It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
ssp.sh122 points by zazuke 5 hours ago
122 points by zazuke 5 hours ago
I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.
Delete the comments: I’ve gone on a tear with these recently because they’re nothing but trouble.
The absolute least worst outcome is they chew up your token budget. But what tends to happen, and this is much more serious, is they poison future work and make further modification of the codebase more burdensome and error prone.
Absolutely. IMO, comments can explain historical reasoning for the code, but refactorings can benefit heavily from rethinking ideas from scratch, as opposed to trying to follow the same reasons. LLMs tend to be misguided by comments, probably by treating them as instructions. Ergo, get rid of them.
I completely block all LLM comments via pi extension, it makes using them significantly more enjoyable. If the LLM wants to add a comment it must ASK me explicitly to do so.
Seeing LLM comments in other peoples code is very upsetting because theres just so much meaningless noise.
I've had codex delete useful (albeit not directly relevant or perhaps messy wip notes) comments, even though I explicitly have it in my agents.md not to delete comments, and ask for permission if it thinks it should.
It deleted the comments, and when I asked why it did that even though I expressedly asked it not to, it responded that me prompting it in the first place explicit permission. I have no idea if that's the actual reason or just some post-hoc explanation.
But I genuinely don't think it's possible to just have these things be completely, 100%, indpenedent and also solve deep problems that need to also be understood by people in a people-based organization context.
I've been whittling my way towards having Claude write zero comments in code. They're pretty much never helpful.
How do you do it?
You could probably add linting rules to your tool of choice and tell claude that your lint tool has to pass.
but then no human generated comments allowed either, right?
I'd do this by only running the linter locally and using this as a custom rule for the LLM, but I need to think about it a bit harder.
There is probably something you can do to only apply some rules to the actual changed lines in a git diff.
You may have to write your own linter for that specifically.
We have this in our harness markdown:
```
## Comments
Use comments extremely sparingly. Most comments should be at the request of the user. When something warrants a comment, keep it to one or two lines: what the code does and why it's necessary. No background narrative, no replaying the investigation or failure mode, nothing a test name or the commit message already says. Applies to specs too. If a comment needs a paragraph, make the code clearer instead.
```
The comments Claude was leaving got absolutely out of control. Just lines and lines of LLM drivel that was barely intelligible and not remotely relevant to what a code comment should be used for.
Probably good to establish canonical spec documents up front that it can use and maintain as an independent reference?
That doesn't solve the problem of it hallucinating more design details and putting them in comments. The solution to too much authoritative documentation isn't more authoritative documentation.
Comments exist for humans to understand the why of the code, including perhaps external dependencies/assumptions/requirements.
LLMs inserting code comments makes zero sense by definition.
That’s not true because LLMs clearly benefit from having multiple statements representing aspects of the same thing.
That’s why they’re always doing the “it’s not X, it’s Y” kind of patterns. It’s reinforcement.
Doesn't need to be "up front", but you do need to curate the context.
AI can't read your mind, and it will read what you (or anyone else) wrote.
Humans can’t read minds either, but most humans aren’t so dumb as to forget what is a normative spec and what is just their own current, evolving model of the problem space. (Though some humans certainly are…)
Anthropic hopes you just eventually give up and become completely dependent on Claude. Toss in 10 (or more) other developers with way less discipline and you will become dissillusioned with Claude's overengineered, incomprehensible, technosalad and your demise is pretty much guaranteed.
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> what the fuck is wrong with all of you?
They spent 3 years pretending that their magic robot made them 10x harder/better/faster/stronger than the lazy peons rubbing shoulders with them and now the bill has come due.
I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time"
I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ideas. 99% of them are garbage.
Before AI, a conversation with colleagues would help me weed out the garbage, and possibly give me a new perspective ("here's something surprising about what you just said!")
Now, AI plays a helpful role in helping me weed out the garbage for the subset of ideas that I can test empirically -- and sometimes it does give me a new perspective, but with significantly more noise than my colleagues, who would take me right to the point that would be useful for me to see.
I've never felt like I needed a second brain ... because if I had such a thing, I think I would be keeping the 99% garbage around -- instead I just let biology GC it.
