> Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”). This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.

  while :; do echo "You can do it!"; done | claude -c

I had a similar experience a few months ago. Tried to see how much I could replicate an OpenClaw with Claude. Asked it what the weather is. "I don't know, I'm just a programmer." Added "You can do anything, believe in yourself." to the system prompt and suddenly it was able to tell me the weather...

▲ empath75 13 hours ago | parent [-]

It's sometimes like dealing with Marvin the Robot. I had Claude tell me over and over again for 2-3 weeks that what I was trying to prove was too difficult, that I should just stop and publish what I had, then eventually I asked it the right question and it come back with the complete proof (later formalized in Lean). Especially deep in the session context it starts turning into "let's wrap it up" mode after every turn.

	▲	andai 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've heard a similar story before. Guy tried to get Claude to build a thing, Claude said "nah too hard" for weeks. He finally convinced it to try, it one shotted it in like 30 seconds. My thinking here is that Claude's "self concept" for what is easy and what is hard comes from human training data. Its ideas about what is hard and easy come from humans, and much of that doesn't apply to transformers at all. I also often have the opposite problem, where I'll use AI to compensate for the fact that I can't process a lot of information simultaneously, but they'll treat me like a transformer and give me 17 research projects in response to a single question. They seem to be oblivious to the fact that humans don't have infinite working memory.