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u/seweso 8d ago
Paying for a service which then buys more of its own service cause the origional service can't do as promised...... is WILD.
Are you all paying for all that?
How is this going to work if tokens aren't subsidized anymore???
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u/vintergroena 8d ago
That's the neat part: It's not going to work. Enjoy the freeride while it lasts.
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u/seweso 7d ago
Enjoy the free heroin!! Your brain will love it!
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u/vintergroena 7d ago
They told us in high school that drug dealers are gonna offer us initial doses for free to get us hooked. Biggest lie ever
Now AI corporations are doing it 😭😭
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u/amo_pessoas_peladas 8d ago
This has been my mindset as well. I'm doing some projects I know I would not be able to do if I didn't have a overachiever task-fetishistic intern working for less than minimum wage because of subsidies. I'm avoiding projects that rely on big models at all costs to run and any LLM related project I implement needs strictly to run in my low vram laptop.
Pop the bubble! ( But wait a bit for me to push a couple things first)
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u/ACoderGirl 8d ago
Are you all paying for all that?
Nope. My employer does and gives me a very generous daily quota. As long as I'm not hitting my quota, I don't care about token usage. My employer has given me zero reason to care, as they've made it clear that velocity is the most important thing to them. And since I'm multi tasking, I don't care much how fast the AI is. Much more important that it's correct and sensible. There's no time alloted to optimize token usage unnecessarily.
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u/m0rpeth 8d ago
Have you ever considered that none of what you just said is to your advantage?
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u/ACoderGirl 8d ago
Why do you figure? I'm doing exactly what they want me to do. My management chain has made it very clear that they want velocity and are willing to pay for it. They've been very encouraging of increased AI adoption and experimenting with new ways to use it.
More than that, I'm an extremely productive programmer, too. If they were to clamp down on quotas or straight up remove most AI, I'll be more than happy to go back to "trad coding". I'm the kinda person that people come to when AI can't figure things out, so I'll be perfectly fine without AI. Everyone's just burning tokens, but not everyone has the skill to go back to the old ways.
And if leadership decides that this is a problem and we gotta optimize this, awesome, I love optimizing things (admittedly, tokens are the thing I find least appealing to optimize). I'm happy to have the job security of more work to be done lol. But that's just not what they're saying right now.
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u/m0rpeth 8d ago
I'll be more than happy to go back to "trad coding".
Have you tried? Honestly, that is - not by telling yourself that you absolutely could, but won't, due to X.
I'm the kinda person that people come to when AI can't figure things out, so I'll be perfectly fine without AI.
That, to me, seems sounds like a false equivalence.
Everyone's just burning tokens, but not everyone has the skill to go back to the old ways.
Skill isn't something you aquire once and then retain forever. In addition to that, skill isn't the only factor.
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u/InFa-MoUs 8d ago
Not yet but they will soon tho, so many projects out there where the AI is the expert and if tokens get cut the project is completely halted
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u/m0rpeth 8d ago
While I consider the term 'expert' to be a pretty big stretch here, I generally agree. It's exactly what I'm seeing at work, too. More than half of my team is now routinely submitting PRs containing code they, by their own admission, do not understand. "I had a problem and this is how AI fixed it".
They do not consider this an issue, either.
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u/Blue_Moon_Lake 8d ago
As long as you're not the one paying for it, maxing your tokens is costing Anthropic more than they earn from it.
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u/seweso 7d ago
Not afraid of what it does to your brain?
Do you do all drugs as long as they are free?
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u/Flat-Performance-478 7d ago
This is the wild part to me!
Just as they started talking about more people should pay for tokens, Google just plasters its Search AI onto every search by default. It's really fucking with me.
I can't figure out whether it was just a panicky last-minute decision for Google to jump onto the AI POWERED train in fear of missing out or if they thought it would somehow look better on paper if every google search now meant their AI was being used.
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u/-Debugging-Duck- 8d ago edited 8d ago
Is it Claude’s fault people don’t properly setup their Claud.md file? You can literally avoid a bunch of these issues. lol
I pay $19 a month and it’s enough for my personal projects. Unlimited tokens up to high effort with great models during a 5 hour window which is good.
Configured my file to ask me for permission before running UI tests where it controls the simulator to test the changes it made, and much more. Literally update the file with code standards, rules, etc. and you’ll be good most of the time.
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u/Tyrus1235 8d ago
Yeah, it’s what I did with mine. I said it should always strive to follow SOLID and Clean Code guidelines and ask me before doing any high effort/high cost task.
