> Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button.
Those are my only options when the site is clearly not blue, two buttons are.
There is a reason for why I am much more specific than this.
So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?
Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.
I've never explicitly paid for AI and never will. I only use the free Claude, etc. So I'm happy to waste THEIR electricity telling their machine how much of a piece of garbage it is and hoping that sentiment gets back in some form to the dumb humans making such a dumb product. It's not like they don't evaluate performance with usage data.
(Afterwards, I do also make sure to actually click the "thumbs down" or whatever equivalent button, and submit a report if it's possible.)
Thank you for helping us heat the planet.
Ie, actually, yes, shouting at the AI can (and does, there are papers on this), work.
My best takeaway from the site was: Every time you see Claude Code / Codex doing something you don't want, ask it to add to AGENTS.md. Specially if they churn a lot doing something, and eventually find a way. I ask it to store the way it made something work. It's a constant gardening of AGENTS.md and it has really working well.
Non-exhaustive consequences of following that rule:
* Each session handles one task, or at most, a few tightly coupled tasks.
* Emotions stay out of context; no showing frustration, no saying thanks (or at least wait until you're about to end the session)
* When possible, provide relevant files (or sections of files) instead of making the model search and read many irrelevant files.
* Keep CLAUDE.md short.
* Disable irrelevant tools.
* Revert history when the model makes mistakes. Don't make it read its mistake and fix it; fork the chat before the mistake and exclusively mention the correct action.
Attention is more limited than the context limits imply; stuff at the beginning of context stays high-attention for a while, stuff right at the end is always high-attention. If you're about to ask for something the model frequently forgets (eg, style), remind it that those instructions exist ("Following the style guidelines, implement feature X.")
I spent 30 mins today planning a change that affected multiple modules, and then handed it off the plan to the Claude to implement, and came back to 4 PRs fully ready to merge 15 mins later.
1 year ago, this kind of work would have taken me a better portion of the day, especially given the amount of searching I would need to do to build context.
It's certainly not helpful in getting the LLM from A to B, but maybe you don't care? Maybe you just need to blow off some steam?
People may call that irrational, but I'm certainly not seeing an abundance of commonly-agreed-upon rationality in all the other things they (we) do, so it's in character.
If I get frustrated by it because it just would not "listen", I discontinue its use!
Either that, or your coworker themselves would laugh and tell you about it later.
That’s also where this quiz lost me. I wouldn’t respond in either way, I’d say “all buttons look blue now. Can we make it so that just the Add to Cart button is blue? I’m okay with Add to Cart having its own class to make it easier.” or something.
FYI I actually agree, it also surprised me. Anyway everything is deterministic on the website so it's not like that prompt actually has an influence on anything.