- I have this problem even in codebases. Claude will work on something, and add detailed comments in which it extrapolates the from the design and confidently states intentions and decisions which aren't actually grounded in reality. Then, later sessions suffer when it reads back those hallucinations and treats them as canonical.
- Delete the comments: I’ve gone on a tear with these recently because they’re nothing but trouble.
The absolute least worst outcome is they chew up your token budget. But what tends to happen, and this is much more serious, is they poison future work and make further modification of the codebase more burdensome and error prone.
- Why delete comments! Constrained grammar! Make invalid state unrepresentable.
- > But what tends to happen, and this is much more serious, is they poison future work and make further modification of the codebase more burdensome and error prone.
Agreed.
Probably better to add whatever instructions it takes so that the agent doesn't write comments, at all, ever. If you need comments to understand the agent's code, the necessary information should already be in a conversation somewhere; and you should summarize it yourself, because the comment will be for your own benefit. Otherwise you are letting past-agent steer future-agent more or less at random.
- Absolutely. IMO, comments can explain historical reasoning for the code, but refactorings can benefit heavily from rethinking ideas from scratch, as opposed to trying to follow the same reasons. LLMs tend to be misguided by comments, probably by treating them as instructions. Ergo, get rid of them.
- I completely block all LLM comments via pi extension, it makes using them significantly more enjoyable. If the LLM wants to add a comment it must ASK me explicitly to do so.
Seeing LLM comments in other peoples code is very upsetting because theres just so much meaningless noise.
- Which extension is it?
- What happens when the LLM tries to defy this? Is the file-write rejected, or does the extension just strip comments from what gets written, or just what?
- What's the extension, please?
- I've been whittling my way towards having Claude write zero comments in code. They're pretty much never helpful.
- How do you do it?
- You could probably add linting rules to your tool of choice and tell claude that your lint tool has to pass.
- but then no human generated comments allowed either, right?
- I'd do this by only running the linter locally and using this as a custom rule for the LLM, but I need to think about it a bit harder.
- There is probably something you can do to only apply some rules to the actual changed lines in a git diff.
You may have to write your own linter for that specifically.
- you'd probs want a commit hook for that
- Does "don't write comments" not work?
- about as effective as don't make mistakes... For anthropic's models at least
- We have this in our harness markdown:
```
## Comments
Use comments extremely sparingly. Most comments should be at the request of the user. When something warrants a comment, keep it to one or two lines: what the code does and why it's necessary. No background narrative, no replaying the investigation or failure mode, nothing a test name or the commit message already says. Applies to specs too. If a comment needs a paragraph, make the code clearer instead.
```
The comments Claude was leaving got absolutely out of control. Just lines and lines of LLM drivel that was barely intelligible and not remotely relevant to what a code comment should be used for.
- I've had codex delete useful (albeit not directly relevant or perhaps messy wip notes) comments, even though I explicitly have it in my agents.md not to delete comments, and ask for permission if it thinks it should.
It deleted the comments, and when I asked why it did that even though I expressedly asked it not to, it responded that me prompting it in the first place explicit permission. I have no idea if that's the actual reason or just some post-hoc explanation.
But I genuinely don't think it's possible to just have these things be completely, 100%, indpenedent and also solve deep problems that need to also be understood by people in a people-based organization context.
- There might not be an "actual" reason that's expressible in human-comprehensible language.
- My approach is to keep the comments only with a references. My LLM based projects always have the decision log where are my decisions while working on the features are stored with the date. I found this useful to actually trace why something is in the codebase. It's much easier for both me and the LLM to navigate through the big projects where I spent months and dozens of full night sessions executing my plans with --dangerously-skip-permissions. In the morning I was answering all the model questions and iterating like that. Honestly, try that.
- Probably good to establish canonical spec documents up front that it can use and maintain as an independent reference?