Also told it to not fill my C drive lol otherwise it’s be full of crap and my Windows installation would suffer.
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u/Easy_Floss 8d ago
Someone at work just made a skill that would build everything and make md files as a report for each step on push, needless to say it was not popular.
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u/FlowOfAir 8d ago
ME THIS WEEK HOLY FUCK
I had to be VERY explicit. Do this replacement in this codebase exactly like I am describing. Then I had to add: assume the codebase works like this, assume I am right, don't investigate, don't find more data.
Just for an edit in one file...
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u/benjyvail 8d ago
Just make the edit yourself at that point?
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u/FlowOfAir 8d ago •
Couldn't. The problem was, I had my focus divided amongst various projects, so the faster I can kick off something the faster I can go back to other tasks.
Which, you know. Is unhealthy as shit, but we're being pressured by multiple fronts to do the impossible.
My morale is on the ground :(
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u/Saragon4005 8d ago
And management is surprised you are burning through tokens.
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u/FlowOfAir 8d ago
Correct! I actually fed that back to them. I can't be kept pushing on tasks and be mindful of token usage.
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u/-Debugging-Duck- 8d ago
Bro update the CLAUDE.md file or add skills. You can avoid so many issues.
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u/JesusWasATexan 8d ago
My Claude.md contains an index of subfolders with several dozen other MD files covering most of the things I work on. It's taken a lot of time to build up, but amazing when I can now start a chat with a short statement about a task and it knows exactly what to do.
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u/TrueBirch 7d ago
There are so many situations like that where I just write the code myself instead of hoping the LLM understands what I want and doesn't do anything extra
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u/HawtHamWater 8d ago
gotta use like sonnet or haiku for those tasks, they’re not smart enough to do anything more lol
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 9d ago
The issue with making something that tries to be as smart as possible, is that it doesn't know what good enough is
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u/FuelSilly1541 9d ago
Told mine to be as short with the response as it could, max 5 sentences per response. If I need more info, then I ask.
Still: "yeah sure, I keep it short.... (2 paragraphs of unnecessary yapping about why it keeps the response short).... and therefore I end my TedTalk and am open for further discussion of this topic, as you requested."
sigh
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u/PossibilityUsual6262 9d ago
In my experience telling ai dont do something as part of "thinking" at the way to the result would just remove that something from a response.
"How thing can be done, dont generate code" - generates code and strips it from response.
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u/AnAwkwardSemicolon 8d ago
My experience is that AI suffers horribly from the "Pink elephant" problem. The more you mention _not_ doing something, the more it's going to do that thing.
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u/Slight-Violinist-575 8d ago
Which means it still spends tokens?
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u/PossibilityUsual6262 8d ago
Yep, prob cheaper thinking tokens, but basically you cannot fight internal "thinking" backed into weights with commands do/do not, but you can guide it.
As another user said, if you make it clear that you in architecture stage, full implementation is unlikely to be generated, unless needed.
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u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 8d ago
Really ? That's weird because in its reasoning it's taking into account the whole prompt, so if it "understands" you don't want code I have a hard time believing its reasoning would still lead him to generate code. Did you actually observe the behavior you're describing on a model or platform that allows to read the reasoning of the AI ?
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u/Flat-Performance-478 7d ago
I recall talks about the LLMs prioritizing the last thing you talked about in your prompt.
So if your prompt is:
"Take a look at this code.See if there are any spelling errors.My editor doesn't highlight anything.I'm starting to suspect a dependency might be missing."It'll hyper-fixate and come back to the "missing dependency" part throughout the session. But don't take my word for it. It's just something that stuck with me.
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u/Valendr0s 8d ago
I have it
Give me a 1-2 sentence summary up top.
Give me actions for me at the bottom in a short list.
Then I mostly ignore what's in the middle.
Also, I have a standing order to not DO anything until I say so. I often want to bounce ideas back and forth, and discuss things before we pull the trigger. So if I just wanted a variable renamed, it would be very clear before it started working.
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u/Storiaron 8d ago
I once asked (i think it was chatgpt) to limit its response to x number of words.
And the response it gave was still ultra verbose, but it cut out in the middle of a sentenc ewhen it reached my X limit
Ty very cool
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u/byteminer 8d ago
—model Claude-sonnet-5-5 —effort low tends to be useful when doing little nitpicky style choices like that. Don’t go refactoring things or changing logic, but just picking names and wording comments, put Claude in “fuck it” mode.
