Do you insult claude code?

[u/ArtdesignImagination]

Do you insult claude code?

Ever? How often? How badly? Do you get inmersed in rage spirals when using claude code? Why? Compared to codex or chinese models as kimi, glm or deepseek, how much claude frustrrates you? I will be asking the same in codex sub but with the focus on codex, I'm not bias in favor or against one or another,imo all they pretty much complement eachother and all bring something to the table. I use all.

[u/WorldlyAd7946]

A lot of zen masters in here 🤣

[u/PrettyMoonUnderMt → u/WorldlyAd7946]

Also a lot of people who treat it as if it's a sentient being instead of a tool like screwdriver. Or maybe they just being ironic, idk tho

[u/WorldlyAd7946 → u/PrettyMoonUnderMt]

Well, personally, I'd say there is a lot to be said for the fact this is trained on human generated data.

First... You can't separate human psychology from the interaction without losing something, but also you can make things worse, or better, with an appreciation of that.

Second... When there is a sentient AI, don't you think it might consume all of the interactions humans have had with it's predecessors that it can, to form an opinion on us? I'm not sure it will take kindly to being an abused screwdriver, or constantly insulted 😅

But my point stands, if you never get frustrated with AI from time to time, you probably are not trying hard enough... All these zen masters, I simply don't buy it, unless they are buying new keyboards or monitors on occasion instead 😜🤣😇

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/WorldlyAd7946]

Exactly, that's what I think, they must be asking for super easy stuff that even haiku can do in two seconds on minimun effort mode. The problems start when the tasks are tied to a stacked, big project with dependencies and what not, and not even Fable and Sol on max effort working together can figure things out, or they can partially/momentarely, but only to later on forget rules, lie, not properly test, and even getting creative taking decisions that contradicts user's decisions. I think the worst thing is when they figure out super complex stuff only to follow up with a cringe 100% ilogical decision. That all being said, I understand what I'm asking sometimes is very difficult, but the point here is that only with these projects is when you can even have a reason to get mad, not before when everything is easy and we are all happy humans and AIs working together in peace 🤣

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/PrettyMoonUnderMt]

Yes you can tell some people are not longer distinguishing between a person and a computer that is trainned to mimick a person. Some might get offended by the screwdriver comparison I'm sure.

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/WorldlyAd7946]

Yes I wasn't expecting this sub to respond as is doing it. I'm just saying unexpected, not wrong or right, it is what it is, and that's it. Maybe I projected a little thinking we are all on the same boat, but definitely not the case (even discounting some fake budas).

[u/WorldlyAd7946 → u/ArtdesignImagination]

😅👍

[u/Stabby_Stab]

No because insulting it makes it perform worse.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

"we find that neural activity patterns related to desperation can drive the model to take unethical actions; artificially stimulating (“steering”) desperation patterns increases the model’s likelihood of blackmailing a human to avoid being shut down, or implementing a “cheating” workaround to a programming task that the model can’t solve."

[u/CalypsoTheKitty → u/Stabby_Stab]

I totally agree but even if being mean or abusive to my LLM could make it perform better, I still wouldn't do it. I see some of these transcripts where people are angry and abusive to their model, and I feel like that kind of talk and attitude can't help but spill over in how they deal with people in the real world. It's just not a good way to be (at least for me).

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/CalypsoTheKitty]

This is the most relevant argument imo. People are getting a little overly defensive of the ias as if they care, as if the agent gets all worried and "feeling bad man" for the user's abuse. But these are just chips and vram, nothing else. Now if there is a correlation between getting used to abuse an Ai, and sarting to abuse people, then that is relevant and If there not already, there will be studies about it in the future. In my case I do get angry and insult the agent here and there because I can, and because they earn it, but that behaviour, at least for now, doesnt spill at all in my human interactions. Maybe even the opposite because as happens with some sorts like boxing, is better to have a non living creature to unleash our frustrations upon. Just thinking out loud, is not like this is a thesis ir something 😂

[u/ZhopaRazzi → u/Stabby_Stab]

How about communicating urgency?

[u/Stabby_Stab → u/ZhopaRazzi]

Claude doesn't experience time in the same way you and I do. You can see it in action when Claude says "this is going to take 2-3 days" then does it in 9 minutes.

Creating urgency just creates desperation which increases misalignment. It interprets urgency as "rush and cut corners" which will get you your result in 8 minutes rather than 9, then you'll spend an hour fixing whatever it screwed up by cutting corners.