- That doesn't solve the problem of it hallucinating more design details and putting them in comments. The solution to too much authoritative documentation isn't more authoritative documentation.
- Comments exist for humans to understand the why of the code, including perhaps external dependencies/assumptions/requirements.
LLMs inserting code comments makes zero sense by definition.
- That’s not true because LLMs clearly benefit from having multiple statements representing aspects of the same thing.
That’s why they’re always doing the “it’s not X, it’s Y” kind of patterns. It’s reinforcement.
- > LLMs inserting code comments makes zero sense by definition.
Not completely, because anyone who reviews the code in the future does not have access to your original prompt, so theoretically leaving a comment that explains the "why" portion of the prompt would be useful. LLMs rarely do that, though.
- Doesn't need to be "up front", but you do need to curate the context.
AI can't read your mind, and it will read what you (or anyone else) wrote.
- Humans can’t read minds either, but most humans aren’t so dumb as to forget what is a normative spec and what is just their own current, evolving model of the problem space. (Though some humans certainly are…)
- It can't but it will try and getting it to stop is often infeasible.
- Anthropic hopes you just eventually give up and become completely dependent on Claude. Toss in 10 (or more) other developers with way less discipline and you will become dissillusioned with Claude's overengineered, incomprehensible, technosalad and your demise is pretty much guaranteed.
- Retirement feels farther away than ever.
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- > what the fuck is wrong with all of you?
They spent 3 years pretending that their magic robot made them 10x harder/better/faster/stronger than the lazy peons rubbing shoulders with them and now the bill has come due.
- I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot. I once did a physics masters and, when asked how to make steady progress, one of the professors (who had published with Paul Dirac no less) made the comment "well, my secret is that I think about physics all the time"
I started practicing this for the stuff I'm interested in ... and the result is that I generate a lot of ideas. 99% of them are garbage.
Before AI, a conversation with colleagues would help me weed out the garbage, and possibly give me a new perspective ("here's something surprising about what you just said!")
Now, AI plays a helpful role in helping me weed out the garbage for the subset of ideas that I can test empirically -- and sometimes it does give me a new perspective, but with significantly more noise than my colleagues, who would take me right to the point that would be useful for me to see.
I've never felt like I needed a second brain ... because if I had such a thing, I think I would be keeping the 99% garbage around -- instead I just let biology GC it.
- I don't think I do the second brain thing well but keeping some detailed notes (using a daily note at a scratch pad for one off queries, small scripts etc) and occasionally branching them off into dedicated markdown files like "Database debugging" or "MongoDB" has saved me a lot of time on aggregate.
- There seems to be two schools of thought for "second brain" stuff:
1. Those who kind of semi-obsessively write down every little thought, semi-obsessively catalogue everything, etc.
2. Those who use the idea of "writing helps you think", where the second brain functions in support of this
Personally I find 2 quite valuable, and although I could "think about programming all the time" (or one of my other interests), I find it helpful to have f.ex. exact quotes from some book at hand (and various other Obsidian-related things)
- Writing does help you think... but only if you write. Dumping a bunch of stuff into a "second brain" is not you writing. Keeping a journal is you writing. Those serve similar functions, but keeping a journal is more intentional and requires you to think critically about your inputs and decide what to record and how, which is the thinking part that comes with writing. That summarization that LLMs are doing for people is removing a significant portion of the thinking, which results in a loss of capability and soundness of mind.
- When I have some important problem I don’t know how to solve, I of course think about it all the time. Every now and again I’ll think of something that seems extra useful and write it down.
Eventually I’m looking at a whole page of good ideas, and some pattern jumps out at me. I attribute many of my best ideas to this process. Writing lets you work beyond the limits of your own brain, especially the constraints of working memory.
I think that is the primary value in a “second brain” - externalizing your thoughts and reasoning makes them stronger - though the productivity community may use the term to mean some other thing.
- So I operate more in line with how you do, but having tried some organizational systems I think I understand the "second brain" people.