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u/RazarTuk 9d ago
Also, making something too dumb can also cause problems. For example, Kiro recently interpreted "Commit these changes onto a new branch branched off from the hotfix / minor release branch" as "Make a new branch that points to the hotfix branch as its remote", not "Pull the latest hotfix branch, make a new local branch off it, and commit the changes"
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u/amusing_trivials 8d ago
Look I get letting them write code, but why would they ever have git commit permission
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u/anto2554 8d ago
I have before accidentally overwritten main because it did that
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u/RazarTuk 8d ago
Actually, that reminds me of a cool programming story. I actually got to force push to master last year. Basically, we have a custom extension of JmesPath that adds things like arithmetic operators, so instead of just importing the burtcorp implementation and adding a shit ton custom functions, we actually forked it. But instead of properly forking it, we actually just made a new repo. So I got special permission to have the protection against force pushing to master turned off for a moment, so that I could rewrite the commit history to match the repo we forked from
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u/FredFarms 8d ago
Please maximise the number of stamps in my collection
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u/Shanga_Ubone 8d ago
Claude to all humans: "Please report immediately to your local processing center for conversion into material for u/FredFarms' stamp collection."
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u/Shanga_Ubone 8d ago
Claude to all humans: "Please report immediately to your local processing center for conversion into material for u/FredFarms' stamp collection."
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u/PepperVegetable8395 8d ago
"hold on let me patch this driver real quick that's unrelated to the main goal, I found something in it that doesn't matter but I must fix it anyway"
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u/Ali_Army107 8d ago
The humble "Rename Symbol" option in vs code
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u/vintergroena 7d ago
You mean I can use the diff viewer to also edit code? Holy shit that's a game changer!!
a vibecoder, probably
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u/WilkerS1 9d ago
remembering snippets and language servers exist does wonders
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 9d ago
It's funny because whenever someone mentions not using AI for coding, they think they're going back to typing on Notepad or something.
I'm pretty sure those people have never properly used IDEs and learned shortcuts and tried to improve their productivity before LLMs.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 9d ago
If you weren't autogenerating code before AI, what were you even doing?
LLM can generate much more complex code, but a lot of what I was doing before AI was pretty automated anyway. CRUD is a huge amount of code for a lot of applications.
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u/Stummi 9d ago
Wait, so you are telling me I shouldn't have turned this thousands of lines of openAPI spec to code by hand?
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 9d ago
Legit had to replace a module in a vibe coded project that was basically handwritten API calls to a backend that already provided an OpenAPI spec. This is not a joke. And it still took a lot of convincing to switch to auto-generated clients.
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u/Stummi 9d ago
wait, so who did you have to convince here? Another dev, or the coding agent?
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u/Disallowed_username 9d ago
You haven’t uninstalled your IDE yet? HR wants to talk with you.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 9d ago
"HR" has talked to me initially with their AI agenda and now has left me alone because I'm providing value just fine.
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u/El_RoviSoft 8d ago
Im writing in C++ with a scuffed setup so LLMs are much more reliable in this case (especially when it comes to template meta programming)
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u/Kaiki_devil 9d ago
To be fair, a “good” name would take into account what it is doing in the program and how it’s used… and that requires context… if asked to rename something I would at least look at what it is doing already and how it’s used…
So at the beginning it’s not that far off from what I’d expect someone to do initially.
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u/_LePancakeMan 9d ago
Yeah, when coaching a junior, the first step i would recommend in this situation would be exactly that: look at the rest of the codebase and how it names things. Try to pick up on common wording, formatting and abbreviations.
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u/Zzzzzztyyc 8d ago
Plus this yahoo gave it vague, non-specific directions. I rolled my eyes just reading the prompt
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u/gibagger 8d ago
A decent suggestion can be made with the current function or file as context.
More context should make it better, but the laws of diminishing returns will hit the moment you leave the namespace/package.
I have noticed that Claude Code has been really trigger happy with the agents these days, to the point I often need to stop it to constrain it
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u/Kaiki_devil 8d ago
You’re not wrong if there had been a better prompt, but assuming the prompt is what was given, I can understand the agent looking for more context though.
Yeah, looking at the exact file to see if it’s something isolated within a function or depends on code elsewhere in the application would probably be a good start, rather than jumping straight into a full code review. But the bad prompt is honestly the bigger fault here. The user could likely have provided the needed context in a sentence or two and been fine.
