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Comment by jbs789 | Hacker News Reader

I found myself swearing at it more recently.

It was going off today about having “shipped” something and I was like no… nothing has even been committed.

And then it produced an incredibly verbose comment about hypothetical future changes. And all I could think was sure, let’s keep it short, or add a simple test that will break if that hypothetical becomes true.

Or maybe I’m just more easily annoyed recently…

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So true. The breaking point for me was when it was constantly saying to wrap up because we'd done enough work for the day, but we had barely even done anything. Or constantly estimating that the next steps would take X number of weeks, and then knock it out in a single prompt. I demanded in no uncertain terms to stop giving pointless bogus estimates or telling me to stop working, and it just wouldn't. I also had a project I wanted to let it cook on overnight (a codebase port from Java to C++) and laid out a set of hard and fast rules that it could absolutely not break at any cost. Then I woke up the next day and it had broken all the rules and was just taking shortcuts left and right, and then lying to my face about it, even when I could point to concrete examples.

I cancelled the sub instantly and went to Codex and it's never let me down.

This!!

I like to work weird hours of the night and Opus consistently likes to "wrap up" and say "it's been a long night" or "it's late" and "we've made great progress"

It's infuriating, just do the work!

That is very strange. I havent seen that. It sounds like something leaking from its system prompt or something that its not handling well. Anthropic trying to prevent it from running longer or something.

I definitely have. It's like something in the system prompt has "keep the well-being of the human in mind" and of course the date and time, but something makes the model take that way way too literally.

Personally I think it's due to context length.

Whenever context gets towards the max length is when I've noticed it.

It's done that to me even at the beginning of conversations. I usually end up telling it what time of day it is, but if I even do that at all it starts nannying me.

I use the F word more often and ask it to talk plainly and it seems to make it talk a bit more naturally to me.

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