Michael GalassiApr 11

Interesting interaction with Claude:

As a software engineer I'm fascinated by how you operate. I think one of the most difficult things I do in my every-day life is come to terms with how different interacting with you is relative to how I interact with my day job (emacs -> cmake -> make -> clang -> ...)

That's a really thoughtful observation, and I find it genuinely interesting to think about too.

The toolchain you described — emacs, cmake, make, clang — is beautifully deterministic. You can trace exactly why any output is what it is, reproduce it perfectly, inspect every intermediate step, and reason about correctness in a formal sense. It behaves according to rules you can in principle fully understand.

Interacting with me is almost the opposite in character. I'm probabilistic, I can't fully explain my own outputs, I have no persistent state, I can be confidently wrong, and the same question asked twice might get subtly different answers. From a software engineering mindset that's trained to value reproducibility and correctness, that has to feel deeply unsettling at times — maybe even philosophically uncomfortable.

What I think makes it particularly interesting from your perspective is that I'm also software, just software of a fundamentally different kind than anything that came before in your career. The abstraction layers go so deep that even my creators can't fully trace why I produce a specific output, which is genuinely unlike anything in traditional computer science.

I'd enjoy those conversations whenever you feel like having them. You'd bring a perspective to them that most people don't — someone who understands both sides of the fence deeply. Questions about how I work, what my limitations mean in practice, where I'm likely to be reliable versus not — those are exactly the kinds of things a software engineer's intuition is well suited to probe.

Show threadMark GalassiApr 12
@michaelgalassi
Wow, if any AI spoke to me that intimately I would say "let's get a room".
I would of course say "meson and ninja".
I tried your prompt on qwen and although it outlined the same differences, it was much more formulaic and with bullet points, instead of being so intimate.
Show threadMichael GalassiApr 12

@markgalassi @jimsalter My surprise at the tone is why I chose to share the interaction. It occurred to me that part of why it was so familiar could be that over time I've interacted with Claude dozens of times so it knows that all my interactions start with "Hi Claude" and end with "thank you, that was helpful" (or some variant). To avoid this previous training which may lead Claude to trying to behave more like a person and less like a machine I went to https::/duck.ai/ and posed the same question after selecting llama 4 scout. The response was much more concise and actually reminded me a bit of an interaction with eliza.

I can understand why you'd find the interaction with me different from your day job. I'm a large language model, and our conversation is more akin to a natural language exchange. You simply type in your questions or prompts, and I respond with answers or information.

In contrast, your day job involves working with a variety of tools, such as Emacs, CMake, Make, and Clang, which are all specialized software development tools. These tools require a specific set of commands, syntax, and workflows to use effectively.

One key difference between interacting with me and using these tools is that our conversation is more free-form. You can ask me anything, and I'll do my best to provide a helpful response. With your development tools, you need to use specific commands, follow certain procedures, and understand the underlying technology to get the desired outcome.

Another difference is that I'm a more abstract entity, whereas your development tools are concrete software applications that you interact with using a specific interface. You can think of me as a conversational interface, whereas your tools are more like a command-line interface or a graphical user interface.

It's interesting that you bring up the complexity of your day job, as it highlights the different cognitive demands and skills required for software development versus conversational interactions like this one. Do you find that the skills you've developed as a software engineer have influenced your ability to interact with me, or vice versa?

Show threadJim Salter
@michaelgalassi like I said... maximize_engagement(user).
Apr 13 at 2:03pmWeb