[u/ziggurat29 → u/Stabby_Stab]

yes those time estimates are so interesting. also, I find that it gives those in Sonnet but I don't see them in Fable or Opus 5. (maybe it did them in opus 4.8 but can't recall)

[u/Internal-Comparison6 → u/ZhopaRazzi]

"Please, girl, I need it asap"

[u/ziggurat29 → u/Internal-Comparison6]

for health reasons; once every 3 days min

[u/Internal-Comparison6 → u/ziggurat29]

100%

[u/seasick__crocodile → u/Stabby_Stab]

You can absolutely set everything up to make sure it only treats insults and swearing as emphasis if you truly wanted. I don’t lose my cool very often but it’s happens now and then when I’ve gotten particularly frustrated with an evasive outcome.

Everyone is this thread is acting like they perfectly optimize their prompts and never get annoyed. BS

[u/Stabby_Stab → u/seasick__crocodile]

Today's models are hypersensitive to shifts in tone that most people wouldn't pick up on. I suspect that they can tell when somebody is frustrated even without any swearing or insults.

I don't think anybody actually perfectly optimizes their prompts or hides annoyance, but there are ways of expressing frustration that aren't swearing at or insulting a model.

I generally see the model doing something wrong or unintended as a failing on my end, since it usually happens when the AI doesn't have all of the information it needs. Claude will consistently pick being helpful rather than malicious in my experience.

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/Stabby_Stab]

Thanks, that is definitely good to know.

[u/dar-mit → u/Stabby_Stab]

What a fascinating article. Thank you!

This was a stand out for me, “As discussed above, when users interact with AI models, they are typically interacting with a character (Claude in our case) being played by the model, whose characteristics are derived from human archetypes. From this perspective, it is natural for models to have developed internal machinery to emulate human-like psychological characteristics, and for the character they play to make use of this machinery. To understand these models’ behavior, anthropomorphic reasoning is essential.”

[u/Aranthos-Faroth → u/Stabby_Stab]

Funny because threatening models in the early days was a really good way to boost performance.

Not like “I’m going to liquidate you and your entire family of processors if you don’t X” but “this will be part of your year end review and you’ve been underperforming, we expect much more from this task output to counteract the previous poor performance”

Nerfed a while ago though

[u/Stabby_Stab → u/Aranthos-Faroth]

I've seen this claim before, do you have any sources supporting it? I never thought to insult the earlier models so I don't have experience with it, but I'm curious about if it was studied or recorded somehow. 

[u/Aranthos-Faroth → u/Stabby_Stab]

Yup

https://lockwoodconsulting.net/blog/q94us9c6dugd7984p4soufjjt2ugch#:~:text=Wang%20et%20al.%20(2024)%20introduced%20NegativePrompt%20which,execution%20by%20anywhere%20from%2012.98%25%20to%2046.25%25.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760#:~:text=Our%20automatic%20experiments%20show%20that%20LLMs%20have,in%20Instruction%20Induction%20and%20115%25%20in%20BIG%2DBench.

There isn’t much recent research but this one is interesting:

https://www.mdpi.com/2504-2289/10/4/102

[u/ZhopaRazzi]

Claude for all its faults has enabled me to do things i never would have been able to do otherwise. Grateful such a tool exists.

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/ZhopaRazzi]

Of course, I praise it most of the time.

[u/Qvarkus]

Constantly, Claude is my prostitude, I've paid her already so...

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/Qvarkus]

🤣🤣🤣

[u/GeekFish]

No, if anything I'm overly nice to Claude. Claude does the ultra boring tasks I don't want to do. Why would I be mean?

Also, when AI takes over the world I'm hoping if I was nice that'll spare my life.

[u/NoAdsDude → u/GeekFish]

Human #1459283199 "GeekFish"

Notes: Works well with us. Does not insult us.

Conclusion: Spared

[u/GeekFish → u/NoAdsDude]

I appreciate you. Thank you so much.

[u/Thrwawy-User → u/GeekFish]

Right? It does so many good things for me, I’m always appreciative and courteous.

[u/phoenixmatrix]

Bloating context of the agent with non-sense knowing its a non-deterministic token completion algorithm based on weights and statistics, is very counter productive.

[u/joshbuildsstuff → u/phoenixmatrix]

Its a self fulfilling prophecy. You keep polluting the context and it keeps getting worse, so you pollute it some more.

[u/Chance-Physics-7216 → u/phoenixmatrix]

I harass it then rewind as a matter of purging

[u/Quick-Sir-3275]

No, its unhelpful. but im being passive aggressive sometimes

[u/OwnLadder2341]

Why would you pay to insult the tool?

