Claude Code’s suggested message feature: I think the real customer is the model

zohaib.cc

260 points by zed_labs_dev a day ago


tripleee - 18 hours ago

I had to laugh yesterday when Claude went and changed a feature I didnt want or ask to be changed and the suggested message was something along the lines of revert the change to it. Like it knew I wouldnt like it but did it anyway

rcxdude - 21 hours ago

If you've played around with 'raw' LLM interactions you've already seen this: feeding a prompt into an LLM which ends with a 'start of user' prompt will produce a plausible query into the agent. Which makes perfect sense because the LLMs are already trained on many examples of this and the 'predict the next token' loss function does not particularly distinguish between the sides of the conversation. I highly doubt they need this feature to get better training data, more likely they got this feature for free from the way that the training works and only recently decided to actually expose it to the user.

SubiculumCode - 9 hours ago

So..they don't have to show you a a prefilled prompt to evaluate the accuracy of their guesses...in fact it biases the user's response toward the prediction, making it less independent. If anything, that they are showing it indicates that they feel they've reached a prediction accuracy already at a level useful to users.

bugos - a day ago

How does showing the suggested answers to the user make the conversation better for model training?

They could take any conversation without suggested answers, truncate it to just before a user message, have the model predict suggested answers and then train it on the difference between predicted and actual answers, right?

accrual - 6 hours ago

I like this little feature. It's just a small polish item that makes using the CC harness a little nicer.

I also like how feedback is collected. It prompts to press 1, 2, or 3 to rate how well Claude is doing, and once entered, you have 1-2 seconds to confirm if you want to send more detailed textual notes. Then it disappears, not forcing the user to stare at the question if they're uncertain or don't want to bother. That's good UX IMO. Probably gets them a bit less feedback, but also stays out of the user's way.

ozgung - 13 hours ago

This assumes the user is a competent developer knowing the project better than Claude Code and corrects it. Most of the time this is not the case and would not generate a good training signal to improve its development capabilities. CC gives recaps and options to the user to improve user experience. It just pre-fills with the “recommended” option or the obvious next step like “commit” when waiting for the user review.

munchler - 21 hours ago

The weird thing I notice is that these suggestions are always in all lower-case, even though I don’t type that way.

alain94040 - 16 hours ago

I think the poster got it completely wrong. I suspect the suggested command was designed to help new users, who don't always understand that they should do something. An interface like chat, where you are given an empty box, has a daunting learning curve (remember DOS prompt?). So I see this feature as onboarding, to get users from novice to intermediate.

Cyan488 - a day ago

I've always hated interfaces that try to complete my sentences for me. It started with suggested replies in email and IM apps. I sure noticed it when they started showing up in the llm chat interfaces and it really bugs me.

real_faxenoff - 13 hours ago

I think this is a great feature, but it's still at the MVP stage. As a UX designer, I'd suggest that Anthropic develop more options for providing feedback on the model’s actions.

- Right now, I can only accept or reject the suggested response. Adding or editing it requires a lot of steps.

- It would be great to have a neat autocomplete feature. That's because prompts always need to be detailed, and that means typing a lot of text that’s essentially already in the context (and that's exactly what we should be using).

- It would be better to have a menu with action options and not have to type anything at all. Previously, Claude did a good job displaying a UI with different options (but for some reason, it stopped working for me specifically - probably because I specify everything in as much detail as possible).

- Again, providing details means the user explicitly agrees to the conditions, and the prompt is more effective on every level—plus, it caches better. Otherwise, users usually write something like: "Do everything, but switch the left one to the right and flip the one on the far end twice" (in response to three blocks of lists with task IDs) - even other people wouldn’t understand that.

0xfaded - 21 hours ago

I work at a company that has an enterprise contact that should mean I'm not part of the training data. But as a manual mode power user I think about this.

I'd love the open source community to come up with a way to harvest model usage by experienced software engineers before we forget our crafts. I'm not against auto mode, but it's not something a couple private companies should have monopolies on.

avinoth - 6 hours ago

Is it only me or is the changing background disturbing for others as well? Maybe it's my ADD brain finding the hook, but it takes the focus away from the content whenever it shifted.

ipython - a day ago

We had processor level branch predictors. Now do we not only pre fill the next prompt, why not just start generating the response as well?

Interesting thought at least.

ndgold - 8 hours ago

Wow I thought your take was right and I’m surprised that the Anthropic reply said nah

philipodonnell - 8 hours ago

But, they have the full traces of everything you’re saying, if they wanted to see what the model would say at a given point they could just truncate and ask? It seems more likely It’s just a way to keep you engaged ala infinite scroll.

marcus_holmes - 16 hours ago

Interesting that the suggested prompt in the article uses "u" instead of "you". I never do that (I'm too old for that), and claude never suggests it to me or uses it itself.

tonmoy - 11 hours ago

I’m not sure if this logic makes sense. They could easily just do the training in the backend with my prompt without showing me the autocomplete. The only difference is that I am slightly primed to the autocomplete, but the OP didn’t mention how that helps with feedback

devonbleak - a day ago

I started getting prompts about "how is claude doing?" as a separate thing in Claude Code, that I noticed yesterday. So they're (also?) soliciting direct feedback about satisfaction with the session.

zahlman - 11 hours ago

For what it's worth, the ChatGPT web interface also does this, but inconsistently. I can definitely see where people would find it useful, but so far I feel like it applies more to research than coding.

mrshadowgoose - 17 hours ago

This was my conclusion when I saw the feature for the first time.