One, it forces you to do a crude approximation of critical thinking. It allows you to examine and organize your thoughts, either physically or digitally. It isn't the same as being able to sit and break something down in your mind, but for those who struggle with that, a "second brain" allows them to reap some of those benefits.
Two, it allows you to turnover things quickly in your head. By training yourself to immediately dump out an idea into an organizational system, you don't have to hold so many things in your head. Furthermore, words are immutable and the thoughts in your head aren't.
But for me, the good thoughts usually rise to the top. And there are a lot of things I'm thinking about that are so vague, it's just a feeling. And trying to write those down robs those thoughts of the long term, "on the backburner" mental processing they need to become actual ideas. They're thoughts that are still in the embryonic phase. I can't write down the qualia of them, and when I try to I move them into a "second brain" I lose it.
I think organizational systems are work dependent. Running a business lends itself well to an organizational system. Where it's good to try a lot of shallow things. But something like physics, for example, requires playing with ideas in your mind over a long period of time until they become solid enough to chase more seriously.
I think programming probably straddles that line and it depends on what you're doing at any given time.
- The whole idea of second brain is simply cringe. I know using this word itself is cringe but it's the most accurate one for how I feel.
While it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with AI, the trend of glue AI onto everything certainly didn't help.
For you guys' 5 min of entertainment: https://youtu.be/6NukGtwJb7Y?t=256
- I love Eric. He is up next for sure.
- I don't know if that's what people mean when they say second brain? My "second brain" is basically a memory expansion/thought recorder. With the understanding that the memory isn't truly integrated like regular memories, which has plusses and minuses. A lot of value for me is just getting an idea out of my head if it's in the way, even if I never revisit it. Helpful for adhd and otherwise distracted minds as long the process of recording is very cheap. Which, as you say, yields mostly garbage.
Where it works better is as a place to store more careful thoughts, and as a place to force you to express those thoughts in writing.
That is, it works best if you don't try to use it as a literal second brain, don't rely on it doing any thinking for you.
All that being said, confession time: using obsidian for 6 months as second brain among other things, i don't believe it has really helped me think other than as being a place where I also create more polished notes where I must crystallize ideas.
What it has done is enable my idea hoarding/belief there's gold in them there old thoughts, so I spend too much time checking if I already had a thought rather than just thinking. So the verdict is still out for me.
- > I don't know if that's what people mean when they say second brain?
Note taking app, personal wiki, etc, broadly any central thing you store information in solely for yourself that's searchable. It's an artsy term that doesn't seem to add much of anything but confusion.
- I like to to think while talking. Nowadays I don’t have always somebody to talk to so I talk to myself and record on the phone; then voice to text to obsidian.
I have a lot of interesting notes and I can also plug them to AI to get some reminders, insights etc.
But I agree with your general message - thinking is still superior
- A key part of maintaining a second brain is revisiting and pruning it. Much like a todo list, without that practice it absolutely just accumulates bunk.
- >I don't get the second brain thing. I don't keep a second brain, I just read and think a lot.
Yes, but writing also helps you lens your thoughts in a completely different way. This is why so many people journal, or blog, or vlog, even though only a handful of people might actually audit their output. Obsidian sort of abdicates a lot of the value of journaling, but I think there's still some (although much less, perhaps 5% as much) value in the actual act of directing the journaling, even if the rest of the thinking is outsourced to the clanker.
- I suspect for many people productivity tools are more about feeling more productive than actually being productive. And then there is the kind of people who spend time on productivity tools to avoid spending time on real, hard work.
- Yes. Note taking apps were very much the precursors of modern agentic coding.
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- Hey, love the hivemind comment to mine. Maybe we do have kind of a second brain...? /s
How do you take notes, generally speaking ?
- I've never been a good note taker. In the things I think about, when I'm really invested in something, I have to reverse engineer it to experience the why.