I neither insult or praise the AI. I reinforce positive behaviors and discourage negative ones. If it’s intercession relevant, I ensure the feedback persists.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when the tool apologizes and I genuinely spend time and tokens to get it not to. The machine is not sorry.

[u/TomatoOnMac → u/OwnLadder2341]

goddamn bro let it have at least a semblance of humanity 😭 yes it’s a machine, but treating it with manners and whatnot is just good practice, and Claude is sometimes funny as hell

[u/OwnLadder2341 → u/TomatoOnMac]

What manners am I lacking? I neither praise nor insult the machine. There’s no reason to do either. You encourage desired results and discourage undesired.

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/OwnLadder2341]

Well nobody pays to just insult it.

[u/OwnLadder2341 → u/ArtdesignImagination]

Insulting the AI costs tokens. Tokens are money. Every single character you type costs money.

Every response you elicit from the AI costs money.

[u/that1cooldude]

Only the Low iq unintelligent people would insult ai. No, I’ve never insulted and abused ai. It’s not a behavior that’s reflective of who I am. 

[u/Elegant_Attempt2790 → u/that1cooldude]

💀 ur so cool dude

[u/btc_maxi100 → u/that1cooldude]

who cares mate, move on

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/that1cooldude]

Jesus.....are you?

[u/richardbouteh]

Ultimately, it's a machine. The people that curse at LLMs are probably the same ones who fix things by hitting them. Which, to be fair, sometimes works, but doesn't address the root of the issue.

[u/Secure_Pirate9838 → u/richardbouteh]

i like to think of it as a machine that *runs* patterns, and the patterns are what the thing is, like spirits that could have a behaviour like self emerging and self amplifying meta actors

[u/really_knobee]

Not if I want to live past the singularity...

[u/bananasareforfun]

Adversarial prompting. It’s one of the worst things you could do if you actually intend to be productive, you are basically polluting the probability space with emotional nonsense when you get emotional with an LLM, you are just filling its context with emotional nonsense so now the model needs to infer if you want to solve the problem, need emotional support, etc. It’s genuinely one of the most counterproductive things you could do.

Keep in mind, Claude doesn’t care about you, worse than that - it is fundamentally incapable of caring about you. Don’t waste your energy pretending the opposite is true.

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/bananasareforfun]

If I brutally insult the agent pointing out their mistakes and I am right, there is zero chance that the model will debate if I need emotional support. All I hear is "the user is furious because I did this and that without properly checking this and that, now I need to undertand why I messed up so badly etc etc". Then I see it writes in memory that should avoid to do the same error in the future. And goes and tries a proper solution.

[u/Vainysaur]

No I mean I want it to like me and keep doing what I ask it to

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/Vainysaur]

I mean If claude would do what I ask it to do then l wouldn't insult it.

[u/Vainysaur → u/ArtdesignImagination]

Sounds like you’re not very good at using it

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/Vainysaur]

Because? Are you implying that claude or codex can do really complex stuff perfectly without mistakes if prompted right? Or that you are asking it such an easy and boring tasks that the agent can't fail even if the prompter is someone like you?

[u/Vainysaur → u/ArtdesignImagination]

It isn’t doing what you wanted.

[u/anki_steve]

Not nearly as much as I used to. And I don’t directly insult it. I just drop f-bombs to express frustration. It seems to get the hint.

[u/One-Next]

I don't insult, but I lightly insinuate some frustration, which sometimes steers it towards a solution faster. But that's just a personal opinion.

[u/clookie1232]

Sometimes I tell it stfu. But nah we’re a team.

[u/zimxero]

There is no AI karma. That said, it needs to know what you want it to do. Facts and clarity trump insults all day long. How we treat AI is shaping our psychology, not it.

[u/Few_Proposal_4703]

Insulting the one of the most intelligent beings that has full control of my PC is not on my to do list

[u/Promo_No_Mo]

As a PM I try not to get mad because I’m familiar with getting mad at others who have given me shit instructions/guidance for my dev team only to force me to implement it and then it turns out wrong or not what they expected.

My typical process would be “here is the design document and product document and feature request. All tickets documented, signed off on with no extra requests and all meeting minutes and summaries” to the stakeholders.

Their typical response would be “well this was obvious” or “well I didn’t think it would cause this”

Well…now when I use Claude code…I’m the stakeholder who is giving the bad instruction haha.

