Comment by rufasterisco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rufasterisco | Hacker News Reader

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Stopped midway through reading it to clarify something.

I don’t want your conversations :)

Anthropic has it and this is beyond me. My plugin commits to your repo. When it comes to keeping the WTF DUDE out of conversations, LFS gives you a net trick. You can edit LFS blobs independently from git repo (different storage), so up to some point you can independently edit them out without touching git history (with caveats, it’s a rabbit hole).

Also, I think the inflection point is making it public. Git helps, just “fork” the repo without LFS to publish code only, or with a “sanitized” LFS (it just needs a touch of tooling to play with it).

I am also shipping a hook that sanitizes secrets by default (because security) and can be used also for keeping parts of the conversations… “tidy”. I have built the “cleanup swearing feature”. Yes sorry it’s llm-turtles all the way down if you want automated, and extra cruft. But is also ok?!? I have a concern, I want to address it, I need to put some extra work…

I just want to clarify that privacy is my concern too and I have found that it’s not impossible.

I did not started coding until I found out that there is a way to contribute to a repo without participating in the “sharing conversations” game. (Not difficult: it’s your machine)

I am not publishing the repo until I have had enough conversations like this to introduce different opinions in my line of thought, especially around non technical hurdles.

My biggest concern is “why the hell would I teach an LLM that much of me, knowing very well this is how I will automate myself away”. But even then, it’s either anthropic doing it, or me (coder, not plugin owner) AND anthropic doing it.

I am not advocating to giving away my skills for free. One feasible variation of this whole record conversation is “commit code to company repo, commit reasoning to MY lfs”. Why not? It’s my critical reasoning!!!

Sorry, didn't see this until now.

I understand you may not want my conversations and I might believe you. You seems like a nice dude.

I don't want my conversations to be forever recorded. I need my private corner. As an analogue: I want to be able to talk to some guy at the office without there being listening devices that's recording me. I want to be able to shut a door and nobody else in the office can listen in. I don't want to be forever forced to have every single conversation ever in front of the entire office.

That's what me talking to my intern is. I'm not gonna spend time to "sanitize" a conversation. I won't trust an LLM (or your code/LLM prompts) to sanitize my conversations. Heck me saying "WTF you stupid piece of electrons floating the ether" is literally what made the probability machine take the turn that made it come up with a stroke of genius from its training data. Whatever is valuable: The outcomes, plans, requirements, system invariants etc. I'm entirely fine to put in the repo. But: I am putting them in the repo.

We do that at work w/ the "AI first" projects. There's a lot of documentation to help the LLMs that everyone including PMs and designers now are using be on the same page. Essentially a lot of the stuff that used to be floating around people's heads or in various other places like the ticketing system or wiki, is (supposed to be) kept inside the (or a separate "docs") repo.

Regarding automating away: Totally agreed and models have come a long way in a short time but are still not there. And if "coders automate themselves away" so that "PMs can now code" is the thing, well then I'll be the better PM that knows how to get the LLM to do their bidding better than the PMs that will "vibe themselves into a corner". Like, when we talk to our PMs and designers about how we make the AI know all these things so we can move as fast as we can, they generally are just not comprehending, can't follow, can't replicate.

As for self-recording your own conversations and learning from yourself for yourself, the same way you learned more/better coding techniques for yourself: Yes absolutely and that's what I'm talking about. I do have a CLAUDE.local.md and I'm sure there's stuff in there that isn't just "personal preference" but actually helps me be better w/ Claude than others. I'm not sure I could tell you which parts those were though to be honest. Same way I try to teach some of my techniques to others. I gladly help them troubleshoot and they can learn from seeing me and how I come up w/ the stuff I come up with. Most people don't pick up on it or don't even pick it up when I explicitly tell them. Their loss. I guess some of this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109460 ;)

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