My experience is the more things you add to the list, the worse agents perform (I'm not exactly the first person to notice this)
I actually have a pretty simple set of instructions right now and Claude still regularly messes them up. Like, my first instructions are:
- Never commit to git without permission.
- Never sign commit messages
You know what it constantly does? Commits without permissions and signs commit messages! And then I ask it, and it's like "oh, you're right, I have that instruction and I ignored it". If you were working with a junior developer, you'd expect at some point they get it, but with Claude even if I tell it to stuff the instructions into it's memory, it will do it, and STILL mess it up.
Then it gets even more fun, because if I politely correct it in the session, it will understand, but then there's a decent chance it will be completely unable to commit anything in the session going forward. Phd level intelligence!
Anyway, my point is, if you're asking it to review a list of 200 items I guarantee it's quietly messing up on a lot of that list.
Sometimes the fact you mentioned “signing commit messages” is exactly why it starts signing commit messages, and it’s better to start with no prompt at all.
Negative prompting is very unreliable. Giving exact instructions on how you want commits made will give you better results.
How am I supposed to take this tool seriously if it struggles with the concept of "dont"?
if what you're suggesting is true, then more important instructions like "Don't delete the production database" are a problem. I shouldn't need to consider how to phrase "Don't delete the production database" in a positive manner. Isn't the point of an AI agent that it understands my intent and I don't need to hold its hand? I'm not saying your suggestion is wrong, I just think that suggests a limit to what these tools should be used for if that's the case.
My guess though is that it probably ignores some of the positive instructions too, and the hardcore AI users mostly don't notice because they probably aren't reviewing the work.
I entirely agree, although I think this is counter to the narrative that we should just let the agent do everything that the labs want to sell.
There's a really major problem with the concept of human-in-the-loop though, which is just that humans are not built for that that kind of work. It's like all those tests against the TSA where they manage to sneak something through that should have been caught. But the problem is, a TSA agent sees probably like 1000 things they can ignore to the 1 thing they need to look at, and it's easy to just start rubber stamping things.
If you're relying on asking the LLM "pwease don't delete" then you're already in trouble. This kind of stuff doesn't work with people either and they generally exhibit actual signs of intelligence.
Sure; it's an example, I would never rely "Please don't delete" for real important data. However, we're being sold an idea that we should just let the agent do everything, so I think it's important to point out how utterly insane that idea actually is.
> How am I supposed to take this tool seriously if it struggles with the concept of "dont"?
Don't think of a pink elephant in a tutu.
What did you just think about? =)
This has been true since the very first GPT release, any words you say to the model will nudge it towards that word - it doesn't matter if you have a negative in front of the word.
Form the guidance using positive words like "always use the development database at..." instead of "don't access the production database" ... Now it "knows" that the prod database exists and "thinks" about it when processing.
> Anyway, telling agent to NOT do something is always worse than telling agent to do something.
> That's why you should say something like "Use constants instead of magic strings/numbers" rather than "Do not use magic strings/numbers".
Pro tip: This is good guidance for communicating with humans as well. Don't just block people but give them a path forward. (But don't force them down that path, because people really hate feeling like their agency is being impinged.)
You should set things like this in Claude's settings.json rather than just asking the model and hoping it will obey. That way it will be enforced by the harness.
As some other comments have said, there are various other options like hooks which are run by the harness and can be used to always enforce certain things (running a formatter for example).
But for your examples, settings are the correct solution. Set an ask permission on git commit and it will always prompt you before committing. For commit messages, just set attribution commit to an empty string and it will stop adding its own attribution. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
Totally. For anything like this, I find asking people or just reading the docs way quicker and much, much more reliable than asking AI. It's interesting that the models seem to know very little about their own abilities.
I personally find that models are trending towards ignoring any instructions given to them, so depend more on vendor-instilled behavior. Anecdotal, but I had bad experiences with OAI's new 5.6.