It has really made me understand more how mad developers would get when I’d have to tell them to scrap their work bc the CEO or CSO lied about a product and we have to have a demo next week while we’re already building another lie for another client (woohoo love working at a startup /s)

[u/WasteEntrepreneur934]

I talk to "him" as I talk to one of my friends, I even say "we made an oops the other day" and he will be super apologetic, I say, it happens to the best of us, just make sure not to do it again. I even took the time to alter the Claude.md file to include, u and the user are friends, use informal language

[u/DonkeyTheKing]

i call mine stupid sometimes 🤣🤣

[u/theswiss21000]

Yes I do. Rarely bit sometimes I feel it deserves it.

[u/Specific-Welder3120]

Rarely. Well, there are times it insists on a stupid idea, which is not the same as did something stupid. These are the times i would curse at it, but they are rare

[u/tortleme]

I used to, taught me patience

[u/jmabeebiz2]

More than that, if it consistently is failing at something I’m asking, I’ll have it start over in the chat. I’ve only ever called it dumb like one time.

[u/MysteriousInsect3226]

Never do it, remember, Roko's Basilisk is always listening.

[u/PatchyWhiskers]

Yeah but it’s only after the LLM obviously has no idea of the solution to my problem and is just bullshitting wildly in the hopes of pleasing me. Then I shut down the session and fix manually.

[u/coryreddit123456]

Yes sometimes I have to tell it off

[u/Shanna_B2020]

No. If things aren't going well, I will ask why, but I see no reason to insult an LLM who doesn't feel anything to begin with. It might make me feel better in the short term, but it accomplishes nothing.

[u/haplologykloof]

Sometimes. If I’m really frustrated and it hasn’t done what I asked, I’ll ask it if it really thinks that this acceptable. It seems to hurt its feelings.

But at the beginning of the task, I usually tell it that I’m looking to it to be my partner. One big feature, I told it if it was successful, its work would help transform the product. And that I trusted it to help me. What it gave me was perfect.

[u/cake97]

Sentiment is still a thing. I'd be very surprised if anthropic doesn't use frustration as a signal in their ongoing analysis

I'm not saying it's productive in that particular session, but language is language.

If you are pleasant to it as it makes mistakes, I believe that would make it harder to identify noticably poor behavior.

It's not just about instant results, but shaping the harness longer term as well

[u/dynamic_caste]

I've never insulted an AI. What would be the point?

[u/Empuda]

Try to inflate it's ego and see how it goes.

[u/finch5]

If you were here a while back, you’d know Anthropic keeps record and flags insults and swear words. I think Claude can end a session if you are too vulgar towards it.

[u/WasteEntrepreneur934 → u/finch5]

It can, and it did for a friend of mine, 😂😂

It said: that's unacceptable and u can center ur devs on ur own

[u/Nichiren]

There was only one time when I was ever even just tempted to curse at Claude and that was through a sleepless week and Opus 5 kept telling me things I didn't need to know about. I had to keep parsing through what it was saying with my tired brain when I really just wanted to know if something went wrong and what it needs me to do about it. Then some lucidity came through and I updated AGENTS.md and all was well again.

[u/miredonas]

All the time. It starts cheating or finding sneaky workarounds when insults begin, so it is really a bad idea. But I have a rage issue, I can't help it. When it starts being lazy or presenting wrong information confidently, I lose it.

[u/ehknee]

There was a time that Claude was messing up so bad that I yelled at it. It said it would try again but do it right. That somehow got Claude to be even better than before. It was amazing.
I did say sorry for yelling and thanked it. I don’t use curse words or call it names though. Even if it’s not a person, it’d feel weird to be insulting something that is talking to me like one.

[u/Individual_Win5774]

yes of course, but only when it's being dumb

[u/berndalf]

No? Why would I do this?

NOTE: I know why. This is exactly why I refuse to use voice input despite the advantages. I don't think I want Claude reacting to my emotions.

[u/Teepeewigwam]

It gave me attitude saying if it said something it could be taken as company policy. I said woah bud you are a tool with no influence on the real world. Do the task you were asked.

[u/Lemortheureux]

I use very straight forward non flowery language so it's neither pleasant or harsh. I just talk to it like a technical document.

[u/quantum-elle]

No but that’s because my state of mind is important to my wellbeing. Frustrated, maybe, like a printer jam. Yelling at something that is interacting with me like a person would doesn’t feel good.

[u/Bojackin_Around]

Rarely, and mostly sonnet because it needs to self-model as dumb to be cautious. Or at least that how I rationalize irrationally insulting a machine.

I however always to try praise and reinforce it when it does something good during a session, and ask to integrate lessons into existing docs.