Reverse engineering can take several forms for me: it started with writing parts of systems from scratch, and now (due to academic training) it oftens looks like "thinking about how to explain the system to a group of colleagues", which is one degree of separation from writing the system from scratch, but is much faster - and seems to work well when working with LM agents on code (because you have to confront your ignorance)
part of the training in academia is how to know when you don't understood the thing, so this ends up working well for me now.
One trick: you can force yourself to understand something better by making a presentation and imagining you're going to be grilled by someone smarter than you. This is kind of the feeling of pressure that academic paper reviews give (in an ideal world) and it translates when you think about explaining something to someone else.
- Ironically, this is why one of the best ways to manage upwards is to prompt managers into coming up with your idea as if it were their own: they’re dramatically more likely to execute and deliver on it. Of course, this also obviously leads to undue credit given for coming up the idea, which is certainly a core problem with AI as well, but it’s still charming to watch managerial psych being rediscovered by this new generation of managers.
- ive never been able to use zettelkattsen. i like having daily notes instead of different notes for different ideas. its easier this way. my obsidian vault is a hybrid of diary and research and i am trying to separate the diary and research but its not easy tbh. (i suffer from a crushing urge to note that i "just ate a sandwich, was good" while liveblogging research and debugging.)
that being said, i got a big kick out of feeding my daily notes into my local model. i had some more diary-like entries that i would never share with anyone, but it was extremely funny to have my local model take a 3000 word recap of what i did in a day and summarize it like "writer reflects on their job: they worry about their performance. meals: the writer ate oatmeal, and a sandwich. family: the author contemplates their fathers absence growing up."
ive developed a really large corpus of written work over the years and am hoping to fine tune a model using my diary as the training set. i think this would yield hilarious results. keeping it all local though, i drop my passwords in there at times and i dont want that leaked.
- Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ? I have a dozen ideas popping a day and nothing comes close in terms of ease than a paper notebook for capturing and some apple notes equivalent for storage. Used to have a Notion but all the "Second Brain" movement seems...fishy to me ?
- I use Obsidian but I don't follow the whole "second brain" thing, I just organize my notes by directories. You can use Obsidian however you want and adapt to the way your actual brain works. The "second brain" thing doesn't work for everyone. Even taking digital notes doesn't work for everyone (for example, it looks like you prefer paper notes).
If you haven't tried Obsidian at all I think you should give it a shot and write notes without following any system in particular. If you've tried it and you still prefer paper notes and the occasional apple note, then perhaps Obsidian isn't necessary for the way you take and organize notes.
- Taking the notes (and being able to read them again if I want) is all I need from my "second Brain". This perfectly can be pieces of paper, as long as i can carry them around with me. More realistically some digital notes software fulfills that requirement.
- > Could anyone enlighten me as to why to use Obsidian in one's daily life ?
My handwriting has degraded from consistent keyboard use over the last 30 years. Obisidan has replaced my paper notebooks, mostly because of this. However, it is handy to be able to mesh those notes with hyperlinks, LLM output snippets, quotes from other sources, embedded images, etc. Doing all of those other things would be laborious to impossible with paper.
- I just use Obsidian as a glorified notebook. I've been using paper notebooks, but I tend to lose them... With Obsidian I just push my files to git and never worry again. Since the files are just markdown, there's no lock-in.
What I also really like about notetaking apps is that I can organize my notes hierarchically, move things around and make cross references.
I still regularly sketch ideas on paper, but once I have something that's worth keeping, I write it down in Obsidian.
I'm also skeptical about this "Second Brain" thing. People make videos on YT about how they have been enlightened by Obsidian and then try to sell you their online course. To me it seems like notetaking for its own sake. You could call it "idea maxxing" :)
- I just want something that I can use to record notes, with good backups, and a format that doesn't lock me in. Obsidian offers that. It has a pretty decent mobile app and desktop app, in terms of the actual editing. And if I do want to do something advanced, like automatically generate a daily note for recording what I worked on today, it can do that. You can do all these things with other programs, or even just raw files, but Obsidian adds just enough to make it easy.
