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by m1keil 421 days ago
I hope we will exit this stage of magic spells and incantations sooner rather than later.
4 comments

I hope we delve deeper into pentacles and rites in candlelit basements to appease black boxes of neural mimicries of canaanite archetypes
So long as we get to play weird science[1] during the montage.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm-upHSP9KU

Maybe we will get to Babylon 5s reality of having literal tech wizards or whatever they were called - which summon "demons" etc
Technomages. They were humans (and some others) bonded to Shadow-manipulated creatures that could affect spacetime. Technomages learned to "cast spells" in a private language they developed with their symbiote. These were essentially commands to "do the thing I'm talking about."

One of the challenges Technomages faced after acquiring their symbiote is gaining control over both the personal language and the impulses for destruction embedded by the Shadows (bias? bias).

So yes, learning the tricks of getting our AI agents to do the thing we actually meant, while aiming to overcome bias built in to the models when we can see it does sound an awful lot like Technomages dealing with their symbiote.

I thought that earlier on, I don't think we will though
Sincerely, I respect your response to how arbitrary it seems in this form.

But... I'd like you to take a moment and think really hard about whether this is truly novel behavior for LLMs, or rather something that has always been part of the interplay between inter-agent communication and intra-agent thought :)

It sounds like it is a “specific phrase mapped directly” based on another comment here? I guess that means hardcoded? Not completely sure, though.
It's hard-coded - this isn't a weird model thing, Claude Code detects the exact string "ultrathink" and sets the thinking token budget to 31999.

I included that de-obfuscated code in my post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/19/claude-code-best-pract...