[gck1]

That probably matters for some scenarios, but I have yet to find one where thinking tokens didn't hint at the root cause of the failure.

All of my unsupervised worker agents have sidecars that inject messages when thinking tokens match some heuristics. For example, any time opus says "pragmatic", its instant Esc Esc > "Pragmatic fix is always wrong, do the Correct fix", also whenever "pre-existing issue" appears (it's never pre-existing).

[lelanthran]

> For example, any time opus says "pragmatic", its instant Esc Esc > "Pragmatic fix is always wrong, do the Correct fix", also whenever "pre-existing issue" appears (it's never pre-existing).

It's so weird to see language changes like this: Outside of LLM conversations, a pragmatic fix and a correct fix are orthogonal. IOW, fix $FOO can be both.

From what you say, your experience has been that a pragmatic fix is on the same axis as a correct fix; it's just a negative on that axis.

[b112]

It's contextual though, and pragmatic seems different to me than correct.

For example, if you have $20 and a leaking roof, a $20 bucket of tar may be the pragmatic fix. Temporary but doable.

Some might say it is not the correct way to fix that roof. At least, I can see some making that argument. The pragmatism comes from "what can be done" vs "should be".

From my perspective, it seems viable usage. And I guess on wonders what the LLM means when using it that way. What makes it determine a compromise is required?

(To be pragmatic, shouldn't one consider that synonyms aren't identical, but instead close to the definition?)

[lelanthran]

> It's contextual though, and pragmatic seems different to me than correct.

To me too, that's why I say they are measurements on different dimensions.

To my mind, I can draw a X/Y axis with "Pragmatic" on the Y and "Correctness" on the X, and any point on that chart would have an {X,Y} value, which is {Pragmatic, Correctness}.

If I am reading the original comment correctly, poster's experience of CC is that it is not an X/Y plot, it is a single line plot, with "Pragmatic" on the extreme left and "Correctness" on the extreme right.

Basically, any movement towards pragmatism is a movement away from correctness, while in my model it is possible to move towards Pragmatic while keeping Correctness the same.

[shawnz]

I don't think it's a single axis even in the original poster's conception, since you could be both incorrect and also not pragmatic.

But if a fix needs to be described as pragmatic relative to the alternatives, that's probably because it couldn't be described as correct. Otherwise you wouldn't be talking about how pragmatic it is.

[matheusmoreira]

> also whenever "pre-existing issue" appears (it's never pre-existing)

I dunno... There were some pre-existing issues in my projects. Claude ran into them and correctly classified as pre-existing. It's definitely a problem if Claude breaks tests then claims the issue was pre-existing, but is that really what's happening?

I agree with the correctness issue.

[mikkupikku]

I had some interesting experience to the opposite last night, one of my tests has been failing for a long time, something to do with dbus interacting with Qt segfaulting pytest. Been ignoring it for a long time, finally asked claude code to just remove the problematic test. Come back a few minutes later to find claude burning tokens repeatedly trying and failing to fix it. "Actually on second thought, it would be better to fix this test."

Match my vibes, claude. The application doesn't crash, so just delete that test!