I found this an incredibly well written and interesting read. A bit of a strange format… is it an article or a newsletter or something else? It is extremely long. I don’t really care though. Because I loved the combination of quotes, insights and links. Thanks.
Nothing. MCP and HTTP APIs and CLI tools without the good parts. They lack the robustness of the OpenAPI spec, including security standardization, and are more complex to run than simple CLI utilities without any authentication.
I have done it many times, using the swagger.json as a "discovery service" and then having the agent utilize that API. A good OpenAPI spec was working perfectly fine for me all the way back when OpenAI introduced GPTs.
If we standardized on a discovery/ endpoint, or something like that, as a more compact description of the API to reduce token usage compared to consuming the somewhat bloated full OpenAPI spec, you would have everything you need right there.
The MCP side quest for AI has been one of the most annoying things in AI in recent years. Complete waste of time.
Makes sense. It’s already illegal to even attempt to commit suicide here, so compared to that, this is just another small way the state micromanages your entire life.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder if they calculated how much we save by not trashing these items, versus the cost in time, bureaucracy, and administration this will demand. There is an episode of Freconomics that covered this. Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
You're confusing being sarcastic with sardonic. It's also a grossly dishonest comparison.
> Managing and getting rid of free stuff is very expensive and hard. But that someone else's problem.
While I think we deeply disagree with what "hard" means, it does feel like its the kind of cost a reasonable organization would willingly take on. I compare it to the chefs, or restauranteers who after they're done cooking for the day bring all the food that they have to a local food bank or shelter instead of throwing it away. That's an equally expensive endevor, just on different scale. I think it's reasonable to expect all organizations to act with some moral character, and given larger companies have demonstrated they lack moral character, and would otherwise hyper optimize into a negative sum game they feel they can win. I think some additional micromanaging is warranted. You don't?
Everyone should be discouraged from playing a negative sum game.
I agree that "sardonic" is a better word. It’s just not used much, and it didn’t even come to mind. It's similar to how people misuse "ironic." But people usually understand what is meant.
The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so. The general pattern is that there are degrees of governmental control over people's lives at the core. I don’t think it’s dishonest because my point is that bureaucracy has no limit on what it tries to control given enough time, even though my framing is vulgar.
and should we do stuff to reduce waist and help the environmen? Absolutely!! should we do this? if this worked, it would be a good thing. But if you just want to virtue signal without caring about reality, I think we disagree on more than just definitions.
My reference to "Freakonomics" is a collection of real contradictions to your theory. Since you didn't consider it, here are the expanded findings:
Most of the "recycled" material collected under these new laws is being "downcycled" into insulation, mattress stuffing, or industrial rags—markets that are already saturated and low-value. Reports show these organizations were overwhelmed with low-quality fast fashion that they could not sell. Instead of companies paying to burn it, the charities now had to pay to store or manage it.
The fines are real. France has set fines of up to €15,000 per infraction for companies caught destroying unsold goods. This is why companies are dumping the stock on charities rather than risking the fine. I’m giving how you speak about corporation. I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time.
Then The Freakonomics data (Sanford, Maine case study) showed that when you charge people for trash, they generate less trash, but illegal dumping often spikes, forcing the city to spend more on cleanup patrols.
To pay for this new collection and sorting system, brands pay an "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR) fee. In 2025, this fee for textiles in systems like France/Netherlands ranged roughly from €0.12 to €0.50 per kilogram of clothing put on the market. In other words, the cost ultimately falls back on consumers.
So in general, no, I don’t agree at all. I think you are discounting the massive cost to not just corporations but also individuals when it comes to micromanagement. On a second layer, I’m not even against micromanagement, just bad micromanagement, especially micromanagement that is at best naïve regarding effectiveness, and at worst purely virtue signaling.
In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
> In short, we should focus on what works, not what you feel is righteously good.
These are not mutually exclusive. But i'm glad you're considering shareholder value!
> I’m guessing you have absolutely no empathy for people who run small single person or small team business and our overwhelmed by all the regulatory traps they can fall into at any point in time.
Sigh... yeah, lack of empathy is the core problem here.
