't know how to resolve that I'd ask Claude for ideas about how to safely eliminate the coupling, and once it proposes a reasonable idea tell it to implement that.
The two big things here I'd never do is use emotional languages in prompts, and I'd never tell Claude to revert changes and try again. Once the incorrect change is in the context it's poisoning all of your future results.
Surely at any point after "Make the "Add to Cart" button blue", it'd be faster to just do it yourself: "grep -r "Add to Cart", insert "addToCart" as a class to the html element, then crack open style.css to stick "button.addToCart {background-color: blue}"
I'm counting maybe 80 keystrokes? That's shorter than your second prompt.
This idea generalizes. Large Language Models are poorly suited for tasks that we have already purpose-built systems to be easy for humans to use. The easiest way to tell your website that you want a button to look a certain way is to update the code. If you know exactly how you want something done, we have developed an incredibly efficient way to tell computers how something should be done: it's called source code.
LLMs work best when they're handed tasks that you don't want to figure out how to do.
Yeah, if this is how people interact with claude I’m not surprised they’re having a bad time in ways that I don’t. Asking it why it did something or getting combative is a waste of time.
Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way.
So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?
Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.
> Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word,
I've never explicitly paid for AI and never will. I only use the free Claude, etc. So I'm happy to waste THEIR electricity telling their machine how much of a piece of garbage it is and hoping that sentiment gets back in some form to the dumb humans making such a dumb product. It's not like they don't evaluate performance with usage data.
(Afterwards, I do also make sure to actually click the "thumbs down" or whatever equivalent button, and submit a report if it's possible.)
You can blame the people making poorly performing LLM chatbots, not me. (For that matter, the paying users actually funding their insanity have more on their conscience than I do trying to keep up by using tools available to me and reacting in a normal way to their poor performance.)
Except you are missing an important aspect: the model includes training data that responds to THIS IS FUCKING WRONG, after which highly likely follows correction patterns and working solutions.
Ie, actually, yes, shouting at the AI can (and does, there are papers on this), work.
Anyone remember the gpt-3 era where adding "this is important to my job" and "if this is wrong someone dies" to prompts made a measurable improvement in accuracy and reduced hallucinations?
Efficient LLM interaction is context management. The golden rule: Nothing irrelevant in context.
Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule:
* Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks.
* Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session)
* When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files.
* Keep CLAUDE.md short.
* Disable irrelevant tools.
* Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action.
Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")
My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.
A lot of the more sane people I work with have decided that it's futile to try and have stopped working with Opus (we can't use Fable at work due to data retention policies).
It's almost like it's not a Spanish word. It was coined by native English speakers to describe themselves. It also happens to be a terrible English word, but the fact that it doesn't work in a different language's grammar isn't why it's a bad English word.
WoW is now on wiki number three after the company hosting the second one was also bought by fandom. The original rotting corpse is now over a decade out of date and still often ranks highest.
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