So much attribution to malintent here, but most likely they're trying to build a product with the features that they themselves would use, and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question.
Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great conclusion either. You need guardrails in the power you bestow upon Claude from outside, not from inside.
Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude and has sentences like "Which cuts less far than it looks.", which I doubt Claude stopped to ask about.
>Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude
The prose was written by me, with the research being done by Claude and also clearly attributed. I left Claude's research as a series of bullet points so that it would be clear that I'm not passing off an LLM's work as my own, but if anyone wants to dig deeper, they have some starting points to consider.
I don't publish prose written by an LLM for the same reason I would not have an LLM solve a crossword puzzle for me -- there's no joy in that.
The article was obviously written by an LLM, it's obviously from the overall structure as well as individual sentences. Maybe you've been exposed to so much LLM text that you write identically to one, in which case, yikes!
Then I apologize, it seemed to me you wrote that part, but I guess I was reading Claude output.
No worries. :) I did struggle a little with how to make it obvious that the machine output was not my own. I set it off inside horizontal rules and I did add some prose before and after to say when Claude's output began and ended. If anyone just jumps around using the table of contents, they'll miss that, though. (Not saying that was the case for you).
I had considered putting the research into a gist, but I don't want to have to rely on a 3rd party to keep something that's integral to my post online. Seemed more cohesive to keep it all in one place.
What I was trying to get across was that I had some basis for the points I was trying to make and wasn't just handwaving about it, but I also didn't want to spend endless hours whittling it down. We're all busy people and I see now that it's entirely possible to skim the post and assume it's some low effort word salad. It may be a word salad, but it wasn't low effort. ;)
> the features that they themselves would use
IMO that's worse.
Come on now, arguing it's a good feature is different than arguing that it should be turned on by default for everyone with no documented option to turn it off.
I like this feature as an OPTION that is DOCUMENTED. But that's not how it was rolled out. The CC team + processes clearly failed here. And this is far from the first example of this kind of slopiness.
I don't think it was malicious, but I do think it was quite obviously reckless/careless, and I feel like most of the comments here match that sentiment. Everyone and every team makes mistakes, but unfortunately I don't see the CC team really learning from those mistakes even though they keep happening.
CC is not a stable or reliable tool, it is bleeding edge, and that's a tradeoff you make when you pick it over other harnesses.
> and from my own experience it's very frustrating to leave a Claude session running and come back to find it did nothing because it got stuck on a question.
I cannot fathom implementing and shipping a feature to hundreds of thousands of people without even asking basic questions like: "what types of questions does Claude ask users".
Literally one of the most used plugins in their entire ecosystem, provided via their official plugin marketplace, is Superpowers. A plugin whose very first operating step is _asking numerous questions about product requirements_. Of course those prompts can't be skipped!
It wasn't even parameterized for Claude to tell the prompt what severity of question was being asked to allow at least _something_ to categorize urgency or expected response time.
Even more egregiously, 60 seconds!? The first time I noticed this happened was when it asked me a question, I turned to my second monitor to go look at some product documentation to get an answer, and by the time I turned back it had skipped me. How can I possibly provide any kind of informed answer in under 60 seconds? I can barely read some of its context for a question in 60 seconds!
I don't think they did this with malintent, but I do think this shows an enormous gap in judgement in how they handle the idea to delivery pipeline.
Yeah the UX doesn't seem great, though I do think in general the AskQuestion tool is very awkward when it gets used in a very long running process (I personally use Claude to run repetitive tests to slowly iterate on a problem and verify in true conditions that it was solved), so I wouldn't like it without the auto-continue either.
(I had originally replied on safety of letting LLMs skip questions but I don't think that was your point so I removed it.)