> The general thrust of the underlying messagr is not dishonest just because you say so.
Comparing suicide of an individual to administrative fines on a corporation for needlessly destroying textiles is rhetorically dishonest. There's so many disparities and meaningful differences that trying to equate them without discussing any of them is counter productive to a beneficial conversation. It's a cheap impotent shot trying to stir up an emotional reaction where one doesn't belong. Or given how strongly you seem to feel, a completely different reaction is deserved. Making a misleading or inappropriate comparison is dishonest, not because I say it is, but because being misleading, even carelessly, lacks rhetorical integrity, or honesty.
Four more examples, of rhetorical dishonesty suggesting I'm acting in bad faith, and lack empathy, or sympathy for the balance of weight for smaller companies (without cause)
Saying again without argument or evidence that my position is a self righteous one devoid of pragmatic function.
Mischaracterizating my opposition to your comments as shallow or opinionated rather than a different core issue you've been unable to identify or reply to.
And then my top reply to yours, suggesting that all you care about is shareholder value. But at least I'm only saying so because it's become a common joke, but also because your first comment feels irreverent towards S/SI, or humans. And the sum total of your next reply ignores the core point of my objections, and drones on about the financial cost towards companies. So maybe it's not that dishonest.
you’re correct. I was just using it to emphasize how all encompassing regulation sometimes feel. I was annoyed and didn’t think; when seeing just another European regulation piling on then endless sea of things you can get fined for here.
Cypress was the last placed in Europe to remove laws against suicide in 2021 it seems.
For anybody that is interested in a clinical psychologist's take, here is mine…
This article triggers an overwhelming feeling that something is missing in the story. Of course, being fired is genuinely painful, and the author's emotional state is understandable. But I think there is a much better way to understand this situation that would be beneficial to the author. Please note that this is just a guess, and in reality, I would explore if this is a good fit for both reality and what the person is capable of talking about, and quickly back off if not both were true. This is just an exercise in hypothesis building that accompanies every meeting i have with a client, and initial theories are often wrong.
First is the defense mechanism of abstract answers. I once asked a girl why she stole from her mother AGAIN, and she responded, "I try to get back up, but I fall down." This is a deflection and a non-answer. This author does the corporate version of that. Instead of saying, "I struggled to read the room," they describe "The Three-Year Myth."
There is the bitterness here that often accompanies the wound to professional identity. The author literally tells us they are smarter than their boss, harder working than their peers, and more ethical than the company. The easiest explanation is to blame failure on the system being rigged against good people. This might be a coping mechanism, but it might also hinder personal growth.
Then there is the claim that the author didn't know why they were fired. However, i think they tell us exactly why in the hardware paragraph. Look at the what the author describes… a senior director presented a vision to a customer. The author (without checking with the director) proposed a totally different architecture because they "read the requirements line by line" (implying the director didn't). The author received a formal warning.
The author’s Interpretation is "My timing was perfect for the market, but poor for the systems of power." (I was too smart/right, and they were threatened). That might hold some truth, but its not implausible that the author undermined senior leadership, embarrassed the company regarding a client commitment, and likely communicated it with arrogance ("no AI summaries here!" as he writes).
And receiving a formal warning is an extremely serious signal. To frame a formal HR warning as simply timing being inconvenient to power that be, shows a near-total lack of accountability. There is zero reflection on how they advocated for their ideas. The author claims, "I'm literally not built for competition so much as cooperation," yet their anecdotes describe them fighting against cost centers and trying to override directors.
The self-reflection that does appear is careful and limited. The author admits to being "naturally helpful and cooperative" and bad at "game theory" but these are virtues reframed as vulnerabilities. "I'm too good and too cooperative for this corrupt world" isn't really self-criticism. The one moment that approaches genuine insight "I need to expand into leadership skills" is immediately followed by blaming stakeholders who "blocked change at all costs." The OCD mention functions similarly and it explains the overanalysis as a feature, not something that might be creating friction with colleagues.
This is someone who likely has high technical intelligence but problems with soft skills. They prioritized being technically right over being effective, and when the social consequences arrived (the warning, the firing), they built a defensive wall of abstraction to avoid seeing their own role in the fall.
