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Comment by soulchild77 | Hacker News Reader

I asked Claude whether these elaborate words like "walk down the design tree" actually mean anything to the LLM and make a difference. The answer confirmed my gut feeling: You can just tell me to "be critical" and get mostly the same results. Matt did incredible work teaching people TS, but this feels more like trying to create FOMO to sell snake oil and AI courses.

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> I asked Claude […]. The answer confirmed my gut feeling.

And i drawn a tarot card and the card refuted your gut feeling.

Joking asside, there is no reason to suspect that an LLM is telling you correct information about how best to use an LLM. The way to confirm your thesis is by running experiments, or finding someone who has already done them. It is a valid move to use an LLM to find primary sources, but in itself the LLM is not an authority you could or should trust.

It feels to me that "walk down the design tree" has a specific meaning with respect to treating the design as a hierarchy (although whether that means BFS or DFS is still ambiguous). "Be critical" lacks that specificity.

Yes but then it’s better to spell those instructions out explicitly, eg state facts, state ambiguities / assumptions, inspect codebase, challenge assumptions, etc.

This particular skill is not great.

How odd, are you under the impression that LLMs have self-awareness or understand their own internal mechanisms? Do you know that you can tell an LLM almost anything and, absent a tool, it will tell you that you're correct? By your logic, why do we even experiment with skills, planning modes, harnesses, etc. when we could just ask the model what the best way to get it to produce information is?

I thought that was supposed to be “decision tree” but otherwise, totally agree the exact words don’t actually matter all that much in most instances. I copy-paste templated prompts and every now and then notice some baffling grammar on my side after the fact… claude doesn’t mind

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