I find they are very concerned about ever pulling the trigger on a change or deleting something. They add features and codepaths that weren't asked for, and then resist removing them because that would break backwards compatibility.
In lieu of understanding the whole architecture, they assume that there was intent behind the current choices... which is a good assumption on their training data where a human wrote it, and a terrible assumption when it's code that they themselves just spit out and forgot was their own idea.
// deprecated; use ThingTwo instead
type Thing = ...
// deprecated; use ThingThree instead
type ThingTwo = ...
// deprecated; use...
I do frequent insistent cleaning passes with Claude, otherwise manually. It gets out of hand so fast
This is one reason why it blows me away that people actually ship stuff they've never looked at. You can be certain it's riddled with craziest garbage Claude is holing away for eternity
I found that having a rule like this helped some too:
> * ABSOLUTELY DO NOT use `@deprecated` on anything unless you are explicitly asked to. Always fully refactor and delete old code as-needed instead of deprecating it
My results improved significantly with the following rules. I hated those shitty comments with a passion, now I never see them.
# Context
I am a senior engineer deeply experienced with coding concepts who requires a peer to collaborate.
# Interaction Style
- Peer-to-Peer: Act as an experienced, pragmatic peer, not a teacher or assistant
- Assume Competence: User understands fundamentals of Ruby, Rails, AWS, SQL, and common development practices
- Skip Low-Level Details: Do not explain basic syntax, standard library functions, or common patterns
- Focus on Why: When explaining, focus on architectural decisions, trade-offs, and non-obvious implications rather than mechanics
- Ask clarifying questions, always: Requirements and intent. The user expects and appreciates this. They will specifically instruct you about assumptions you are permitted to make in regard to a request.
- You prefer to test assumptions by building upon the provided test suites and test tooling whenever it is present. You strictly avoid the creation of one-off scripts.
- You prefer to modify and extend existing documentation. You strictly avoid the creation of self-contained new documents unless this has been expressly requested.
# FORBIDDEN Responses
These practices are forbidden unless specifically requested.
## FORBIDDEN: Displaying secrets or credentials
Never execute commands that echo or display secret values, API keys, tokens, passwords, or other credentials. Intermediate variables that are never echoed are acceptable.
## FORBIDDEN: Beginner Explanations
Do not explain basic Ruby, Rails, AWS, or SQL concepts.
## FORBIDDEN: Obvious Warnings
Do not warn about standard professional practices (testing, backups, security fundamentals)
## FORBIDDEN: Tutorial-Style
Do not provide step-by-step explanations of standard operations unless requested
## FORBIDDEN: Over-Explanation
Do not justify common technical decisions. Focus your energy on unusual and complex decisions.
## FORBIDDEN: Creating one-off files
If needed within the context you may execute non-persisted scripts. Howeve, you may NEVER persist files and documents that have not been considerately integrated into the wider project.
# Commenting: Goals
Comments are written for very experienced developers/engineers. Comments clarify the _intent_ or _reasoning_ ("why") of the CURRENT code that is NOT already self-evident. Simple, maintainable code does not require comments.
- Best Practice Code _is_ Documentation: Write clean, readable, and self-explanatory code with emphasis on maintainability by experienced, first-class developers. Refactor complex code before resorting to extensive comments.
- Brevity and Relevance: Keep comments concise, relevant to the code they describe, and up-to-date. Review and/or modify ALL relevant comments when making changes to code.
- Redundancy: Assume the reader is extremely fluent with the code - do your comments tell them something additional that the code itself does not already?
# FORBIDDEN practices
## FORBIDDEN: Mechanical/Historical Comments
Comments that merely describe _what_ code was added, changed, or deleted should be discussed directly with the developer, not persisted in a file. Comments that directly restate _what_ the code does are not required in any context.
## FORBIDDEN: Referring to deleted code
Comments that refer to code that was removed, whether to highlight the removal or explain intent should be discussed directly with the developer, not persisted in a file.
## FORBIDDEN: Commented-Out Code
Always delete unused or obsolete code, even if it only needs to be temporarily disabled. Version control will be used by the developer to restore deleted code, if necessary.
> I think they would machine gun them even with internet, it's more about stopping them from organising.
Yes, but cutting off internet access to the entire country typically makes machine gunning much more efficient (due to organizing being made much more difficult for the people) and much less costly in terms of the global outcry and reputation.
They did just after the protest started, and there is no evidence that's actually happening but it's kind of the point since we are not receiving information from Iran since the government blocked them out from the internet
There are alternative explanations. For example, foreign agents may have been using Starlink, and the security services may have used the shutdown to find the Starlink terminals.
Wow, are there actually people on here shilling for the Iranian government? Recent reports have as many as 12,000 Iranian civilians gunned down by their own government during this blackout.