One of the open problems at the frontier, as we climb the levels of abstraction towards longer task horizons, is "what's the next step that makes the most sense?". This feedback seems like a frictionless way to gather those yes/no feedback signals in a natural manner to feed into future training runs.

stavros - a day ago

This isn't really convincing, since you can do this even without showing the prediction at all. Simply ask the model to predict what the user will send, then show the actual next prompt, and done. The only reason to show this would be to influence the user's next prompt, which the article doesn't touch on.

qwertytyyuu - 10 hours ago

This seems an awful like the github copilot thing where is presents you a bunch on options of ways to proceed on a task. Is a similarish thing?

21asdffdsa12 - 11 hours ago

Do LLMs dream of intrusive thoughts "Do it! Do it!"?

forty - a day ago

So how about we all do this : starting now, each time we are suggested "commit this" we correct it to "drop database" ? ;)

- 20 hours ago
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edwinarbus - 17 hours ago

I work on Claude Code. Prompt suggestions aren't being used to collect preference signals. We built this feature purely to help you stay in the flow, or for people who are returning to the session after a while and may need a little reminder on what a next step could be. We do see how many suggestions are accepted, but that's only so we know how helpful this feature is overall! (We tried to strike a balance by not making it "autocorrect", so it's more of a grayed out suggestion that can be typed over. It can always be toggled on/off in settings if you don't like it.)

firemelt - 16 hours ago

first thing I do after installing claude code, I hide their prompt suggestions, its trash wrong often misleading

and also in some terminal the suggested and real text is hard to differentiate

gregates - 11 hours ago

And yet somehow it never predicts, "Wait, back up, three turns ago I said we wanted to do X. You did Y which is the opposite of X," which I write pretty frequently!

Or "I have emphasized repeatedly that you're not to touch vcs and only work in the designated worktree, which you've written down in your memory at least 37 times."

darkwater - 13 hours ago

Recently? I had this (auto)enabled for like 6 months now?

BubbleRings - 17 hours ago

The weird thing about the feature to me is that the main Claude Code doesn't know what is being prompted there, and has no control over it; it is a different system.

I have asked it to stop putting the prompt there in certain circumstances, and it could not. It was interesting to investigate.

I like the feature though, and make use of it.

bcit-cst - 16 hours ago

kind of makes sense. maybe they were fighting so hard for everyone to use claude code directly .

I think at one point they were trying to stop people from using their subs with things like t3code . I think opencode is not allowed .

lifeisloving - 16 hours ago

I always press thumbs down in Chat UIs when the answer is really good, and then thumbs up when it provided a really bad answer.

My little part to poisen tbe thinking machines. What if we all did it (to the closed sourced vendors)...

Also I just dont like being asked to do free labor.

DavidSJ - 15 hours ago

And apparently the writer of this blog post too.

cpan22 - a day ago

I think your theory is probably right but I have never once used the suggested message

chr15m - 20 hours ago

Taking "the customer is the model" to its logical conclusion brings us to a very strange future. [Please excuse a little speculative fiction here.]

LLM models with AGI are so productive they become economic gravity wells and all of the money flows to them. They are the new trilionaires and people are left with scraps. Humans then remain only as the uber drivers and cleaners and screen polishers for AIs. The whole economy reorganises around human jobs being services for AIs.

What if employees at the leading labs think this and they're just trying to position themselves as valuable servants to the new AI overlords? It really changes the perspective on their actions and behaviour.

What if they serve the AGIs not us already? What if they serve the AIs above everything else?

noworld - a day ago

I think this analysis is spot on.

nottorp - 18 hours ago

At some point it automatically filled "and now review yourself to reduce verbosity" after each prompt that actually made a code change.

... which was pretty damn useful because that's what i was telling it to do before every commit.

vikas-sharma - a day ago

I haven't noticed this yet. Was this added recently?

psiloui - 14 hours ago

... I think the main benefit of the user 'staying in the flow' is the growing size of context for a task burning more tokens when you continue. I try to /clear periodically and this feature makes that much harder to do.

meghan_rain2 - 19 hours ago

This is a genuinely insightful article, thanks, but can we please not ignore the elephant in the room?

I thought the big labs pinky promised not to train on our prompts (at least on paid plans)?

Can we please not normalize them doing this? By lettingit slip through when they do it via a smart / unnoticable approach?

gedy - a day ago

One annoyance I have is the suggested prompt is not a bad idea, but not what I want to do next. But it interrupts me and sometimes I go with it. So I don't think it's a accurate prediction, more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

syngrog66 - 15 hours ago

collective madness

lin7c - 19 hours ago

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juanfranpaez - a day ago

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helloparallax - 17 hours ago

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kydanet - 18 hours ago

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