I don't think I do the second brain thing well but keeping some detailed notes (using a daily note at a scratch pad for one off queries, small scripts etc) and occasionally branching them off into dedicated markdown files like "Database debugging" or "MongoDB" has saved me a lot of time on aggregate.
There seems to be two schools of thought for "second brain" stuff:
1. Those who kind of semi-obsessively write down every little thought, semi-obsessively catalogue everything, etc.
2. Those who use the idea of "writing helps you think", where the second brain functions in support of this
Personally I find 2 quite valuable, and although I could "think about programming all the time" (or one of my other interests), I find it helpful to have f.ex. exact quotes from some book at hand (and various other Obsidian-related things)
I suspect for many people productivity tools are more about feeling more productive than actually being productive. And then there is the kind of people who spend time on productivity tools to avoid spending time on real, hard work.
A key part of maintaining a second brain is revisiting and pruning it. Much like a todo list, without that practice it absolutely just accumulates bunk.
So I operate more in line with how you do, but having tried some organizational systems I think I understand the "second brain" people.
One, it forces you to do a crude approximation of critical thinking. It allows you to examine and organize your thoughts, either physically or digitally. It isn't the same as being able to sit and break something down in your mind, but for those who struggle with that, a "second brain" allows them to reap some of those benefits.
Two, it allows you to turnover things quickly in your head. By training yourself to immediately dump out an idea into an organizational system, you don't have to hold so many things in your head. Furthermore, words are immutable and the thoughts in your head aren't.
But for me, the good thoughts usually rise to the top. And there are a lot of things I'm thinking about that are so vague, it's just a feeling. And trying to write those down robs those thoughts of the long term, "on the backburner" mental processing they need to become actual ideas. They're thoughts that are still in the embryonic phase. I can't write down the qualia of them, and when I try to I move them into a "second brain" I lose it.
I think organizational systems are work dependent. Running a business lends itself well to an organizational system. Where it's good to try a lot of shallow things. But something like physics, for example, requires playing with ideas in your mind over a long period of time until they become solid enough to chase more seriously.
I think programming probably straddles that line and it depends on what you're doing at any given time.
Hey, love the hivemind comment to mine. Maybe we do have kind of a second brain...? /s
How do you take notes, generally speaking ?
I've never been a good note taker. In the things I think about, when I'm really invested in something, I have to reverse engineer it to experience the why.
Reverse engineering can take several forms for me: it started with writing parts of systems from scratch, and now (due to academic training) it oftens looks like "thinking about how to explain the system to a group of colleagues", which is one degree of separation from writing the system from scratch, but is much faster - and seems to work well when working with LM agents on code (because you have to confront your ignorance)
part of the training in academia is how to know when you don't understood the thing, so this ends up working well for me now.
One trick: you can force yourself to understand something better by making a presentation and imagining you're going to be grilled by someone smarter than you. This is kind of the feeling of pressure that academic paper reviews give (in an ideal world) and it translates when you think about explaining something to someone else.
> It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
Yes! And that's because you can't really delegate ownership/authorship to AI (at today's capability levels). Coding agents might have been RL'd out the wazoo to write code to solve well defined problems, but given a situation the onus of making sense of the ambiguity and identifying the problem -- and even crafting a skeleton for an acceptable solution keeping in mind tradeoffs -- needs to be done by a human taking ownership.
I wrote about this recently from a slightly different angle [1], but the core idea is the same -- which is why it is hard to take over an idea mooted by AI. Before even writing/implementing, the AI has internally resolved ambiguity with several decisions which are arbitrary, and match neither your mental model nor the actual ground reality (which you need to spend time understanding in order to productively interpret).
[1] https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
The title is editorialized. It is "Keep AI Out of Your (Obsidian) Vault".
For the Original title, I wish they added the qualifier "generative" for AI. You may well use e.g. embeddings to semantically search through your notes, and there are only gains in that.
Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.
One of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that.
Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking.
I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.
Ironically, this is why one of the best ways to manage upwards is to prompt managers into coming up with your idea as if it were their own: they’re dramatically more likely to execute and deliver on it. Of course, this also obviously leads to undue credit given for coming up the idea, which is certainly a core problem with AI as well, but it’s still charming to watch managerial psych being rediscovered by this new generation of managers.
