LLMs know why they are writing things in the moment, and they can justify decisions. Asking it to write those things down when it writes code works, or even asking them to design the code first and then generate/update code from the design also works. But yes, if things aren’t written down, “the LLM don’t know and can’t tell.” Don’t do that.

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Avicebron 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm going to second seanmcdirmid here, a quick trick is to have Claude write a "remaining.md" if you know you have to do something that will end the session.

Example from this morning, I have to recreate the EFI disk of one of my dev vm's, it means killing the session and rebooting the vm. I had Claude write itself a remaining.md to complement the overall build_guide.vm I'm using so I can pick up where I left off. It's surprisingly effective.

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YetAnotherNick 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, humans probably have tens of millions of token in memory of memory per PR. It includes not only what's in the code, but what all they searched, what all they tested and in which way, which order they worked on, the edge cases they faced etc. Claude just can't document all these, else it will run out of its working context pretty soon.

	▲	seanmcdirmid an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ya, LLMs are not human level, they have smaller focus windows, but you can "remember" things with documentation, just like humans usually resort to when you realize that their tens of millions of token in memory per PR isn't reliable either. The nice thing about LLMs, however, is that they don't grumble about writing extra documentation and tests like humans do. You just tell them to write lots of docs and they do it, they don't just do the fun coding part. I can empathize why human programmers feel threatened.