A proper question is WHY has this happened repeatedly and in multiple roles, across multiple organizations, with the same pattern? The author even acknowledges this but thinks the answer is "I keep falling for the same trap." I think it would be more helpful to ask, "Why do I keep creating the same dynamic?"
> The OCD mention functions similarly and it explains the overanalysis as a feature, not something that might be creating friction with colleagues.
Because it is both and this is a very classic problem for neurodivergent people.
As a ADHD person I could very much relate. My pattern recognition allows me to see connections and structure where neurotypical people only see chaos. I am often three, four, five steps ahead and can see potential problems and solutions so much earlier.
Of course this doesn't help. If I point these things out, I will only be met with resistance regardless if I happen to be right later on or not.
So really the best solution is to just shut up. Let them catch up eventually. It just feels so isolating and frustrating. Not only do I have to mask the deficits that ADHD gives me but also my talents.
I think this is the core issue here. OP is hated and discriminated for their OCD. Corporations are not equipped harness the talents of people that think differently. They are not a "culture fit".
I don't really have a solution. Yes you can learn to mask and play the game but that is also not healthy in the long term.
> My pattern recognition allows me to see connections and structure where neurotypical people only see chaos. I am often three, four, five steps ahead and can see potential problems and solutions so much earlier.
A little humility would probably help a lot. Your post is already blaming everyone else for not listening to you. This isn't really about you thinking differently.
Oh I am sorry for highlighting one of the side effects of my crippling disability.
I did not even present it as an advantage but as something that causes feelings of isolation but I guess I am bragging about it and need more humility.
My brain's filtering function is defect. Where neurotypical people see one or two possible solution my brain automatically comes up with ten which is great for creativity but also paralyzing. Where neurotypical people can easily control their focus I can't.
Now I do think people that present their ADHD as a superpower are full of shit but I think it is fair to point out that some of the aspects could also be strengths if the structure I work with would allow them to be strengths. I think that is very fair to criticize.
I assure you that a significant chunk of my energy is spend every day in adjusting my communication to the needs of neurotypical people and always second guessing myself and improving how I do that. It just sucks that they get quite angry if I ever suggested they adjust their communication just a tiny bit for my sake.
Neither ADHD nor OCD have anything to do with communication style, 'being five steps ahead,' or patterns of interpersonal friction. The only symptom that remotely fits here is impulsive speech, and that's sporadic, it doesn't produce a consistent pattern of seeing yourself as above your colleagues, and its not related to the content style of the speech.
This is something i see allot of. People project what they want onto their pet diagnosis, without knowing what the diagnosis actually is. And god know what people mean when they say neurodevergent these days. The only thing i know for certain is that it never maps on to anything from real spectrum disorders.
OCD is ritualistic and compulsive behavior, often performed to decrease a negative feeling. It has nothing to do with anything described in the article or this thread. What does fit the described behavior: Rigidity, perfectionism, a need to do things the 'correct' way regardless of social cost,is OCPD, which is something completely different. And there is another diagnosis that is blindingly obvious but i wont name it out here.
There should also be noted that there are plenty of extremely smart people who don't end up in this pattern. If you're looking for myths, start with the myth of the troubled genius.
And a gift of seeing all possible solutions obviously doesn't extend to the interpersonal friction you're describing. The person you're replying to tried to point this out, and tried to communicate that you are missing something about the situation. I doubt it's the first time someone has. This reply is itself an example that just confirms the hypothesis: Someone offered feedback, and instead of sitting with it, you defended, reframed, and redirected blame outward. That's exactly the pattern I described.
> And there is another diagnosis that is blindingly obvious but i wont name it out here.
I wonder why a self identified mental health professional would go to such lengths to deny the viewpoint many of autistic people, who frequently report that the truth of what they say matters far less to organizations than the manner in which they say it.
Because it’s annoying that people can’t even stick with the criteria that are basically the same across all the major diagnostic manuals. And because I believe that words and concepts should mean somethin. Because it’s proof that they are not really as focused on details as they claim.
