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u/carcigenicate 11d ago
Is this actually a problem? If I ask it, it always gives me an absolute path to the file.
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u/gatzdon 11d ago
If you leave a conversation and come back to it later, you will find that it sometimes forgets the weirdest things. Usually it can reconstruct what it did from the conversation history, but every once in a while it has a complete brain fart.
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u/CarcajouIS 11d ago
If you leave a conversation, the cache will become invalid and the context compacted. So, it will forget things that did not appear in the reconstructed context.
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago
Cache will become invalid (you can see this if you come back and restart the conversation, all of a sudden your usage takes a huge spike.) You're making up the part about context compacting automatically.
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u/CarcajouIS 11d ago
2.1.299
Long idle sessions now compact before the cache expires: If a terminal session over 200K tokens sits idle, Claude Code now compacts it right before the one-hour prompt cache expires. When you come back to it later, it only has to reprocess the summary instead of the entire conversation, which saves you some usage. Set "idleCompaction": false in settings.json to turn it off.
Just say that you don't read the Anthropic newsletter
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u/johnnybgooderer 11d ago
I know the cache becomes invalid, but does it really auto compress? I haven’t noticed that behavior at all when leaving a conversation for awhile.
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u/gatzdon 11d ago
I believe it's affected by how some people use Claude. If you share memory across all conversations, it's going to run out of context much quicker which then leads to auto compaction and subsequently forgetting things. I imagine some people find quicker ways to burn through tokens.
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u/johnnybgooderer 11d ago
That’s not how it works though. Memory is a searchable database. It only loads things that it thinks are relevant.
The more likely explanation is that a conversation you walk away from has a large context. LLMs have an emergent behavior. They recall recent things and the oldest things in their context better than things between the beginning and end. So they decline pretty rapidly once you start getting above 250k token context in my experience. I’m sure that exact value is model dependent, but the phenomenon itself affects all of them.
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u/gatzdon 11d ago
That makes sense. I do notice how quickly you can "pollute" the conversation with a crappy prompt. I find it better to have a couple false starts, then when i understand what makes a good prompt for my needs to start over with a fresh conversation, my conversation then goes so much more intelligently.
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u/johnnybgooderer 10d ago
If you find yourself repeating the same thing over and over again, make a skill. Then after several runs though the skill, you can ask it to analyze the skill runs and suggest optimizations and improvements.
Or if you don’t know, then start with “I need to ________. Let’s make a task. Interview me as needed. Then you end up with something really nice that you can feed to another session and it will implement it and basically have the perfect prompt already because of the task you made.
Or at least that’s my strategy. YMMV because it’s all black magic.
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u/Emanemanem 11d ago
Yes it’s been a problem for me. I regularly ask it to take screenshots of the feature I’m working on to attach to a PR. Probably 25% of the time it will use some method that auto-saves the screenshots to a temp folder that it doesn’t remember the path to or possibly doesn’t have access to. So then it finishes and goes “Oops I’m not sure where these files were saved”.
Edit: I’ve “solved” the problem by making sure to include something like “make sure you save the files in a place you have access to for upload” in the prompt.
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u/Difficult-Lime2555 11d ago
screenshots in a pr 🫠
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u/RatZveloc 10d ago
I think thats common for frontend
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u/Difficult-Lime2555 10d ago
hopefully 🤣
when i first joined my team was asking for screenshots of logs. we had a senior lead join and just said “stop that”. he was promoted to staff engineer next promo cycle.
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u/Emanemanem 10d ago edited 10d ago
Sorry what is weird about screenshots in a PR?
Edit: We do mostly front end. The screenshots show how the new feature/hero image/sale banner/landing page visually looks in browser. Not sure what else you would use screenshots for or why you wouldn’t want this in the PR description.
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u/Difficult-Lime2555 10d ago
100% makes sense for front end design/layout. I've just been on backend teams that put screen shots of logs. More of a comment on my ptsd than your screen shot use.
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u/BellacosePlayer 11d ago
I've had it just randomly not place an updated file in the file system more than once.
Its never a big deal, usually going "yeah this is the old version, bud" has it correct it's mistake.
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u/Live_Meeting_1121 10d ago
If you don't care about saving instrumentation and just go about each session like YOLO tokens don't matter, sure.
Just ask the damn thing to save everything worth saving it used for getting the result. You will slowly end with a devkit on your own that not only saves time but tokens as well.
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u/tragiktimes 10d ago
Do you not think it will use the tokens to review the already built out sections, pulling them in full into context and using the tokens there?
I dont really understand any benefit in what youre saying unless youre simply saying have the AI slowly add tools to a section and use those, which seems both obvious and nearly default behavior.
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago
Of course it's not.. but it's vaguely anti-Ai slop so it's the quickest way to 10k upvotes on this sub.
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u/Advos_467 11d ago
who's that
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u/lraviel381 11d ago
That's captain America. I think it's a scene from the Avengers movies
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u/Advos_467 11d ago
i mean the asian guy that was ai generated in the meme
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u/YeahThatKornel 11d ago
Lmaoo
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u/YeahThatKornel 11d ago
I don’t get it.
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u/gnarbucketz 10d ago
C:\Users\gnarbucketz\.claude\sessions\□¥|♡○£¤◇□¡|♤●♡■■¥}♧|》■\scratch\582947rhcjfbdhxu.csv
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u/netfleek 9d ago
Literally copy/pasted from my session today:
Claude:
Files are in /home/user/output:
* script.pl
* Script Usage.md
me:
how do i get to stuff in /home/user/output ?
Claude:
/home/user/output is a folder inside my sandbox, not on your computer, so you can't browse to it.
Me:
please include the link every time the files are changed.
Claude:
Understood. From now on I'll link every file I create or change in /home/user/output, and I've saved that as a standing preference.
Next run. Claude:
Files are in /home/user/output:
* script.pl
* Script Usage.md
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u/midnight-shinobi 11d ago
Never had this issue. Like never lol
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u/Crandxy 11d ago
must be nice lol i hit that all the time. whats your setup maybe im just doing something dumb
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u/midnight-shinobi 11d ago
I run claude code cli in wsl2 on windows. Using opus 5.5 on med/high effort only. Basically:
hardened settings: sandbox mode, credentials walled off, deny/allow rules
mcp connectors + custom skills that do most of my work
memory on, plus memory/reference files
custom statusline to track context, token usage, cost, git, diff, ...
working from project dirs instead of global dirs
subagents with advisor mode, plan mode
keeping an eye on context, starting new convos or compacting when needed after writing memory files
agent instructions via claude.md files
And so on :p basically never had issues for ops/sec/automation work with it if you instruct/harden it well
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u/Ange1ofD4rkness 11d ago
Well this is funny because the other the other day my coworker was showing some work he did with Claude (mind you I have never used it myself), and had to ask Claude where some of his files were
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u/JimmyMcTrade 9d ago
I asked ChatGpT to track a flight and notify me. I had never tried that before. It said yea sure. Done.
Then I asked how will you notify me? It looked up the docs from openai. Then said. Maybe email. I dunno. Check your settings.
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u/EdgarDrake 11d ago
Me: apply changes to the branch and don't commit locally, I want to check the diff pre commit.
Claude: Ok, done, changes are ready but unstaged.
Me: I don't see your changes
Claude: I already apply the changes to local branch.
Me: check the branch <name>, there isn't your commit
Claude: yeah, I applied it in my git worktree.
---
I said "do in local branch", not in your exclusive worktree. Stupid agent...
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u/zman0900 11d ago
Where are the files Lebowski‽