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missmoss

17 karma · joined May 12, 2026

https://substack.com/@clairetsao https://github.com/missmoss
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missmoss··on Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents
This is real. I was very angry that AI kept breaking the rules I wrote, so I asked Claude to crawl its own history logs. And then I found: every time after it breaks a rule, the chance of breaking rules goes up.

I feel this is like few-shot in reverse. Few-shot is supposed to be good examples AI should follow. But when it breaks a rule, we correct it, it keeps breaking, and this whole thing actually raises the probability of more violations.

I wanted to know if there is any difference between writing rules in the prompt, writing them in CLAUDE.md, or not writing at all. So I did some short tests before. I asked Claude to open brand new sessions, test different topics with the rules I want to apply. The result turns out to be: in a fresh session, no matter the rule is in a prompt or in CLAUDE.md, models (Opus 4.8, 5 or Fable) all follow it fine, across models. Even Opus 4.8, the one always violates rules in our conversations, does it well.

I suspect it's the long context that breaks rules. But simulating a long conversation experiment is kind of hard, I still haven't found a good way to test it. So seeing this paper now, it completely answers the question I was stuck on these few days.

Besides, something caught my eyes in this paper: sometimes the model does run the check by the rules, and it really finds the violation, but its narrative still insists on its original wrong output.

My current approach is same as everyone here: use a separate hook or post-check to fix things. Because if you let the model fix it during generation, its narrative or main generation part sometimes just rejects the rule error it found.

missmoss··on The AI Productivity Illusion
My guess is AI mostly increases the throughput of low-quality output, and the cleanup burden lands on the people with better judgment
missmoss··on Ask HN: What livestream do you keep open in a tab?
I love this already. Slow-moving large animals are an instant yes for me
missmoss··on Ask HN: What livestream do you keep open in a tab?
This makes perfect sense. My friend's cat is basically into window TV too
missmoss··on Ask HN: What livestream do you keep open in a tab?
Love that sound. I could sit at the beach all day
missmoss··on Ask HN: What livestream do you keep open in a tab?
Weirdly soothing to watch it slowly reposition itself
missmoss··on Show HN: Ratel, give agents unlimited tools and skills without context bloat
This is neat! It tackles a boring but real problem with agents. When you have too many tools, the model gets confused. This is a good search box for its tools instead of dumping everything into the prompt. Benchmarks is amazing!
missmoss··on Show HN: Verification of Human Understanding of LLM-Generated Work
Cool! I watched the demo. The concept makes sense. Quick thought: free-text answers might be high friction for adoption. Not sure if you'd consider various verification method, but something like multiple choice questions or "highlight the relevant code chunk" could be lower effort for the developer, and easier to evaluate programmatically too.
missmoss··on Ask HN: Do you need to look at the code?
When working on an existing project, I always take a close look on what got changed by LLM. Sometimes I explicitly tell it which line to change and nothing else. Like what most people found, LLM sometimes, if not always, creates redundant over-engineering work trying to be useful, while most of time it actually breaks something, e.g. code quality and readability. In new projects, I focus more on plan, spec, test scheme. I review how modules are set up and sometimes functions, but pay less attention on implementation details.
missmoss··on Show HN: Verification of Human Understanding of LLM-Generated Work
Curious if there's a demo/screenshot on what questions developers should expect and what acceptable answers look like. Checked out the repo but didn't find the showcase.