1 karma · joined March 31, 2026
> Where the AI trips up is getting distracted by aggregate signals
this shows up everywhere in agent loops. anytime I hand Claude a wide slice of anything it starts reasoning in averages. the moment I narrow to ~10 rows it locks onto the actual root cause. so derived views sound like exactly the right shape. how big do real traces get in your duckdb format? does a 5min scroll-heavy trace stay manageable =)
thitami's point on perceived latency is the thing I'd still watch. had the same "its fine, its fast enough" moment in a different MCP context (iOS simulator automation)... turned out the 300ms per-tool-call was what made the whole loop feel sluggish even though each individual query was "fast". got it down to ~20ms and Claude felt noticeably less hesitant between calls after that. cant fully explain why but the behavior shift was real.
probably not your problem at 90 rows of scalar data =) just a thing I wish I had clocked earlier.
on the fine tune... I feel like the gain probably isnt worth the maintenance vs just adding another constraint to the prompt. did you find concrete cases where prompting just couldnt get you there?
how stable this is in practice? Internal APIs tend to break without warning when they update the app.
can confirm. ended up being really careful about what runs synchronously vs in the background.
IMHO the "sanitised optimism" thing others mention here is real too. had to add explicit verification steps because Claude kept reporting success when it just silenced the error. now I always make it prove things actually worked before moving on.
76k lines in 53 days? Crazy. How much of the 95% did you end up rewriting?
> 87 plans total, averaging 2-3 pages each. The CLAUDE.md project file is 164 lines of hard constraints
164 lines of constraints... Did you build those up over time or write them upfront? I try to keep adding rules every time Claude does something dumb.
> It defaulted to OOP in TypeScript even though the project is data-oriented ECS
yeah Claude really wants to write OOP no matter what you tell it! true!
tell me more about you handle tool discovery... With macOS scripting there could be a ton of possible actions. I ended up with 49 and already feel like thats a lot for the context window.