Every time someone wrongly claim they have PTSD, which is a lot these days, they water down and diminish the experience of people who have experienced severe and real trauma.
Said another way. Because it’s egotistical.
For the record, I have worked with hundreds of people with ASD and helped them understand how to navigate social relations. And I’ve tried to work with people that claim they have ASD, but in reality, just use it as an excuse to be a jackass. Guess which ones of them are defensive with regards to their pet diagnosis?
You sound like a dreadful psychologist if true. You clearly do not have empathy or understanding or tou have burned out and need a break. Your so assured in your antagonistic retorts that you are unraveling the very point of trust you staked to give your opinion social validation....You are lacking aelf awareness and it shows that clearly you are generalizing the diagnoses and possibily you just over diagnose narcissism because its easier?
There is absolutely no empathy in not helping people with the actual problem. Using ASD protocol on someone who has a personality disorder is going to make things worse.
It sounds to me like you have no empathy for all the people who are afraid to acknowledge that they have an autism diagnosis because it has become a fashionable diagnosis.
If you look at your response to me making serious points about the need for valid diagnoses and criteria to conduct proper research and find the best treatment methods for everyone, you use this to assume that I don’t think everyone should get help.
For instance, I get extremely annoyed when people misdiagnose borderline personality disorder by calling it bipolar. If you use the treatment protocol for bipolar disorder, you’re going to make it worse for the person.
Do you think I’m dismissing their suffering and dismissing their plight? I love helping people. How many people have you heard of going to a clinician and ending up talking about something that wasn’t really their issue, spending years going through the motions? Much of that is not working on the correct problem. So I actually think it’s extremely dangerous, destructive, and unempathic towards the people who are suffering to glorify avoidance of the real issues and attack anybody who tries to help people focus on the issue.
The best example of how naïve you are regarding real psychological therapy is when you say it’s easier to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder. It’s one of the hardest things to do. It’s infinitely easier to just agree with everything the person says, give them the ADHD or PTSD diagnosis, and let them sit with it for 10 years while suffering and avoiding working on themselves.
I honestly hope you are lying about your profession, rather than venting your personal frustrations with clients by arguing with people that you believe resemble them online.
I have absolutely no frustration with my clients. Be it psychopaths, social anxiety, pedophilia, or schizophrenia. I think I currently actually like all of my clients. And I think all of them I appreciate my approach. Because with them, I don’t care about labels. I only care about figuring out together what the real problem is. Can I accept who they are no matter what their problem is, or who they are. The only thing I “fight”, metaphorically, against self deception.
That doesn’t mean that diagnosis is are handy quick references for the topic at hand.
Obviously, I don’t talk so directly confrontation with my clients as I do on a forum, but I follow the same principle. If I disagree on their own self assessment, I talk with them about it until we both agree on what the real problem is. Sometimes I’m wrong. Sometimes the diagnosis label people give themselves is a defense mechanism.
Yes. The terrible ideology of working on yourself not blaming the world! It’s only the core of almost all psychotherapy approaches, self-help book, secular self improvement programs, and religions ever.
I find that there is a big difference between how people that use the fact that they are "A perfectionist OCD person".
Some wield it at a weapon. Some use it as an excuse. Some start with the assumption that it can be harness into something good. And some beat them self up over it uses it to degrade them self.
I think its most helpful to view it as a "know thy self" data point, and not make it someone else problem, but use it as information as to what is ones own challenges that must be kept in check. And if one is relay good, use it for something productive.
A great way for cultivating internalized self hatred and burn out.
You approach isn't wrong per se and might be the right one for some people. Some people need to be told to take more personal responsibility
But other people take too much personal responsibility already and only blame themselves and need to be told that they have a disability and it is their right to ask for accessibility and help. That the world is part of the problem.
The people to who take too much responsibility are not the one that "makes it other peoples problem", unless they are suffering from a dependent personality disorder.
And even then, consider rearranging what you just said in your reply. You are saying: You have to make it someone else problem to avoid self hatred and burnout.
There is a difference in relying and getting support from people, and being a jackass.
The trick is to be the Oracle of Delphi, not Cassandra.