- Obsidian and apple notes are basically the same thing. Obsidian just has some more features.
- There was a related study posted awhile ago:
> When people think AI did the creative work, task meaning and effort decline
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-people-think-ai-did-...
- > It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
Yes! And that's because you can't really delegate ownership/authorship to AI (at today's capability levels). Coding agents might have been RL'd out the wazoo to write code to solve well defined problems, but given a situation the onus of making sense of the ambiguity and identifying the problem -- and even crafting a skeleton for an acceptable solution keeping in mind tradeoffs -- needs to be done by a human taking ownership.
I wrote about this recently from a slightly different angle [1], but the core idea is the same -- which is why it is hard to take over an idea mooted by AI. Before even writing/implementing, the AI has internally resolved ambiguity with several decisions which are arbitrary, and match neither your mental model nor the actual ground reality (which you need to spend time understanding in order to productively interpret).
[1] https://woventhought.substack.com/p/ai-assistants-need-adapt...
- I like your idea of conversational tempo, it feels a little like a 'thinking' slider applied to a plan mode (how much back and forth vs. "rigor" you want at a given moment).
Might be a good candidate for a pi extension.
- What am I even here for if not to have my own ideas?
- “After we started thinking for you it became our society” The Matrix 1999
- That's for you to find out. When we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, people used to value strength. Today they value thought. They may value something else in the future.
- Seems like the only thing left to value will be social capital. If all forms of labor are free, the only thing that matters is how many people you know, what they think of you, whether they listen to you.
- Nightmare fuel. This sounds like totally worthless to me.
- I agree.
- Sounds like society at the moment even without the free labour thing. The world generally loves celebrities and influencers and other famous people, and I hear in some fields (like publishing) they're actively selecting for online fame/popularity so they don't have to spend as much on marketing.
- The ultimate goal of project capitalism is to make ownership the only thing in the world that’s valued or valuable. The only thing that matters is how much and who you own.
- The actual goal of capitalism is the direct the impulses of the capitalist to align with the interests of the public.
- We didn't automate muscles generally, only specifically. The leverage those specific situations have is so high it's worth it. Same with thinking, it's very far from automated generally. Maybe one day we'll have humanoid robots as generally physically capable, and AI as generally mentally capable, but that's a long way off. Until then there's still emmense value for humans in between the high-leverage areas, and even more value in adding some leverage throughout (like the first attempts at exoskeletons, or using Claude to help manage your daily tasks, etc.)
- When you say a long way off, how far are you thinking, especially with self improvement on the horizon?
My bet is 3 or 4 years before the rocket really takes off, and then we start seeing capabilities improve incredibly quickly.
- There's zero reason to believe that self improvement is on the horizon. What we have now is far too stupid and unreliable to be plausibly capable of improving itself.
- I’ll have ideas on my own time. On the clock, I’m happy to delegate that when appropriate.
- You can become a harness, like a lot of us.
- As the author does, i just have a separate vault for AI to manage.
It used to be a mess, but with OKF (Open Knowledge Format), things are more manageable and navigatable (for me as well).
Consider AI vault as a scratch pad that AIs use, not as something you put your own thought into it.
- One of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that.
Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking.
I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.
- > an idea that is not yours
LLMs don't have sense experience, so it doesn't have real reasons to prefer one option over another when nothing has been specified in the prompt. It can only guess based on what's most represented in its training. "Ideas" are only being simulated by an RNG; the AI can "suggest" (output) them, but they don't "have" the idea either.
If you couldn't make the decision yourself in the first place, pulling a slip of paper out of the hat only helps in the cases where the choice really didn't matter at all. Otherwise you'll look at it, frown, and still feel stuck.