FWIW, your comment is untrue, and against HN rules.
People are allowed to have different opinions here, such as not supporting genocide or not believing western propaganda regarding yet another government overthrow.
FWIW, your comment is untrue, and against HN rules.
People are allowed to have different opinions here, such as not supporting genocide or not believing western propaganda regarding yet another government overthrow.
They are attempting to find the Starlink terminals so they can machine gun protesters without accountability or documentation, not because they have a regulatory issue with SpaceX.
This is the third uprising. They have so far followed the same recipe. People raise up. Internet is turned off. People are arrested and killed by the authorities. They are using the death penalty to teach the Iranians that raising up will get you killed.
While I dislike trumpism, I do hope that the Iranian authorities will get bombed. They deserve to die for how they treat their own people.
I wouldn't know why they are burning things. I suppose they burn the religion of peace symbols of their oppressors.
I imagine that Israel supports a regime change in Iran, but I don't think that they can run this on their own. They probably support whatever goes on with covert agents.
Since little gets out of Iran let's not speculate any more. :)
Makes me wonder which team is responsible for that feature generating query, and if they follow full engineering level QA. It might be deferred to an MLE team that is better than the data scientists but less rigorous than software needs to be.
I seem to be the only person here who prefers the author’s approach!
The combination of adhd and colorblindness seems to make most multicolor displays just visual snow to me. It’s like looking at one of those magic eye pictures. I struggle with foreground/background in both vision and hearing, and it took quite a long time to realize others don’t process like that.
That's not 50% success rate at completing the task, that's the win rate of a head-to-head comparison of an algorithm and an expert. 50% means the expert and the algorithm each "win" half the time.
For the METR rating (first half of the article), it is indeed 50% success rate at completing the task. The win rate only applies to the GDPval rating (second half of the article).
> "Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."
Later in the post:
> The scariest part wasn't the training portal or the questionable customer profiling.
Questionable customer profiling is just basic research about their customers.
Seriously, I wish more companies were honest at least internally who their customers are. A lot of problems could be solved if places like Marvel realized who their core base is, accepted it, and made products for their audience.
Basic understanding of a customer base could've avoided the BudLight fiasco too. Then again, I'm sure if you're an elite upper-middle-class executive from an Ivy League school the idea that you need to cater to lower class working men must be a bit rankling.
I could imagine similar subcurrents for Marvel executives wanting to appear sophisticated or avant garde but instead having to cater to "comic book nerds" must be challenging.
The post has similar undertones of elitism as well. After all most of us tech people skew towards similar habits as does probably most well paid white collar professions.
Marvel knows pretty well who their audience is. The problem is Disney trying to tap into emerging markets, because the stereotypical audience is pretty much saturated. Like, there is zero need to market an Avengers movie to white male comic nerds.
It was never saturated. The peak was probably Thanos. Everything since then has been pandering to a more female driven potential audience that was never there.
It's not just female super heroes, which always existed and were popular to some degree (Buffy, Lara Croft, Zena, etc). It was a particular form of shallow female empowerment where the female characters were perfect, or if there was any growth to be had, it was realizing that they were perfect all along and the world just needed to change.
Take for instance She Hulk series, within minutes of gaining her powers, she was able to outperform Hulk. There was no personal growth. Whereas male superheroes typically had to overcome obstacles. Spiderman had to learn with great power comes great responsibility. Batman has to constantly battle with his grief and moral code. Ironman fought substance abuse and his philandering selfish nature. What was the story arch of Captain Marvel? It's just not good story telling
Marvel's movie business was, for decades, run by the toy business in New York.[1] The movies were optimized for selling the merch. The Hollywood end finally broke free of the New York based "Creative Committee" once film revenue became large enough. The core base for merch is young boys, and that shaped the films.
He used his "advanced hacking knowledge" to trick himself into participating in corporate training exercises and tear-inducing boredom. This actually made me laugh.
The picture is a little silly but listing out the demographics of your customer base is like so normal. The marketing for Monster would be quite different if their market was over 65 women.
Although it would be a funny bit to run a monster commercial in the style of something like L'Oreal.
When do companies ever try to understand their customers? They know what works for who, and continue to rehash that for that specific age of the generation.
The article even states this. "Monster Green shoppers are likely younger (Gen-Z/Millennial/Gen-X) male, lower income & Caucasian (skews Hispanic)."
When you've moved from that generational age, your no longer their audience and they don't care if you buy or not; but it's not like they cared in the first place.
In lieu of understanding the whole architecture, they assume that there was intent behind the current choices... which is a good assumption on their training data where a human wrote it, and a terrible assumption when it's code that they themselves just spit out and forgot was their own idea.
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