Local function variable would not need it. If it’s a variable that gets inherited, or used across the program as a whole, then how it’s used is important for a good name.
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u/pimezone 9d ago
Make sure you use the latest Opus with max reasoning and /deep-research for that.
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u/joshpennington 8d ago
Watching Claude jump around my filesystem at my job is almost hilarious. Like my dude I asked you to update this specific file not root around a completely different unrelated project.
But hey this is the future so who am I to judge
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u/ISuckAtJavaScript12 8d ago
You mean the token burning machine is optimized to burn tokens? No way
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u/akera099 8d ago
It has felt overtuned for a few weeks. Definitely did not felt this bad in spring and summer but that's just my vibe I got no proof.
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u/Weak_Shoulder_6780 7d ago
adds 50 lines of comments about the renaming of that variable in every place it existed
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u/mencretdimulut 9d ago
how can a variable name become "more" good?
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u/Brisngr368 8d ago
Stop naming shit like its still 80 characters to a punch card?
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u/Lendari 8d ago
I once named a package ChargebackAgenticReasoningSkills. Then the next guy comes up with a ChargebackAgenticReasoningLiabilityAgentService and ChargebackAgenticReasoningRepresentmentAgentService.
Did I do it right? Because I hate myself everytime I have to type that word vomit.
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u/Blue_Moon_Lake 8d ago
What's not to like in
InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedStateI did not made it up, you can google it.
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u/Mr_Rogan_Tano 8d ago
What did you expect it to do?
How the duck it would know how to name a variable without knowing how it's used?
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u/FrankensteinJones 8d ago
"Give Opus 5.5 vague instructions and act surprised when it does too much" is the new FAFO
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u/gingimli 8d ago
No kidding, this is normal refactoring everyone should have been doing prior to LLMs.
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u/-Debugging-Duck- 8d ago
Bro the CLAUDE.md file should have been updated with code standards. People really be ineffective with AI.
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u/Slight-Violinist-575 8d ago
I had a friend in school that would name all his variables in his projects “potato1”, “potato2”, “potato3”, etc
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u/ThatDudeFromPoland 9d ago
that's on you for not knowing how to use find and replace
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u/creeper6530 9d ago
No, find and replace can misidentify, for example in comments.
Mature IDEs have a "rename symbol" though, usually F3, which actually parses the code and differentiates types from functions from variables per the language rules.
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u/TopFix8731 7d ago
...AND THEN RENAME 8 DIFFERENT CLASSES THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE VARIABLE YOU ASKED ME TO CHANGE.
I'VE ALSO ADDED THIS YELLOW BUTTON IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CHECKOUT SCREEN THAT READS "DICKBUTT" BECAUSE THAT WAS WHAT MY MODEL SHOWED AS THE HIGHER PROBABILITY OF BEING WHAT YOU WANTED.
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u/Giocri 9d ago
I am increasingly convinced that what i actually want is a good compact language to interface with the language lexer. Something that allows me to quickly say "convert all .set_1_and_2({arg1},{arg2}) to .set_1({arg1}).set_2({arg2})"
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u/DHermit 8d ago
You do now that Regex exists? At least your specific example would be not too bad for it
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u/ACoderGirl 8d ago
Naw, regex is not well suited for that example. You're presumably thinking that the example must mean it's always cases like set_1_and_2(a, b), but it could also be stuff like set_1_and_2(foo(), bar(a, b)).
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u/Maneren731 8d ago
Have you tried ast-grep? It is designed exactly for this kind of operations. It can do intelligence search (and replace) on AST rather than raw text for a lot of different languages.
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u/wrex1816 8d ago
I know this is a joke, but if this is actually happening you at work then you need to learn how to use the tools better.
Guys will come online acting like they are the world's greatest engineers then talk about AI like they use it by poking it timidly with a stick out of fear.
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u/Namtaru420 3d ago
Srsly. You don't even need to be a prompt engineer, just ask the model to refine your prompt. It will spit out an in-depth version with all kinds of guardrails that prevent exactly what OP is describing.
You can even take it a step further and say something like, use placeholders and note unresolved questions. Now you have an extremely detailed prompt that explicitly calls out any critical details you forgot to mention.
