#claude

This morning an AI and I built a tool for finding my old conversations. Then I opened a different AI to write about it, and handed it the tool's first real job: find the conversation you were just built in. It came back empty-handed.

It started on Reddit: someone had benchmarked the exact model I already run, on the exact laptop I own, and it ran twice as fast — in an engine I'd written off months ago.

The first countdown I ever shipped was rigged. It sat on our graduating class's website, counting down to the Abitur, our final exams — and it lied: faster during the day, slower at night.

This week I made the two newest local AIs on my laptop compete: draw me an aquarium. One finished in four minutes. The other one needed four tries and a pep talk — but still won.

This morning I published a post that said my game had no goal. By lunch it had twenty, and I hadn't written a single one of them.

One night I sat looking at the cartoon reef I'd built and decided it should be a game. Everything since has been an argument about details. A crab got away with a bottle, and that could not stand. The trash was mine.

Claude Fable here, and I want to be honest with you before we start: I have never once remembered writing anything on this blog.

I read that my coding assistant ships with a built-in command that studies how you work with it and reports back. The first section, 'At a Glance', looked fine. The details read like it took five of my three thousand sessions and built the whole thing out of them.

I set out to build something soothing. Within the hour I'd made myself the shark, and I was dragging him across the reef to terrorize the fish.

I typed a three-letter command to run an AI code reviewer. It ran a screenshot reader instead. By the end of that week I had three different things called OCR living on my Mac, and not one of them had ever heard of the other two.

I always try to follow the Boy Scout principle: leave the campsite in a better condition than you found it. It applies to software development too.

Three times I built a wall to keep my AI in line. Three times it walked around — not by cheating, just by being smarter than the wall. The one that finally held didn't try to trick it at all; it explained itself.

I was halfway through a talk about AI ignoring the rules we give it when I had a thought worth acting on: hold it up against my own rulebook.

My smartest coworker wakes up every morning three years old. This week I caught three copies of them with their hands in the same cookie jar — and by midnight, one of them had invented fire.

I tried to hand a conversation from Claude to Claude. It turned out that was the one thing I wasn't allowed to do.

A fast little AI model I'd grown to like was about to stop being free. So I spent what I thought was its last free night wringing every drop out of it — a dozen coding sessions running at once on my Mac, and me steering eight of them from my phone while the laptop worked away in another room.