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65 Lines of Markdown, a Claude Code Sensation

55 points by roywashere

by timr

7 subcomments

LLMs are the eternal September for software, in that the sort of people who couldn’t make it through a bootcamp can now be “programming thought leaders”. There’s no longer a reliable way to filter signal from noise.
Those 3000 early adopters who are bookmarking a trivial markdown file largely overlap with the sort of people who breathlessly announce that “the last six months of model development have changed everything!”, while simultaneously exhibiting little understanding of what has actually changed.
There’s utility in these tools, but 99% of the content creators in AI are one intellectual step above banging rocks together, and their judgement of progress is not to be trusted.

by pyrale

4 subcomments

With AI, it feels like deterministic outcomes are not valued as experience taught us it should.
The absence of means to measure outcomes of these prompt documents makes me feel like the profession is regressing further into cargo culting.

by onion2k

3 subcomments

surely, 4,000 developers can’t be wrong
Apparently almost half of all the websites on the internet run on WordPress, so it's entirely possible for developers to be wrong at scale.

by john_owl

2 subcomments

I know some people that would also benefit from these 65 lines of markdown. Even without using AI.

by xlbuttplug2

1 subcomments

My probably incorrect, uninformed hunch is that users convinced of how AI should act actually end up nerfing its capabilities with their prompts. Essentially dumbing it down to their level, losing out on the wisdom it's gained through training.

by wiether

0 subcomment

So we reached a point where the quality of a `piece` of software is decided based on stars on GitHub.
The exact same thing happened with xClaw where people where going "look at this app that got thousands of stars on GitHub in only a few days!".
How is that different than the followers/likes counts on the usual social networks?
Given how much good it did to give power to strangers based on those counts, it's hard not to think that we're going in the completely wrong direction.

by 3371

1 subcomments

You know, it's good old prompt/context engineering. To be fair, markdowns actually can be useful because of LLM's (Transformer's) gullible/susceptible nature... At least that's what I discovered developing a prompting framework.
Of course it's hilarious a single markdown got 4000 starts, but it looks like just another example of how people chase a buzzing x post in tech space.

by arjie

0 subcomment

That's just how it is in the LLM world. We've just gotten started. Once upon a time, the SOTA prompting technique was "think step by step".

by golem14

0 subcomment

All good advice in general. Could add others, like x-y problems etc.
This feels like a handbook for a senior engineer becoming a first level manager talking to junior devs. Which is exactly what it should be.
However, this will go horribly wrong if junior devs are thus “promoted “ to eng managers without having cut their teeth on real projects first. And that’s likely to happen. A lot.

by mosselman

1 subcomments

Bro science is rampant in the AI world. Every new model that comes out is the best there ever was, every trick you can think of is the one that makes all the other users unsophisticated, "bro, you are still writing prompts as text? You have to put them into images so the AI can understand them visually as well as textually".
It isn't strange that this is the case, because you'd be equally hard pressed to compare developers at different companies. Great to have you on the team Paul, but wouldn't it be better if we had Harry instead? What if we just tell you to think before you code, would that make a difference?

by mcintyre1994

1 subcomments

Maybe I'm just really lucky but reading those instructions it's basically how I find Claude Code behaves. That repo with 4k stars is only 2 weeks old as well, so it's obviously not from a much less competent model.

by podgorniy

0 subcomment

Next inevitable step is LLM alchemy. People will be writing crazy-ass prompts which ununderstandable text which somehow get system work better than the straight-human-text prompts.

by throwaw12

1 subcomments

> But the original repository has almost 4,000 stars, and surely, 4,000 developers can’t be wrong?
This is such a negative messaging!
Let's check star history: https://www.star-history.com/#forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-s...
1. Between Jan 27th and Feb 3rd stars grew quickly to 3K, project was released at that time.
2. People star it to be on top of NEW changes, people wanted to learn more about what's coming - but it didn't come. Doesn't mean people are dumb.
3. If OP synthesized the Markdown into a single line: "Think before coding" - why did he went through this VS Code extension publishing? Why can't they just share learnings and tell the world, "Add 'Think before coding' before your prompt and Please try for yourself!"
PS: no I haven't starred this project, I didn't know about it. But I disagree with the authors "assumptions" about stars and correlating it to some kind of insight revelation

by pavlov

0 subcomment

These hopeful incantations are a kind of cargo cult… But when applied to programming, the wild thing is that the cult natives actually built the airports and the airplanes but they don’t know what makes them fly and where the cargo comes from.

0 subcomment

by ciconia

0 subcomment

The document under discussion:
https://github.com/forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills/blob/...
I find the whole premise of writing some vague instructions, feeding them to a stochastic parrot and expecting a solid engineering process to materialize out of the blue quite ridiculous.
Any sufficiently advanced "AI" technology is indistinguishable from bullshit.

by brador

0 subcomment

There will come a day soon where “hello world” will be typed by sentient hands for the last time.

by rootlocus

0 subcomment

I found that "Make no mistakes, or you go to jail" improves claude-code's performance by about 43%

by csomar

0 subcomment

These days I genuinely can't tell if articles are satire or not.