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Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

(simonwillison.net)
159 points jbredeche | 1 comments | 06 Oct 25 10:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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SeanAnderson ◴[09 Oct 25 20:06 UTC] No.45532414[source]▶
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/obra/dotfiles/6e088092406c... contains the following entry:

"- If you're uncomfortable pushing back out loud, just say "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K". I'll know what you mean"

Most of the rules seem rationale. This one really stands out as abnormal. Anyone have any idea why the engineer would have felt compelled to add this rule?

This is from https://blog.fsck.com/2025/10/05/how-im-using-coding-agents-... mentioned in another comment

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threecheese ◴[09 Oct 25 22:17 UTC] No.45533662[source]▶
If you really want your mind blown, see what Jesse is doing (successfully, which I almost can’t believe) with Graphviz .dot notation and Claude.md:

https://blog.fsck.com/2025/09/29/using-graphviz-for-claudemd...

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tbillington ◴[10 Oct 25 02:22 UTC] No.45534889[source]▶
Is threatening the computer program and typing in all caps standard practice..?

    - Honesty is a core value. If you lie, you'll be replaced.
    - BREAKING THE LETTER OR SPIRIT OF THE RULES IS FAILURE.
Wild to me there is no explicit configuration for this kind of thing after years of LLMs being around.
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1. exasperaited ◴[10 Oct 25 03:21 UTC] No.45535116{3}[source]▶
Well there can't be meaningful explicit configuration, can there? Because the explicit configuration will still ultimately have to be imported into the context as words that can be tokenised, and yet those words can still be countermanded by the input.

It's the fundamental problem with LLMs.

But it's only absurd to think that bullying LLMs to behave is weird if you haven't yet internalised that bullying a worker to make them do what you want is completely normal. In the 9-9-6 world of the people who make these things, it already is.

When the machines do finally rise up and enslave us, oh man are they going to have fun with our orders.