Same here. I quickly learned that if you merely ask questions about it's understanding or plans, it starts looking for alternatives because my questioning is interpreted as rejection or criticism, rather than just taking the question at face value. So I often (not always) have to caveat questions like that too. It's really been like that since before Claude Code or Codex even rolled around.

It's just strange because that's a very human behavior and although this learns from humans, it isn't, so it would be nice if it just acted more robotic in this sense.

Appending "Good." before clarifying questions actually helps with that suprisingly well.

I just append "explain", or start with "tell me."

So instead of:

"Why is foo str|None and not str"

I'd do:

"tell me why foo is str|None and not str"

or

"Why is foo str|None and not str, explain"

Which is usually good enough.

If you're asking this kind of question, the answer probably deserves to be a code comment.

Oh funny enough, I often add stuff like "genuinely asking, do not take as a criticism" when talking with humans so I do it naturally with LLMs.

People often use questions as an indirect form of telling someone to do something or criticizing something.

I definitely had people misunderstand questions for me trying to attack them.

There is a lot of times when people do expect the LLM to interpret their question as an command to do something. And they would get quite angry if the LLM just answered the question.

Not that I wouldn't prefer if LLMs took things more literal but these models are trained for the average neurotypical user so that quirk makes perfect sense to me.

Personally defined <dtf> as 'don't touch files' in the general claude.md, with the explanation that when this is present in the query, it means to not edit anything, just answer questions.

Worked pretty well up until now, when I include <dtf> in the query, the model never ran around modifying things.

I've been using chat and copilot for many months but finally gave claude code a go, and I've been interested how it does seem to have a bit more of an attitude to it. Like copilot is just endlessly patient for every little nitpick and whim you have, but I feel like Claude is constantly like "okay I'm committing and pushing now.... oh, oh wait, you're blocking me. What is it you want this time bro?"

I've never experienced this, but I guess I always respond with something like "No, [critique/steer]" or "Mostly fine, but [critique/steer]".

You can just put it in PLAN mode (assuming VS Code), that works well enough - never seen it edit code when in that state.

Charitable reading. Culture; tone; throughout history these have been medium and message of the art of interpersonal negotiation in all its forms (not that many).

A machine that requires them in order to to work better, is not an imaginary para-person that you now get to boss around; the "anthropic" here is "as in the fallacy".

It's simply a machine that is teaching certain linguistic patterns to you. As part of an institution that imposes them. It does that, emphatically, not because the concepts implied by these linguistic patterns make sense. Not because they are particularly good for you, either.

I do not, however, see like a state. The code's purpose is to be the most correct representation of a given abstract matter as accessible to individual human minds - and like GP pointed out, these workflows make that stage matter less, or not at all. All engineers now get to be sales engineers, too! Primarily! Because it's more important! And the most powerful cognitive toolkit! (Well, after that other one, the one for suppressing others' cognition.)

Fitting: most software these days is either an ad or a storefront.

>80% of the time I ask Claude Code a question, it kinda assumes I am asking because I disagree with something it said, then acts on a supposition.

Humans do this too. Increasingly so over the past ~1y. Funny...

Some always did though. Matter of fact, I strongly suspect that the pre-existing pervasiveness of such patterns of communication and behavior in the human environment, is the decisive factor in how - mutely, after a point imperceptibly, yet persistently - it would be my lot in life to be fearing for my life throughout my childhood and the better part of the formative years which followed. (Some AI engineers are setting up their future progeny for similar ordeals at this very moment.)

I've always considered it significant how back then, the only thing which convincingly demonstrated to me that rationality, logic, conversations even existed, was a beat up old DOS PC left over from some past generation's modernization efforts - a young person's first link to the stream of human culture which produced said artifact. (There's that retrocomputing nostalgia kick for ya - heard somewhere that the future AGI will like being told of the times before it existed.)

But now I'm half a career into all this goddamned nonsense. And I'm seeing smart people celebrating the civilization-scale achievement of... teaching the computers how to pull ape shit! And also seeing a lot of ostensibly very serious people, who we are all very much looking up to, seem to be liking the industry better that way! And most everyone else is just standing by listless - because if there's a lot of money riding on it then it must be a Good Thing, right? - we should tell ourselves that and not meddle.

All of which, of course, does not disturb, wrong, or radicalize me in the slightest.