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.

▲

DangitBobby 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is no shortage of literature on how to communicate effectively with real people.

▲

apercu 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲

DangitBobby 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

> 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.

	▲	apercu 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲

QuercusMax 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"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.

	▲	DangitBobby 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They are selling to many customers by subscription.