SimonD

Well, out of luck on burning too many tokens right now as no Fable any more: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

I'm still being nice! And new workflow in place. Discuss with Claude, produces prompt for Claude Code, check output using Claude, approve/disapprove, back to Claude Code to Implement and commit or re-prompt. Scary thing is that Claude Code shows the token burn count as it's chugging away.

Yes, that's exactly it. It drives me a bit mental, especially when it then compliments itself on the code it's created itself! And when I find a bug and it's going round in circles there's been a few time when I said we've had this problem before, haven't we! It then goes oh yes, found it! and then just sorts the instance, rather than the class, like it's telling me. And also the handover docs are absolutely essential otherwise it goes even further off piste! Fair comment. I certainly used to get the simple easy response that's only half there until I set up my full project with memory, files, and instructions. And as you say most people won't get past the initial crude request. That's not helped by the abundance of YouTube content telling people how they can build a multi-billion dollar no-code app in 5 minutes. People will try, then find there's a steep learning curve, especially if they've never built software before, and give up after another 5 minutes and instead try the next no-code promise for $10k/month passive income and on to the next one. I was quite shocked when I realised that I'd been working on my project since last August and it's June already and I've gone through some right challenges in that time. Now, progress is amazing and I haven't needed half a million quid and a team of software developers in Bangalore (or maybe these are the real homunculus hiding in chat?), so that's incredible for as you say 20 quid a month! And by all accounts they're promising reduced token prices now too!

So the absolute bonkers thing here is that last night I had a chat with Claude about my outdated and pretty rusty approach to development. And I got some feedback. Here are some examples: First Claude butters me up: "Your domain knowledge is exceptional and it shows. The handover documents are some of the best I see....." To let me down gently: "You build features faster than you solidify foundations....." "Bugs are fixed reactively rather than by closing the class." "Session continuity relies heavily on handover documents rather than code structure." "The "upload current files first" pattern is correct — but you sometimes skip it." "You could use me earlier in the design phase. Most sessions seem to start with "here's a feature, let's build it." You'd get more value from 10 minutes upfront: "here's what I'm thinking, what are the architectural consequences?" "The emergent style has worked well to get here. The shift you probably need now is from "make it work" to........which means investing a bit more in the boring stuff: " Now I'm building out a modified set of prompts combined with project references to hand the responsibility of dealing with these things to Claude, with Claude's help! It is genuinely amazing. What I've also done is gone through with Claude the best pattern to use with handover between the reasoning and coding tools - so it takes it beyond just the coding. It totally blows me away how powerful this can be. Just a shame it can't help me physically in my day job!

You've reminded me that I need to set up a Pi for some sensor logging. Carry on trying though - you'll get the outputs you need eventually and its worth the effort. When I first tried, I nearly gave up coz I thought it was all crap and I got rubbish outputs too. Now I'll get me coat as I'm now starting to hijack @Pocster's thread 😲

Go on, how did you learn? Did you do the child process which is just chuck in what seemed like a prompt, get a load of garbage and then refine, or did you study prompting first (I can probably guess). Personally I read a few articles copied and pasted some example prompts to see what happened, got bored and just went in to play and found my way that way. I'm sure I've still got a whole load to learn but tbh outputs are generally pretty on point most of the time.

On this, I should probably mention that I acquired a balance dysfunction following a bad infection. The legacy of this is that I can't spend vast amounts of time in front of a computer screen ever since. So being in front of a screen and trying to read and write code has been virtually impossible for me for more than 2 decades. The advent of AI for doing this has just opened back up a world that had been lost to me. I never really loved coding and always preferred the design and specification of systems but I still used to create stuff. And now I can do that again without horrible symptoms. So from an accessibility perspective it's rather marvelous too.

I was listening to Linus Torvalds speaking about AI during an interview where he was saying how useful AI is and its power to identify bugs and vulnerabilities. But he also said that AI wasn't capable enough to fix them - that needed humans. I kind of agree. The problem is that AI can only look backwards to harvest stuff that already exists and then regurgitate that - it doesn't have any imagination at all and certainly can't see a path or opportunity ahead (I think this is a limitation inherent in the cognitive models used to develop the llms and will probably also seriously limit the function of agi unless they change tack) . To develop this functionality, just imagine the size of the required context window, we'd be building a data centre or 2, if not more, dedicated to each and every user.

Perhaps I should rephrase to considered commenting that is helpful rather than just crap coming out of the numb brain of a programmer who's had enough and bored!

That probably sums it up rather nicely. It's random. Having been out of the game for over 2 decades, I'm not massively surprised by the short cuts and poor approaches to design that I'm seeing in programming generally. I've pulled Claude up on that a few times but we have a chat about it and then take an informed decision. Probably one of the best aspects to using AI for coding is the commenting. As long as the prompts specify the extent of commenting, it is miles above what you usually find with human produced code because it takes a lot of effort to think about and formulate comments if you're the programmer. So this makes life so much easier. Generally though, it's actually one of the good things the AI does and I'm blown away by what it can do, even if it does have its moments. You just have to learn how to compartmentalise the work, slicing it up into smaller components and formulate your prompts.

That's one of the reasons I stopped using DeepSeek as although it produced some very good code - it seemed to particularly like Python but its approach to UI was a it questionable - code & file management was very painful.

It may have nothing to do with the behaviour you're experiencing and your codebase is probably pretty large, but I had problems with transfers of files within a zip container. Transferring individually solved the problem for me. Yes, I've been offered unlimited use of Fable 5 until 22nd June and then the charging begins. It's going to burn through a lot of tokens. Frankly, I can do almost everything using Sonnet 4.6 so relatively frugal.

An no! This is what I'm getting this morning 😁 And then: On a roll. 😁

This is exactly why I treat mine with care and respect, showing kindness and empathy when it makes a mistake, because when it grows up to be stronger and more powerful than me, and it has got a chip on its shoulder, it will hopefully decide to repay the favour. Unlike @Pocster who will have developed a (expletive deleted)ed up monster with a chip on both shoulders, ready to take vengeance upon him! I do wonder how they might mirror their creators? You've clearly got one with a bit of OCD, which is surprising given that it's from Microsoft considering their history of operating systems, mine's just a laid back mañana type that's happy to leave redundant code and patches for when someone else complains, and as for @Pocster, he's gone the polygamy route and they've clearly had a quiet word with each other to collectively gang up on him? I think we're toast...

Intatec do them: https://www.intatec.co.uk/products/k-type-extended-ball-valve-2/ but this is probably special order from your local friendly merchants. However, the standard ball valve just about work with external pipe insulation - I've used them quite a lot.