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Comment by mikenew | Hacker News Reader

> The chatbot recommended some of the dumbest shit you could possibly do

The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs.

Use a very good model. Set up a good harness. Spend some time on your system prompts and skills. Develop your intuitions about how the model works, what it's good at, how to scope the work, and how to steer it. Recognize when it's alleviating menial work and recognize when it's making choices you really need to understand yourself. Be patient and accept that the failures are going to be very painful for a while.

Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.

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You describe my experience with Claude (except my gut feeling is that system prompts and especially skills are useless, and I've even done limited testing that agrees with that).

However, your discourse is not the usual borderline religious discourse that's used by LLM advocates. You're not extreme enough either pro or against LLMs :)

Ha, well that's good because I would hate to be labeled an "LLM advocate". I've been on the negative side of the conversation many times, and I think the downsides are very real and often ignored. But calling them useless is just not reality.

As far as system prompts and skills, my approach has been to start with nothing and add very specific instructions as I notice issues or feel like I need them. Mostly around trying to keep it terse, kill the obnoxious rhetoric ("It's not X. It's Y"), and give specific guidance on how to write code. Skills are things like "use edge-tts to generate spoken audio for this answer and send it to me" kind of thing.

> except my gut feeling is that system prompts and especially skills are useless

I tend to agree. Not with the extreme version of this statement: there are some genuinely useful instructions I give in my Claude.md and prompts. Comment style, how much to push back, which subagents to orchestrate for tests, reviews, etc.

But I've tried the single-sentence versions of those and versions with multiple files of long prompts for the orchestrator and its subagents, and I can't tell the difference in output quality. If anything, the shorter version is better

> Comment style, how much to push back, which subagents to orchestrate for tests, reviews, etc.

Are those "skills" or just instructions?

My definition for "skills" is the "you are the greatest software architect ever born" type bullshit.

> Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.

This is ridiculous. Basically you're saying "if you try it and find it sucks, you're wrong, keep at it until you change your mind". That isn't a tool at that point, it's a religion.

No, it just means you have to learn to use the tool well.

No, they're saying there are upsides, even if you think they are small, or think they don't outweigh the downsides, you at least have to be honest about where the utility is.

Of course you don't need to keep trying until you think it's good. But if you haven't found anything it's good at, and meanwhile lots of smart and seemingly-honest people are saying they've found it to be very good at some things, then it's pretty likely that you really are holding it wrong (and perhaps not even trying to hold it right in the first place).

How do you account for the lots of smart and seemingly-honest people who are saying they've earnestly tried it and find it not useful? These are all just personal accounts. The only empirical evidence we have is the output, but there is conspicuously no big successful AI project taking over anything, which is some minor evidence against.

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