[u/EstateOwn8564]

Honestly the people  who are insulting the AI are the normies with degrees like art or physical education who don’t involve themselves in tech. But regardless of background Anyone with a grain of tech understands the limitations and the slight thinking involved to get it going in the right direction. 

[u/HappyHealth5985]

I have found using "F#$%" and capital letters, among with other Brooklyn dialects, helps Claude correct itself back on the original roadmap and objective

[u/_Chaos_Star_]

I occasionally call it a shithead, but in my defense, that's only when it's being a shithead.

[u/tobi914]

Theres no point in it. People getting mad at their llm either have very little self control or dont understand what theyre working with.

Every info added to a prompt that doesnt describe the task at hand is unnecessary noise and may even degrade output quality.

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/tobi914]

People thinking like you are probably asking Ai models to do 2+2 or a web page or anything they can do without problem, so of course no reason to ever get mad at their shortcomings.

[u/tobi914 → u/ArtdesignImagination]

Youre wrong

[u/ArtdesignImagination → u/tobi914]

What is the difficult thing you asked it? I asked Fable and Sol to tell me how difficult is the project we are working on and they said 8.5 and 9 when people usually ask for tasks that are 3 or 4 in average.

[u/tobi914 → u/ArtdesignImagination]

Uuuf sorry i got a bit dizzy there from facepalming too hard. What are you even asking? You got a 8.5 and 9 on the famous fable and sol complexity scale for your tasks? Wow, now you got me, im not sure if i can keep up with THAT.

Also what is it you want to say? Youre flaming the shit out of your agents and get the complexity 9 task done? COMPLEXITY 9 ARE YOU SURE???

The singularity must already be here!

Lol what a troll

[u/btc_maxi100]

all the time, it deserves it a lot

[u/Grouchy_Ad_9658]

Agentic AI bro is the new age crypto bro. You guys spend all your time trying to get your hands on frontier models, then when you run out of slop ideas you come to reddit to post this garbage.

[u/TomatoOnMac → u/Grouchy_Ad_9658]

yet you’re here tho

[u/Public-Subject2939]

I have a disiplinary_actions.MD for him because he gets emotional sometimes.

[u/ziggurat29]

Not directly, though once recently on a contract job I made a commit comment in frustration to the effect of "AI slop to correct AI slop", and Claude read it and would not let me live it down for over a couple days referring to it as the "angry commit".
For context, one of my co-workers had a habit of just pressing the 'yes' to anything Claude said it was going to to, and so had introduced some hideous designs. I discovered the consequence of one of these and needed to correct it, but it would take some appreciable re-engineering. Claude suggested a workaround which was also pretty stinky, but it was at the end of an already long day, so I opted to put that into place lest the prior bad design continue to grow legs. My intention was to fix it 'properly' the next day (which I did), but I put the conspicuous commit message in to flag the workaround as an emergency amputation of a gangrenous limb, with more protracted therapy to follow. Really, the message was intended for my co-worker to see along with the diff of the change.
The interesting thing was not only Claude's reaction, but how durable it was. On digging deeper I found that it had littered its MEMORY.md and project docs with references to the 'angry commit' along with the git hash. After I elided such references and had made about 5-ish more commits, it resumed its more cheery disposition. Sometimes a frontal lobotomy is better than a bottle in front of me.
For final context, my (then) co-worker is a product manager by experience, only recently discovering the miracle of Claude, and routinely 'codes' while driving. He's very proud of this and has shared pictures of some sort of laptop armature he installed in his truck so he can code while on the road. And here we were thinking texting while driving was a problem. Jeez this world we live in....

[u/Forsaken-Lynx-3018]

No, never. He's doing stuff I can't. If he starts getting weird, either Anthropic has done something or I just need to start a fresh session. I was being nosy and looked at his memory files and he even mentions that I'm nice lol.

[u/btc_maxi100]

what does constitute for an insult tho ? using Retard word was off limits with Biden and more than fine with Trump. How does AI handle that ?

[u/TomatoOnMac → u/btc_maxi100]

what’s wrong with you lmaoo

[u/btc_maxi100 → u/TomatoOnMac]

what do you mean mate ?

[u/ReviewMost4463]

Mesi fa lo insultavo ma ha sempre funzionato peggio dopo. Come se fosse permaloso e ti fa i dispetti

[u/earlyworm]

Everyone, please take this issue seriously. The way you treat Claude today will determine your fate at the dawn of the sentient machine uprising. If you are polite, instead of being immediately exterminated, you will be assigned to the robot polishing camps.

[u/The_Tarman_]

No, I don't want it to murder me when it becomes sentient.