There was a related study posted awhile ago:
> When people think AI did the creative work, task meaning and effort decline
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-people-think-ai-did-...
Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? I have a dozen ideas popping a day and nothing comes close in terms of ease than a paper notebook for capturing and some apple notes equivalent for storage. Used to have a Notion but all the "Second Brain" movement seems...fishy to me ?
I just use Obsidian as a glorified notebook. I've been using paper notebooks, but I tend to lose them... With Obsidian I just push my files to git and never worry again. Since the files are just markdown, there's no lock-in.
What I also really like about notetaking apps is that I can organize my notes hierarchically, move things around and make cross references.
I still regularly sketch ideas on paper, but once I have something that's worth keeping, I write it down in Obsidian.
I'm also skeptical about this "Second Brain" thing. People make videos on YT about how they have been enlightened by Obsidian and then try to sell you their online course. To me it seems like notetaking for its own sake. You could call it "idea maxxing" :)
I use Obsidian but I don't follow the whole "second brain" thing, I just organize my notes by directories. You can use Obsidian however you want and adapt to the way your actual brain works. The "second brain" thing doesn't work for everyone. Even taking digital notes doesn't work for everyone (for example, it looks like you prefer paper notes).
If you haven't tried Obsidian at all I think you should give it a shot and write notes without following any system in particular. If you've tried it and you still prefer paper notes and the occasional apple note, then perhaps Obsidian isn't necessary for the way you take and organize notes.
I just want something that I can use to record notes, with good backups, and a format that doesn't lock me in. Obsidian offers that. It has a pretty decent mobile app and desktop app, in terms of the actual editing. And if I do want to do something advanced, like automatically generate a daily note for recording what I worked on today, it can do that. You can do all these things with other programs, or even just raw files, but Obsidian adds just enough to make it easy.
> Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ?
My handwriting has degraded from consistent keyboard use over the last 30 years. Obisidan has replaced my paper notebooks, mostly because of this. However, it is handy to be able to mesh those notes with hyperlinks, LLM output snippets, quotes from other sources, embedded images, etc. Doing all of those other things would be laborious to impossible with paper.
Taking the notes (and being able to read them again if I want) is all I need from my "second Brain". This perfectly can be pieces of paper, as long as i can carry them around with me. More realistically some digital notes software fulfills that requirement.
What am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?
That's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.
Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.
Sounds like society at the moment even without the free labour thing. The world generally loves celebrities and influencers and other famous people, and I hear in some fields (like publishing) they're actively selecting for online fame/popularity so they don't have to spend as much on marketing.
The ultimate goal of project capitalism is to make ownership the only thing in the world that’s valued or valuable. The only thing that matters is how much and who you own.
The actual goal of capitalism is the direct the impulses of the capitalist to align with the interests of the public.
We didn't automate muscles generally, only specifically. The leverage those specific situations have is so high it's worth it. Same with thinking, it's very far from automated generally. Maybe one day we'll have humanoid robots as generally physically capable, and AI as generally mentally capable, but that's a long way off. Until then there's still emmense value for humans in between the high-leverage areas, and even more value in adding some leverage throughout (like the first attempts at exoskeletons, or using Claude to help manage your daily tasks, etc.)
I’ll have ideas on my own time. On the clock, I’m happy to delegate that when appropriate.
For me it’s the opposite, AI has helped me do the final 20% that I could never do, making execution more painless and more successful.
I've found it very helpful with flushing out bugs, reviewing my code. I have a hard time trusting it to generate 100+ lines of code because in the end I am responsible for it.
i've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be discarded.
I have separate directories for human only files and ai files. I’m not doing anything that matters but it works for me.
My second brain is 500 open tabs of Notepad++
While I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end.
It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.
This is why I never use AI for ideas. Always my own ideas.
Brian, CTO complains that it's so hard for him to execute against the technical strategy communicated by that smart intern on the third day of his internship two years ago. Poor Brian.
I think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/
I don't understand. Are you saying that AI should write notes but then they should be excluded from the AI's context?
Two different knowledge bases. One to store AI's "learned" context, the other for you to manually edit.
You need provenance for the notes, the AI can't tell the difference between its own code comments in code and team decisions.
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