As someone born in 1975 I always felt until the last couple of years that I had been stuck in a long period of stagnation compared to an earlier generation. My grandmother who was born in the 1910s got to witness adoption of electricity, mass transit, radio, television, telephony, jet flights and even space exploration before I was born.
Feels like now is a bit of a catchup after pretty tepid period that was most of my life.
I've been working with it for the last couple of hours. I don't see it as a massive change from the behaviours observed with Opus 4.6. It seems to exhibit similar blind spots - very autist like one track mind without considering alternative approaches unless actually prompted. Even then it still seems to limit its lateral thinking around the centre of the distribution of likely paths. In a sense it's like a 1st class mediocrity engine that never tires and rarely executes ideas poorly but never shows any brilliance either.
But it did. What used to be unworthy of building is now totally doable. I can roll out one off ad-hoc UIs for our customer to navigate their bespoke data sets without having too much worry about expending a lot of development time to throw up a visualization page that may get discarded when its usefulness expires. So it has expanded the realm of the worthwhile if not necessarily the realm of the possible. At least not yet.
I agree. AI clearly expanded the set of things that are worth building, especially small or previously unjustifiable work. What I was trying to say is that once those things become real systems, the old constraints show up again. You still have to understand boundaries, failure modes, and how to operate what got produced.
Yes, no denying this. Now in time this will change too. I'm slowly letting Claude do some target maintenance work in AWS in non-critical environments. Over time I will let it perform reversible operations in production but that time has not come yet. And it still too often takes silly approaches to problems that have more elegant solutions. These days it has a personally of an ambitious, restless junior who wants to always get stuff done but doesn't have the depth of thought to just handle it all by itself. But the times they are a changing.
Your advice beautifully reinforces OP's case.
We now have to use auxiliary apps with more predictable behaviour because designers made such a mess of things.
This fascinates me because I tend to use Claude Code in _very_ long sessions, driving it until its context window is exhausted at which point I grab most of the session history from the terminal window and paste it right back into the context. This usually fills the context window right back up to 80-100K tokens. Seems a lot more successful especially with keeping track of recent developments than built in compaction does.
For some reason I get the best results this way. I know it's unorthodox but with my approach the agent seems to learn about the ongoing concerns as it stays 'in the loop' and I prefer it to use its minion agents to do grunt work like grepping sources or log files. That way the main context is free of monotonous blobs. I like having it act as a coding/troubleshooting companion rather than a minion to delegate short bursts of work to. I believe it's because I rarely feed it a big block of data to parse in a single prompt or let it grep incessantly in the main context that I don't get hit by the dreaded 'context rot'.
This little study seems to line up with my experiences.
However, when fed source material into the context they will lie less, right? So at this point is it not just a battle of the nines until it's called "good enough"?
I also wonder if I leave my secretary with a ream of papers and ask him for a summary how many will he actually read and understand vs skim and then bullshit? It seems like the capacity for frailty exists in both "species".
Not to mention that it would then make some hedge fund with a better backtesting harness or more AI scrutiny more successful thus keeping the financial market work as designed.
Americans, you elected someone with the mentality of a child to the highest office in your country. You should be ashamed.
Face it, this is not some recent attack of dementia as some of you claim (perhaps trying to defend your extraordinarily poor judgment). The first time I heard that man talk was in 2016 when I saw fragments of his debate with Hillary Clinton. He was as childish and incoherent then as he is now. Later, seeing some clips of his behaviour during your election campaigns it was evident that he has the language and mannerisms of a child. I suspect he stopped his mental advance around the age of early adolescence or even earlier. This is not how an adult talks or behaves.
You gave nuclear codes to a 79 year old child. I can't condemn your recklessness enough.
Because this is democracy. I didn’t want this, I didn’t vote for it. But democracy is not just electing the people you want. The last presidential election was by all accounts a free and fair election.
As terrible as the current insanity might be, this is the president the majority voted for.
It may destroy the world economy, he might commit war crimes (attacking water infrastructure might be a war crime) and crimes against humanity (tbd). Those crimes may be prosecuted following due process, but until that happens this is the president the people elected.
Condemn the people who voted for him all you want, propose rules changes to prevent it from happening again, but he was democratically elected and I can’t be ashamed of democracy.
Shame, in a democratic system, is good for exactly the same reason it is good for individuals to be able to feel it.
Every system of government has a failure mode. There are no exceptions: anarchy fails to strong men with big sticks, democracy fails to demagogues, hereditary aristocracy to literal inbreeding, dictatorships to sycophantic courtiers, etc.
A democracy that one cannot be ashamed of is simply one in which the same demagogues can keep trying as many times as it takes.
That's all fine and good as long as you keep your trash indoors. Iran is halfway around the world and the title here should make anybody feel ashamed, not just those from the country that proposes this. It's a failure of humanity, not just of democracy that we let things get this far.
The democracy in the US is faulty in many ways. Democracy isn't a black or white kind of thing, so of course you can be ashamed of the lack of democracy that ended up with this person in charge.
I'm not convinced that the last election was free and fair. There's the strange comment that Trump made about Musk fixing the election machines and all the GOP comments about fixing elections sounds to me like projection
Balderdash. Russia has elections. There are plenty of places with elected governments that don't rise to the definition of democracy. We can't really claim to be a democracy without citing the caveats that our elections are bought by the Epstein class, and that we have a nearly overt fascist movement, with some tech industry leaders in that movement, among other ways in which democracy is degraded in the US.
Not maintaining and cultivating our democracy reduces our legitimacy, and when our acts affect the whole planet, that legitimacy matters.
Him talking was broadly incoherant word salad in 2016, but I think there's a strong case to be made that his coherancy has been getting even worse over the past while.
Only having the mental age of a child and sliding into dementia are not mutually exclusive.
What you are seeing in America right now is not democracy. We have transitioned into an oligarchy that is run by a group of billionaires. The only reason we still have elections is because the elites get to select the candidates and we only get to choose between the two options they chose for us.
Feels like now is a bit of a catchup after pretty tepid period that was most of my life.
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