Hacker News: sutterd

New comment by sutterd in "How to earn a billion dollars"

sutterd — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:26:50 +0000

I think there are different views you can have here. I think PG is in the group that thinks if you get a billion dollars, you earned a billion dollars. His distinction is between getting the billion dollars honestly or dishonestly. The alternate view is that you can get 100 billion dollars, presumably honestly, but that doesn't mean you earned a billion dollars. The first group will say this is splitting hairs. The second group will say that is the whole point. It the company gets a billion dollars, did it earn a billion dollars? Even more to the point, if the company earns a billion dollars, does the founder/CEO, or whoever is refernced in this post, earn a billion dollars? I think the two groups will just see this differently.

New comment by sutterd in "Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.5: Better Planning, Similar Execution"

sutterd — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:50:40 +0000

Fable was a big improvement in planning for me over Opus. I usually do a bit of work preparing tasks before handing them off to Opus or else I get bad results. I didn't plan on writing software this week because I was working on other things but changed my mind to test out Fable. I didn't have any work prepared. Fable was able to write the high level plans that later turned into coding tasks. Of course any model could wirte plans like that, but I had confidence in these plans similar how Opus 4.5 gave me a huge jump in confidence in the code it wrote. (Honest, I am not paid to write this.)

New comment by sutterd in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

sutterd — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:23:32 +0000

A large share of invested money is passive, especially in the S&P 500. If some people pull out, it could cause a very damaging cascade. There would be a forced sale of stocks with maybe no buyers.

New comment by sutterd in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

sutterd — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:48:52 +0000

I am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good is that it is effectively a very high level computer language, where the agent can implement a lot of underlying code with a short English description, often. But many other times it takes a lot of work to get what you want.

New comment by sutterd in "I’ve banned query strings"

sutterd — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:50:03 +0000

Doh! The part past the # does not go to the sever, so that wasn't a longer URL. How about:

https://chrismorgan.info/%6e%6f-%71%75%65%72%79-%73%74%72%69...

New comment by sutterd in "I’ve banned query strings"

sutterd — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:37:38 +0000

This url worked fine:

https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings#:~:text=So%20I%E2%...

but this one was too long:

https://chrismorgan.info/no-query-strings?a=1

New comment by sutterd in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

sutterd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:34:14 +0000

I never adopted Opus 4.6 because it was too prone to doing things on its own. Anthropic called it "a bias towards action". I think 4.5 and 4.7 are much better in this regard. I'm not saying they are immune to this kind of thing though.

New comment by sutterd in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

sutterd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:32:00 +0000

I’m working on a side project and AI is writing all the code. The code it produces is not good, and this comes from someone who has experience producing bad code. One thing I’m worried about is places like GitHub being full of AI code, which leads to AI being trained on AI code. It seems like this will lead to a downward spiral.

New comment by sutterd in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

sutterd — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:32:30 +0000

What kind of performance are people getting now? I was running 4.7 yesterday and it did a remarkably bad job. I recreated my repo state exactly and ran the same starting task with 4.5 (which I have preferred to 4.6). It was even worse, by a large margin. It is likely my task was a difficult or poorly posed, but I still have some idea of what 4.5 should have done on it. This was not it. What experiences are other people having with the 4.7? How about with other model versions, if they are trying them? (In both cases, I ran on max effort, for whatever that is worth.)

New comment by sutterd in "Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7"

sutterd — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 03:27:39 +0000

With my use of Claude code, I find 4.7 to be pretty good about clarifying things. I hated 4.6 for not doing this and had generally kept using 4.5. Maybe they put this in the chat prompt to try to keep the experience similar to before? I definitely do not want this in Claude code.

New comment by sutterd in "Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7"

sutterd — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 03:07:46 +0000

I am getting pretty good performance. Even on trivial questions it seems to go through the thinking process end. If they are using adaptive thinking, it seems to work much better than before. I will see how my experience goes with more usage.

