Back in my day Claude had amnesia, it’d forget the top of the conversation while you had to type, yes, type, as in: by hand, stuff like "we are continuing working on the project X, read the “context_for_claude_v9_23_final_FINAL3_fr_02fsdfa.md”, because it’d forget everything every couple hours - we called it ‘compacting’. Also yeah, the A.I. would have this thing we called ‘hallucinating’, it’d just be wrong, inventing stuff, and if you pointed it out it’d say “Point taken, I skipped a crucial part of the debugging procedure, and I should have caught that. I did it anyway, and I owe you an apology”, and then you’d tell it to fix the bug and it’d change a bunch of things in the code and the bug would still be there, and like that 5 times, until you resurrected it in another conversation where it got smarter, but you’d have to prepend stuff like “you are an expert in…”, imagine, like giving a peptalk to your own doctor, “Now remember, you went to medical school and got straight A’s only, you’re expert in ophthalmology, you’ve studied ophthalmology for 25 years and you’re on top of the current most groundbreaking theories, you have holistic view over the entire field because you’ve also got master’s degree in 10 other relevant areas and you can see around the corners others cannot”, and it didn’t really help, but we did it anyway. The whole “don’t make any mistakes” thing was just a joke back then, nobody took it seriously. It’d say “Good. Now I have the big picture”, but it didn’t. It didn’t have the big picture. What’s that? Yeah no, of course you had to pay for it, there was like a couple companies that made A.I.s and you had to rent it from them, because personal devices were too slow. That’s why we didn’t have one A.I., we had like different models and had to match which one did what to not set your money on fire, you had to ration intelligence between different A.I.s, sometimes outsourcing things like reading to another Chinese model to have second-hand opinion. In the beginning we also had to paste the code it wrote and then sent it in zips (you kids don’t know what zips are anymore, do you?) into your project, test it yourself, and then paste the errors back to it like a carrier pigeon. Good times. submitted by /u/Spooky-Shark
Originally posted by u/Spooky-Shark on r/ClaudeCode