Post by @bitprophet@social.coop

Claude Code (bear with me) has all these dumb little gewgaws & animations & "sorta slick, sorta annoying" TUI behaviors – none of this shit is germane to its use case.

However! The overall effect seems precisely like the AV presentation of casino games - their barrage of flashing lights, noises, and music. It tickles your lizard hindbrain, a constant pitter-patter of dopamine hits.

Those are literally designed to be attention-grabbing, focus-keeping & habit-forming, by (evil) psychologists. One imagines the same is true with chatbot UIs.

(Thoughts brought to you by my daily "what inane, mostly metatextual questions can I ask Claude Code so I don't get fired for zero usage statistics" meditation. Today's has been investigating if you can turn any of this shit off. Answer: of course not.)

4 Replies

1 Boost

Jeff Forcier

@bitprophet@social.coop 59 min. ago

Well, the answer was /actually/ "watch an irritating animation cycle through a dozen synonyms for 'thinking' while also rainbow-color-changing, for longer than it would have taken to use keyboard shortcuts to switch to my browser, launch anthropic's docs site, and search for the answer"

But, you know. Now I got to waste somebody else's money and increase my chances of remaining employed. So it's "better".

Jeff Forcier

@bitprophet@social.coop 57 min. ago

I still need to find (or ask the bot to consult on creating) a default/system prompt that is the equivalent of that "a computer must never speak to its operator" meme. No first person pronouns, no offering to do extra shit, etc etc.

(Does it matter? Not for the ~5min/day I use it, but again, the point here is to "use it" in ways that aren't actually frying my brain or making my code worse. Thus, the meta game.)

Taggart :ifin:

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange 55 min. ago

@bitprophet First, a thousand points for "gewgaws." Criminally underused.

Second, a more minimalist harness may be useful to you. I've been experimenting with Pi and it isn't terrible, as these things go. Of course, if you're all-in on the Anthropic models, that comes with additional costs.

https://pi.dev

Pi Coding Agent

A terminal-based coding agent

Jeff Forcier

@bitprophet@social.coop 52 min. ago

@mttaggart well, as this is for work, I assume it would need clearing with work, which is what settled on Anthropic as the vendor.

(but also, Earendil, oh no. what military-industrial-complex horrors are /they/ hiding? 🤣)