New comment by sutterd in "Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7"

sutterd — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:33:49 +0000

You don't have to use adaptive thinking. It had been turned off on my main work computer. I was using a different computer on a trip and I started getting so angry at Claude for doing a bad job. I evetually figured out it was adaptive thinking and set it to "hard" and it started working again. At the time I think "hard" was the top choice. With 4.7, my computer now shows "xhard", which I assume is the equivelent setting. There is one higher setting than this, which I haven't tried yet. I would tell you how to change these settings, but I don't remember. By the way, I have been happy with 4.7 so far. I actually did not like 4.6 and preferred 4.5 and used that most of the time until this new release.

New comment by sutterd in "Claude Opus 4.7"

sutterd — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:47:19 +0000

I liked Opus 4.5 but hated 4.6. Every few weeks I tried 4.6 and, after a tirade against, I switched back to 4.5. They said 4.6 had a "bias towards action", which I think meant it just made stuff up if something was unclear, whereas 4.5 would ask for clarfication. I hope 4.7 is more of a collaborator like 4.5 was.

New comment by sutterd in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

sutterd — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:13:05 +0000

I still use 4.5. I occasionally try 4.6 but always switch back. The “bias towards action” is what I hate. 4.5 would make sure it understands what I want. 4.6 will just make shit up. Maybe the Anthropic people always write crystal clear instructions so it works for them. For me, I just can’t get 4.6 to do what I want.

New comment by sutterd in "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"

sutterd — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:28:30 +0000

I was surprised to see a post by Petzold on this subject. I know who he is. But I don’t think you owe an apology here. I think you made a thoughtful comment. A post like his should be critiqued for what it says, not for the author’s previous work. And, fortunately, other people could give context on the significant work he has done.

New comment by sutterd in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

sutterd — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 04:09:49 +0000

The spec contains formal, numbered items which are requirements and also serve to make tests (these are spec tests, additional implementation tests are also allowed by the implementer). When I said "they are not formalized as much", I mean I am not as strict on the spec format as CodeSpeak is, where their spec can be parsed with a tool. For me it is up to the LLM to use the spec itself. I have additional text beyond the requirement items which also influences how the LLM implements the code. I did this because it is too tough, for me at least, to prompt the LLM just based on strict requirements. This is perhaps cheating according to what you might call SDD. I'm just trying to be practical. The idea in the end is that this spec implies the code and maintaining the spec is the same as maintaining the code. Strictly speaking this won't be true, but I am hoping it still works anyway.

New comment by sutterd in "Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English"

sutterd — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:13:47 +0000

I am trying a similar spec driven development idea in a project I am working on. One big difference is that my specifications are not formalized that much. Tney are in plain language and are read directly by the LLM to convert to code. That seems like the kind of thing the LLM is good at. One other feature of this is that it allows me to nudge the implmentation a little with text in the spec outside of the formal requirements. I view it two ways, as spec-to-code but also as a saved prompt. I haven't spent enough time with it to say how successfuly it is, yet.

New comment by sutterd in "Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan"

sutterd — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:00:42 +0000

Is wealth the right term here? I thought it was supposed to measure production, with the actual measurement usually spending (with qualifiers). And, when comparing countries, you have to account for the different currencies. Currencies are typically trade balanced, which gives a rough equivelence for buying power, but that is not true with the dollar because, as the effective reserve currency, it has international demand outside of trade.

New comment by sutterd in "OpenClaw is changing my life"

sutterd — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:17:22 +0000

I’m working on a solo project, a location-based game platform that includes games like Pac-Man you play by walking paths in a park. If I cut my coding time to zero, that might make me go two or three times faster. There is a lot of stuff that is not coding. Designing, experimenting, testing, redesigning, completely changing how I do something, etc. There is a lot more to doing a project than just coding. I am seeing a big speed up, but that doesn’t mean I can complete the project in a week. (These projects are never really a completed anyway, until you give up on it).

New comment by sutterd in "Claude Opus 4.6"

sutterd — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 05:12:02 +0000

I am also _not_ happy. I tried the `/model` command and I could not switch back to Opus 4.5. However, the command line option did let me set Opus 4.5:

``` claude --model claude-opus-4-5-20251101 ```

I will probably work with Opus 4.5 tomorrow to get some work done and maybe try 4.6 again later.