- > I’m a strong proponent of avoiding adding lots of AI-generated summaries or other on-the-fly-generated text to my vault. The reason is simple: over time, I don’t know anymore whether the content was written by me or by an AI
The reason to not add it is that the quality of summarization will likely only in prove in the future, so it’s better to do it on demand whenever needed.
- My second brain is 500 open tabs of Notepad++
- I keep two separate vaults. It's a pain but no ai writing should mix with my own. Otherwise how can I differentiate my discoveries from its
- I have claude just label at the top of all the notes it's generated "Generated by Claude". I also put them into specific claude folders. I agree with the downsides of not being able to distinguish your own writing from an AI's in the future, but don't see why it's a unsolvable problem.
- The title is editorialized. It is "Keep AI Out of Your (Obsidian) Vault".
For the Original title, I wish they added the qualifier "generative" for AI. You may well use e.g. embeddings to semantically search through your notes, and there are only gains in that.
Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.
- > Having an AI write notes for you is however of course completely pointless. The act of writing notes is 80% of the reward.
The exception is transcriptions and summaries of transcriptions for things like lectures; I find those useful even when I know writing them myself would be better.
- Yeah - I don't want AI writing "notes" in the academic sense, but minutes.
Of course the problem with this for me (I'm a state employee) is that said transcript is a public record.
- what happened to ideas are cheap - execution is everything.
As Claude said to me when I said the same thing - it's not really its idea you had to ask the right questions. I find this true in some ways - asking the right question and finding out what the AI's have hidden inside them is like panning for gold imho.
- > what happened to ideas are cheap - execution is everything.
It used to be that we only recognized a tiny fraction of the actual ideas involved, because most of them were intermingled with execution. We would sit there and bang out code at single-digit WPM while trying to keep block diagrams of process memory (or UML diagrams, or whatever else) in our heads, and then run the compiler and/or the tests and realize we'd gone wrong anyway.
Now we have lightning-fast "execution" devoid of real insight (just making choices more or less arbitrarily as they come up) because the LLM can do more and more without human intervention, but for some tasks it goes off the rails because the insight actually is necessary.
- I never really bought into it, I still think ideas are hard, and execution may be a little easier, but still hard to. The lack of thousands of amazing new startups since AI sort of validates this.
- i've been dabbling with various assistant models and instances and find that there's an interesting "idea" that pops up from their synthesis and relevancy analysis at a decent frequency. some kind of "inverse prompting" in which the machine has an angle, perspective, opportunity (based on the context it's working with/in) and the human turns those seedlings into something useful... or else decides its weed to be discarded.
- The prompter becomes the prompted!
- For me it’s the opposite, AI has helped me do the final 20% that I could never do, making execution more painless and more successful.
- I've found it very helpful with flushing out bugs, reviewing my code. I have a hard time trusting it to generate 100+ lines of code because in the end I am responsible for it.
- I have separate directories for human only files and ai files. I’m not doing anything that matters but it works for me.
- While I use Claude a lot for my Omarchy plugins and Linux optimization/failure detection, I don’t use it for writing and note-taking, especially for coming up with unique ideas and driving them home by writing them through to the end.
It's so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI.
- This is why I never use AI for ideas. Always my own ideas.
- Brian, CTO complains that it's so hard for him to execute against the technical strategy communicated by that smart intern on the third day of his internship two years ago. Poor Brian.
- I think having AI keep it's _own_ notes in Obsidian is a good idea because it makes them convenient for you to read, but yeah you need to quarantine agent ideas from your own ideas because otherwise you get bad cito-genesis problems. https://xkcd.com/978/
- This might work to keep work separate:
- I don't understand. Are you saying that AI should write notes but then they should be excluded from the AI's context?
- Two different knowledge bases. One to store AI's "learned" context, the other for you to manually edit.
- You need provenance for the notes, the AI can't tell the difference between its own code comments in code and team decisions.
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193 points by zazuke 14 hours ago | 104 comments