I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".

Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor.

Very much so: “everyone does it” means that the leader can destroy anyone who doesn’t toe the line while seeming to be following a reasonable law.

And only a few steps further and the leader rarely needs to employ the service of obedient judges, but opponents "just" fall out of windows.

Exactly. See also underposted speed limits, for example. It's not about being able to stop everybody, it's about being able to stop anybody.

I found a similar blog post like this years ago at the start of my career and started keeping a Rhodia Webnotebook A5. I've got over a dozen now from all my years of work. Nice for nostalgia

Very interesting. Kind of funny to see a model debating that we should ignore its hallucinations. I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

Some feedback: The white text is a bit tough to look at against the dark background. Darkgrey was a lot easier on the eyes for me.

Appreciate the feedback, updated :)

I tried this but didn't realize how exhausting it is to think about even 2 smaller items at once.

I've seriously wondered about merging a home office and home gym into one, and doing sets in between claude working. My usual workout has about 22-30 sets of exercises total and I probably wait on Claude that often in a day. It would be wonderful to be able to spread my exercise throughout the entire day. I'd also include an adjustable height desk so that I could be standing up for much of the workout/workday. I could even have a whiteboard in there.

I have a small gym next to my home office and I just cannot do it. When I train I need to be 100% focused on the exercises otherwise in the best case I'll stagnate, and in the worst I'll injure myself. So instead I do some mindless chores if time allows.

It's still not always reliable.

I have a skill in a project named "determine-feature-directory" with a short description explaining that it is meant to determine the feature directory of a current branch. The initial prompt I provide will tell it to determine the feature directory and do other work. Claude will even state "I need to determine the feature directory..."

Then, about 5-10% of the time, it will not use the skill. It does use the skill most of the time, but the low failure rate is frustrating because it makes it tough to tell whether or not a prompt change actually improved anything. Of course I could be doing something wrong, but it does work most of the time. I miss deterministic bugs.

Recently, I stopped Claude after it skipped using a skill and just said "Aren't you forgetting something?". It then remembered to use the skill. I found that amusing.

I have a couple skills invoked with specific commands ('enter planning mode' and 'enter execution mode') and they have never failed to activate. Maybe make the activation a very rigid phrase and not implied to be a specific phrase.

Please do! This sounds way more interesting than a simple coding loop agent (not to knock the blog)