Make the prediction once, with politeness and humility, and preferably in enough company that your opinion is noted even if (when) it is overridden. Use it as an opportunity to be seen as wise, not just smart.
Then, keep contingency plans. When the problem manifests, have a solution ready as best you can given your limited position. Even when it's too late to avoid the whole problem, you might be able to limit the blast radius. Again, be public but polite about it, and most importantly never say "I told you so" or otherwise appear smug.
You want to cultivate the reputation of "the person who is right but easy to work with, and who always has your back in a pinch."
I'd push back gently on 'just shut up' as the solution. In my experience, people like you are usually CORRECT about the problem, and the anger and annoyance is well funded. It can be annoyance with the bad architecture, the wasteful meetings, the dysfunctional team dynamics. But you are falling into the same pattern as the author... Where it breaks down is treating 'being right' as the end of the job. Figuring out how to get others to see what you see, that's the actual unsolved problem, and it is more often than not solvable. Giving up on it means real problems stay unfixed, which helps nobody. If you channel the energy into solving what annoys you, in a productive way, you make both your life and your team better.
> Figuring out how to get others to see what you see
but this is exactly the point of article: event if you make them see, they just pretend they don't because it's not in their personal immediate interest to admit you are right or you were right (later)
I gotta say you really nailed a solid explanation for what I felt reading the OA but would not have been able to articulate it this clearly.
As someone who personally had a history of wanting to be right, sometimes at the expense of being effective, this is a lesson worth taking to heart.
What I’ve learned is that raw engineering chops and deep end-to-end thinking is highly valued if and only if you understand where leadership is trying to go and you bring people along in your vision. If you pitch your boss and they say no, you need to take it to heart and understand why, if you plow ahead vowing to show how right you were you are forcing them into an awkward position where you can only lose.
A lot of replies in the thread siding with the original author and indignant on their own terms about how they’ve been wronged by “corrupt” leaders. But this betrays a misunderstanding of how large orgs work. The nature of success is you have to subvert yourself to the whims of the organization, and only stick your neck out to challenge the status quo when you have sufficient air cover from someone higher up who believes in you. Corporations are often dysfunctional and anyone working within them can clearly see the flaws, but you’ve got to be clear eyed about what influence you have, and even then, pick your battles, or you’ll be rejected like an immune response from the organization.
> And receiving a formal warning is an extremely serious signal.
To be nitpicky, the article doesn't say 'formal warning,' just 'warning.' That could have been anything from a gentle let-down to a reprimand.
That being said, I think your broader point is reasonably true: the author frames the 'political games' of promotion as a regrettable necessity rather than a job requirement beyond the juniormost levels. Despite their self-description as helpful and cooperative, they disdain the dyadic sport of cooperatively making their boss look good.
That's not to say that one should submit to base exploitation, of course, but there's a fine art to understanding the constraints and incentives of others and working with (and often within) that framework.
A second skill is being able to separate the person from the position, to maintain friendly or at least respectful personal relationships with people who might be professional adversaries at the moment. This is harder, but if professional hostility reads as personal contempt that will definitely destroy one's social weight in an organization.
As I wrote in the opening. That’s exactly what we do all the time. It’s called case formulation. It’s called hypothesis testing. In this case it’s also common sense about human nature.
It's called "strawman fallacy", you
replacing the thesis and add things that wasn't there to draw plausible conclusions instead of trying to get more information if there's not enough. Calling it "hypothesis" isn't charging anything.
I think you just heard that word and use it because it makes you sound like a logical person. It’s not fitting at all here. After all, a straw man would be me taking a general claim and creating the weakest version of that argument.
If anything, you should argue that it’s overgeneralization, over-extrapolation, or an argument from authority. Hell, if you involved the concept of non sequitur, it would be better.
It’s like you’re cobbling together words related to scientific rigor without understanding the concepts. A hypothesis is, by definition, based on incomplete data. If it wasn’t, it would just be called an observation. So you make a hypothesis, see how it fits the data, and maybe even see how well it predicts the future.