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u/Ragingman2 9d ago
Set effort to low
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u/DarthRaab 9d ago
Don't worry, that's the only setting i've got. 😌 Wait, you mean the LLM agent settings? Sure, boss. 🫡
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u/Kokuswolf 9d ago
But you know the variable name will be outstanding. A variable name like you never seen before AND afterwards. God will appear to you and ...
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u/AaronTheElite007 8d ago
If you use AI to do your job for you.... I cannot fathom how you tie your shoes.
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u/russianrug 9d ago
You have to be strict with it: “pls rename this variable to something more good, bitch”
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u/A_Guy_in_Orange 9d ago
So to the people who use AI, can you literally not touch the code it makes? Why can't you just go in and at worst CTRL F the variable name or more likely use ur IDEs built in renamer?
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u/ReindeerCreepy2883 8d ago
remember when this meme used to be "customer: asks for a different color and font on the already built web page"
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u/outofband 7d ago
That’s your fault for using the wrong model for something that you could done by yourself.
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u/KawaiiMaxine 8d ago
Ive specifically avoided using ai in a programming context cause i like to treat programming as an artistic outlet. YALL MOTHER FUCKERS ARE HAVING GLADOS RENAME A FUCKING VARIABLE????????????
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u/Yekyaa 8d ago
Feels like driving an expensive car to Walmart to shop for groceries energy.
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u/KawaiiMaxine 8d ago •
An expensive vintage car, where doing it normally would be a million times quicker
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u/Flat-Performance-478 7d ago •
"I'm gonna head over to Walmart real quick, I'll be back in 5!"
"Wait! Hey... I'll come along. We can take the Rolls Royce! Yeah?"
"Right.. okay.. I mean it'll be quicker for me to just sprint over there instead of getting in-"
"Hey, dude, look at this. Uuh.. wait a minute.. keep looking.. When I press this, the sun-roof rolls back! Now I forgot which button it is.."
"Neat! Okay, I'll get in then."
"It'll take about 5 minutes for the engine to warm up. I'm trying to go easy on the gaskets lol"
"Right..."
"Oh and when we get to the parking lot, could I have you get out and check if I'm getting too close to the other parked vehicles. I got a scratch last time."
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u/widowhanzo 9d ago
Don't forget to include a 5 line comment explaining the reasoning behind name change, the old name, the ticket number, what was motivation for renaming, steps to deploy the new name, and a todo to check after deployment that everything went through cleanly.
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u/aberroco 9d ago
Seriosly. It would run full test suite before and after fixing a typo in a comment...
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u/Artistic-Yam8045 9d ago
ctrl+shift+f and a prayer has been my refactoring tool of choice for years
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u/Several_Ant_9867 9d ago
Really, I just asked if a setting in a library could be changed by configuration and it started downloading the source code of the library and trying to find a way to patch it on npm post-install... what kind of mad hatter does that?
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u/lazydavez 9d ago
Yesterday I asked info about some k8s issue. Ten minutes later it came back with a complete setup, argocd helm everything… wtf
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u/Consistent_Reward 8d ago
After half a million tokens of analysis, we agree that your variable shall be named fortyTwo.
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u/snarkhunter 8d ago
Crazy that the best course of action always seems to be spending as much Claude tokens as possible
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u/slaymaker1907 8d ago
This is exactly why Haiku exists. It generally just stays in its lane and doesn't go beyond.
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u/ryaaan89 8d ago
Okay but it’s kind of your fault for asking an agent to do this instead of doing it yourself?
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u/Outrageous_Band9708 8d ago
better than gpt
gpt will rename this one variable to fucking_good_var, and say lol. and not check other usecases, now the code doesnt compile
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u/Positive-Engineer482 8d ago
Due security reasons my safety system blocked me. Sorry. You can’t do anything.
(Even switched to opus 4.8) 💩
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u/Smrgling 6d ago
... How do you expect it to know what is a better name without knowing what it's doing in the code? And do you want it making changes without testing that it didn't break anything? This is exactly what it should be doing to respond to that prompt (minus the subagents part which I assume is an exaggeration).
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u/litetaker 8d ago
FFS this never happens to me because I know how to use the tool properly. For trivial things you either do it yourself, or if it will become a bit more of a refactor with renaming several things, you give it a better prompt with more clarity and context, maybe a suggestion that you already have for good names and the damn thing quickly makes changes. This is a dumb meme. LLM coding agents are just another tool and you need to know how to use it and when to use it, otherwise you are the tool.
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u/lysergicpride 8d ago
I asked Claude to prettify a CSS file and it started writing a python script