[data-ottawa]

Yesterday I had my biggest Opus WTF.

I asked Opus 4.6 to help me get GPU stats in btop on nixos. Opus's first approach was to use patchelf to monkey patch the btop binary. I had to redirect it to just look the nix wiki and add `nixpkgs.config.rocmSupport = true;`.

But the approach of modifying a compiled binary for a configuration issue is bizarre.

[pxc]

It does stuff like this all the time. It loves doing this with scripts with sed, so I'm not surprised to hear about it trying to do this with binaries. It's definitely wilder, though

[spoiler]

It frequently gets indentation wrong on projects, then tries to write sed/awk scripts. Can't get it right, then write a python script that reformats the whole file on stdout, makes sure the indentation is correct, then writes requests an edit snippet.

And you might be thinking. Well, you should use a code formatter! But I do!

And then you might say, well surely you forgot to mention it in you AGENTS/CLAUDE file. Nope, it's there, multiple times even in different sections because once was apparently not enough.

And lastly, surely if I'm watching this cursed loop unfold and am approving edits manually, like some bogan pleb, I can steer it easily... Well, let me tell ya... I tried stopping it and injecting hints about the formatter, and it stick for a minute before it goes crazy again. Or sometimes it rereads the file and just immediately fucks up the formatting.

I think when this shit happens, it probably uses like 3x more tokens.

For a Rust project, it recently stated analysing binaries in the target as directory a first instinct, instead of looking at the code...

Good grief.