I didn't read the whole thing, but I got my back up at the headline and my first reaction is now even the "AI" companies are telling you that "you're holding it wrong".
I mean, they told us "just talk naturally to the AI because it's so much smarter than all you meatbags" and now it's “for best results, please learn to manage context windows, prompt caching, cache invalidation, model switching, output verbosity and when to manually clear or compact your session.”
I get it, but it seems like the "PRODUCT" should be doing this shit. I.e., the PRODUCT is getting less efficient because I didn't manually manage its context correctly and now it's MY fault.
Edit: i.e., for e.g. Doh. Even the robots get that right. Sigh.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
Anthropic has no incentive to make their products more efficient as long as they're selling them by the token.
They are selling to many customers by subscription.
There is no shortage of literature on how to communicate effectively with real people.
I'm doing my best to interpret your comment but if I parse it it seems like you think my complaint is "I shouldn't have to express myself clearly" when really its "Why am I being asked to understand and manually manage the implementation details of the product in order to keep it working efficiently?".
Unless I am fully not understanding your comment and you don't actually mean “humans require communication skills too” which in honesty feels orthogonal to my complaint.
> I mean, they told us "just talk naturally to the AI because it's so much smarter than all you meatbags" and now it's “for best results, please learn to manage context windows, prompt caching, cache invalidation, model switching, output verbosity and when to manually clear or compact your session.”
It's true both that it can be smarter than all us meat bags and that talking to it a certain way gets better results. On some of the things it's a limitation of the technology and on some of the others it's just how information and effort work in any context. I don't see it as orthogonal to your complaint, I see your complaint as misplaced frustration, like Anthropic invented GIGO and compute so they'd have an excuse to write a blog post.
Huh. And to me it’s like “I can’t believe Anthropic has the audacity to post that and I can’t believe my peers defend it”
Oh well.
And I in turn can't believe your response to the post. Different strokes for different folks. I understand that HN fucking hates everything and everyone, especially big model providers at the moment, but this shit doesn't make any sense to me and you people are starting to actually make me crazy.