... personal psychology aside (btw somehow i have never seen anyone taking on the top-winners but anyway)
but what i see, organisational-health-wise, is a way-too-long and totally broken communication chain. A Director presents a vision and does not communicate it to related/interested internal parties, someone on the floor invents something or develops something by the spec and does not show a preliminary versions / check ground / seek feedback while in-process, and how many levels in-between those, just one - or more - doing nothing to facilitate the information flow?
Honestly, I think your hypothesis betrays a naïveté on how corporations actually function. How much time have you spent working in a technical capacity at a mid or large size corporation?
I've worked for 25+ years in mid and large size corporations, including IBM, Google, and other places (so a pretty large gamut of cultures and behaviors), and i think it's exactly right, FWIW.
For example - there is little to no understanding presented by the OP as to the actual perspectives of others - IE giving factual examples of what happened, and how this made OP view the other person's perspective. Instead, you get exactly one side of a story, without really any facts, and then a cartoon caricatures they are presenting as the other side (also without any real facts).
What is the actual example of what the other side of any of these stories did that is being used to back up these perspectives?
The post you are responding to points this (and other things) out , in a fairly kind way, and it's totally right to do so.
FWIW - i'll point you did a variant of the same behavior OP did- you say it betrays someone as being naieve, but provide no examples that actually back this up (IE what facts and examples do you have that make you believe it is naieve), and then sort of try to place the burden of them to prove you wrong by asking how long they worked at corporations?
This is nowhere near as bad an example as what OP did, but I would offer, similar to the post you responded to - it is much more effective and helpful if, rather than sort of try to paint someone else with your feelings, instead provide your experience and why it made you agree or disagree with what they wrote.
That is actually helpful in understanding your perspective on the situation, and enables folks to have a real discussion about it.
Some. I was CTO of a mid-sized firm (~$30M revenue) and have sat on the board of two hospital psychiatric units. Granted, I'm in Norway, so office politics may differ.
But let me ask you the reverse: How much time have you spent helping people actually improve themselves? Because in my experience, the single biggest obstacle to professional growth isn't corporate politics, it's the lengths people will go to protect their ego from accountability. And focusing on systemic injustice is a destructive patterns I've seen in both the clinic and in the workplace.
So if you think Im naive with regards to office politics you might be right... But what if you are naive with regrades the psychology of defense mechanisms?
No, just me. As you can see from my long history I always took the time ever so often to comment in-depth on stuff i care about on HN, since its the place with the most interesting spread of content for me, and the place with the highest chance of getting interesting responses. I do admit that i use AI for spell-correction, but that sucks since it peppers my grammar with EM (—), which is obviously makes people suspect it pure AI. And i have to re-edit it to remove them to avoid comments like this. But its just me...
Btw, that is what Caesar said to his friend who betrayed him along with all the other senators. I fail to see how accusing chatgpt of betrayal makes sense here, so I'm assuming you have a misunderstanding of the phrase.
In later iOs versions i started making much more mistakes. Felt i got old or something. But whenever i type on my Android phone, its like nothing has changed. I swear that the iOs keyboard is trolling, I HIT O NOT I! O AM CERTAIN!
This is my favorite field for me to have opinions about, without not having any training or skill. Fundamental research i just a something I enjoy thinking about, even tho I am psychologist. I try to pull inn my experience from the clinic and clinical research when i read theoretical physics. Don't take this text to seriously, its just my attempt at understanding whats going on.
I am generally very skeptical about work on this level of abstraction.
only after choosing Klein signature instead of physical spacetime, complexifying momenta, restricting to a "half-collinear" regime that doesn't exist in our universe, and picking a specific kinematic sub-region. Then they check the result against internal consistency conditions of the same mathematical system.
This pattern should worry anyone familiar with the replication crisis.
The conditions this field operates under are a near-perfect match for what psychology has identified as maximising systematic overconfidence: extreme researcher degrees of freedom (choose your signature, regime, helicity, ordering until something simplifies), no external feedback loop (the specific regimes studied have no experimental counterpart), survivorship bias (ugly results don't get published, so the field builds a narrative of "hidden simplicity" from the survivors), and tiny expert communities where fewer than a dozen people worldwide can fully verify any given result.
