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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

It’s Claude’s earnestness that’s so disingenuous in this kind of write up. This voice Claude has where it believes the work is important and deserves to be taken seriously, and where it takes ever part of the process where it has to adjust its approach because of a thing it figured out as a great insight which is incredibly valuable and that people should be made aware of…

I feel like vibecoded projects need Claude to pick up on a sense of ‘this is just me messing around’, and a project like this where there does appear to be genuine digging into the art of performance tuning Z80 assembly needs Claude to understand ‘this is impractical hacking for hacking’s sake not groundbreaking research’

I don’t have a problem with projects which are, essentially ‘Claude and I burned a lot of tokens for giggles to see just how far you can push something’. But the write up needs to reflect that spirit.

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That's an excellent way of putting it. It's like an enthusiastic student who points out all the really smart stuff it did so that the teacher will be impressed and give it a gold star...which is basically what its RL environments were.

I have called it Claude's "iamverysmart" voice, but as you said, maybe it's more of a "thisisveryimportant" voice.

agreed, the only issue here is that Claude is targeted to enterprise engineering teams so its language model is trained for SoCal startup culture.

Would take three times the token cost to actually get it to fight with itself in the correct voice tone.

Honestly think self hosted models is more valuable here. At least then one can train it with the right system prompt.

You can do a lot with custom agent prompts. Just telling Claude ‘this is only a personal project, we’re messing around here’ changes its tone somewhat already. It’s still Business Claude, but more Casual Friday Claude, less Monday Morning Standup Meeting Claude.

the only issue here is that Claude is targeted to enterprise engineering teams so its language model is trained for SoCal startup culture.

SV is SoCal now? I missed the earthquake.

There's also a vast gulf between 'startup culture' and 'Enterprise engineering'. But the general sense of "this voice is for a specific context, and it is not 'weekend ZX Spectrum hacking project'", is correct.

> It runs on the real thing, not just an emulator.

Wow!!!!

TBH even if you're messing around you may still want the code to be performant and taken seriously :-P

Sure. If I ask my roommate to go make me a ham sandwich without mayo, I expect them to observe basic hygiene practices, too, but I am comfortable with them just handing me the sandwich and saying ‘there on you go - sandwich’ rather than “Here is an edible sandwich: No mayo, no lettuce – just bread and ham. And the load-bearing insight that makes it work: it doesn’t use the open ham from the fridge that was past its use-by date. That one decision changed everything.”

Yeah, but it doesn't have to sound like you have invented a time machine and deserve a Nobel prize.

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