Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 27 days ago
> LLMs flip positions when users push back

Same experience. Claude rarely pushes back once you give a plausible/logical reason for your initial decision, even if it flagged concerns at first.

2 comments

I have noticed this as well, but I think it's somewhat a good thing. I know what I want for my application more than Claude does for example, especially when it comes to what's in production.

An example from earlier, Claude strongly suggested a migration that would run a full vacuum on postgres. However, in production this would lock tables which would grind the application to a halt. After I informed Claude that there were millions of rows in production, it accepted that and helped me get to the right thing.

Another example, I'm developing a TOTP authentication app because I'm dissatisfied with all those that I've tried. I want something strictly local, and with a very easy use case when you have dozens or even a hundred or more accounts on there, that is also efficient when left open for long periods of time. Claude strongly suggested that we force users to encrypt their vault with a passphrase all the time. However this makes the CLI extremely painful to use if you are using a strong passphrase. I told Claude about the user experience impacts and that I wanted to allow users to optionally use a vault with no passphrase encryption, and it accepted that and suggested as a medium that we have a checkbox for the user to explicitly acknowledge that they're creating an unencrypted vault on disc. This is the right thing IMHO.

It's a good thing except when it's not. The problem is the AI does not understand when to use which approach.

Contrast this with a human. We generally understand when the other person knows what they're doing and we should just listen, and when the other person is asking for an honest opinion and wants a push back if necessary.

Skills help there.

I have a linus-reviewer skill that focuses on architectural integrity, no bs, etc modeled on Torvald's code preferences.

And I have an enrico-reviewer one (I'm Enrico), that focuses on correct design, strict typing, simplification.

They have different prios, but they both push back on feedback, till you convince them.

Care to share the skill behind the Linus reviewer ? I tend to as it to do that but leave it up to LLM to decide what the means. Interested to see any specifics you might have included there if it’s ok to share.
Sure.

Would be interested in the experience others may have, took me weeks of iterations to get reviews in a format and utility I liked.

https://gist.github.com/enricopolanski/2bde8619f53307c9bcd5e...

I agree completely. Skills definitely keep it in line and sticking to the script. Thanks for sharing the skills you use, I’ll definitely take a look.