The standard defence is that the underlying theory — Yang-Mills / QCD — is experimentally verified to extraordinary precision. True. But the leap from "this theory matches collider data" to "therefore this formula in an unphysical signature reveals deep truth about nature" has several unsupported steps that the field tends to hand-wave past.
Compare to evolution: fossils, genetics, biogeography, embryology, molecular clocks, observed speciation — independent lines of evidence from different fields, different centuries, different methods, all converging. That's what robust external validation looks like. "Our formula satisfies the soft theorem" is not that.
This isn't a claim that the math is wrong. It's a claim that the epistemic conditions are exactly the ones where humans fool themselves most reliably, and that the field's confidence in the physical significance of these results outstrips the available evidence.
I find it hard to care about claims of degradation of quality, since this has been a firehouse of claims that don't map onto anything real and is extremely subjective. I myself made the claim in error. I think this is just as ripe for psychological analysis as anything else.
Did you read the article? It's not about subjective claims, it's about a very real feature getting removed (file reads showing the filepath and numbers of lines read).
This is exactly what I am talking about. Let me try to explain.
I am interested in the more abstract and general concept of: "People excessively feel that things are worse, even if they are not." And I see this A LOT in the AI/LLM area.
For instance, the claim that Claude Code, on the UX/DX side, is dumbed down seems to me absolutely not a reasonable take. The "hiding" of the file name being read is no longer being shown neither supports that claim, AND has to be seen in the context of Claude Code as a whole.
On the first point: Could one not make the argument that "not showing files read", is part of a more advanced abstraction layer, switching emphasis to something else in the UX experience? That could, by some, be seen as the overall package becoming more advanced and making choices as to what is presented for cognitive load. Secondly... it's not removed. It's just not default shown in non-verbose mode. As I understand it, you can just hit CTRL+O to see it again.
Secondly, even if it was done ONLY to be less for "power user focus," and more for dumb people (got to love the humility in the developer world), it's blindly obvious that you can't just mention ONE change as proof that Claude Code is dumbed down. And to me, it just does not compute to say that Claude Code feels dumbed down over the last patches. The amount of more advanced features, like seeing background tasks, the "option" selection feature, lifecycle hooks, sub-agents, agent swarms, skills—all of these have been released in just the last few months. I have used Claude Code since the very beginning, and it is just insane to claim that it's getting dumber as a tool. And this is just in relationship to the actual functionality, UX, and DX, not the LLM quality. But people see "I now have to hit CTRL+O to see files being read = DUMBED DOWN ENSHITFICATION!!!" I don't get it.
My point was simply... I'm much more interested in the psychological aspects driving everybody to predictably always claim that "things are getting worse," when it seems to not be the case. Be that in the exaggerated (but sometimes true) claims of model degradation, or as in this example of Claude Code getting dumbed down. What is driving this bias towards seeing and claiming things are getting worse, out of proportion to reality?
Or even shorter: why are we obsessed with the narrative of decline?
I know you think that's a clever comeback, but it's not; it's just a shift in what level of analysis one does.
It's an experienced reality indeed, but THEN you create a narrative based on that. Obviously.
Experienced reality is, by definition, subjective and affected by filters for what you can, and how, experience things.
For instance, you can actually and truly experience something as bad, and then create a narrative around that. And you can be right, or you can be wrong in the narrative. Some narcissists experience themselves as a victim and unfairly treated, but everybody around them thinks the victim narrative is wrong, because they can clearly see that they are primarily at fault for their own situation.
So you just shifted the question to: "Why do people have a bias towards experience something as worsening, regardless of objective measures of quality"?
No. What you say is obviously true. My question is: Why do, on average, people always make wrong claims in the same DIRECTION? Towards negativity.
Let's say we had objective data on things people say that we know are wrong regarding LLMs. The amount of people who WRONGLY say "It's getting worse" dwarfs the amount of people who WRONGLY think it has gotten better.
All I said is that I'm starting to get more interested in the psychological factors for this observation, the negativity bias, than actually investigating if the latest in a series of "OMG MODEL DEGRADATION" or "UI SUCKS NOW" posts; is actually true.
What a list of bangers!
reply