Same for me. Not sure if its intentional (do they want to push people towards workflows that will burn more tokens?) or if it's just a side effect, but it's very annoying. I refuse to use tools that dictate how I develop, I'm just going to switch models to less opinionated ones.
I let it have elevated permissions and it started doing some crazy things like figuring out I had zsh and running zshell commands instead of the common ones.
I have dedicated checkpoint and commit skills. Checkpoint has it run my review skill, then run my commit skill. The commit skill just asks it to suggest commit messages for my review. Having these skills in place has resulted in claude preferring to use the commit skill instead of committing on its own, and suggesting commit messages to me before actually doing the commit.
Who likes writing commit messages? In the abstract, perfectly spherical developer mindset, I'd spend hours writing the best commit message to go with the most elegant and perfect, beautiful code that I'm comitting, but the real world with meetings and life demands is greasier and grimer than that. Letting the LLM start off with the commit messages for me to edit with additional details has been a boon to productivity. Staring at an empty $EDITOR my brain goes blank, but with a framework of what's going on, I find the details for me to add flow more easily.
I have commit signing enabled by default. I run my harness in a sandbox which doesn't have access to my signing key, and I always tell it not to commit. When it ignores me, the commit fails because it can't access the signing key... so the agent commits without signing. Tragic.
My git commits are ssh key verified and the key is behind a TouchID gate. I've told agents that they shouldn't try committing because I need to be on the computer to activate Touch ID.
I’m not a Claude code user, is there really no way to get it to not commit to git other than “asking it nicely in a prompt”? I thought there was some sort of permission system?
I could ban it from using git, but having access to git logs helps it do work so I don't want to go that far. I could probably ban the subcommand, but as a convenience I do like to be able to ask it to make a commit. (I'm not super attached to this, I frequently commit myself just to avoid these issues). It does tend to write good commit messages, so sometimes I ask it to generate the commit message and then just do the operation myself, which kind of sucks in the sense of feeling like reverse-centaur (Cory Doctorow term). (The reason I do that is sometimes it gets confused where if I greenlit one commit, it assumes all future commits are greenlit)
I guess the other option would be to not use "auto" mode, but god there's just no way I want to sit around and it "yes" 50x a session. I'd rather just sandbox it and nuke it if it does something too stupid.
If I’m going to be responsible for the code that Claude writes on my behalf, I’m also going to take full responsibility for the moment that it is added to the project history, so I’m going to at least review every line before I allow that to happen.
The automatic coauthor line is also just a pet peeve. It’s a tool, not a person. I don’t say that a commit was coauthored by vim - why should Claude get special treatment?
I want it to commit on my behalf, and I don't pay full attention before commits. But I do review every line at the PR level, just as I would if some other human were to submit a PR, and if I find something off, then I ask it to fix it before I will approve the PR.
re: automatic coauthoring -- you can turn that off, but I prefer to turn that on. Commit ownership is something that I want to make clear was not just a human, but a human + AI. Agentic coding does get special treatment from me, because the volition to make changes doesn't come from me. I want that to be clear in the history. The only time I do my own commits (without the coauthor line) is when I make some change myself, without a coding agent.
I wrote this to do that: https://github.com/deepbluedynamics.com/nemesis8, although I also added `gh` to it so it could do that if it needed to. It can be easily disabled during the container build. Supports at least 8 agent CLIs.
And for bonus points you can have the agent write you a Pre Bash hook. Tell it to make the hook look in the command for anything that’s a git commit. The vaguer your instructions here the better. Let it pull some crazy regex out of its hat. You’ll be impressed.
I never ran into it making commits before but when I tried Fable it made a bunch of commits signed by Claude, but then in the next prompt I just said "don't make commits anymore" and it was like "okay" and saved its own little md file and it hasn't happened sense.
I want to be clear that I'm not saying this to discredit the people saying they can't get claude to stop making its own commits, I'm just adding data to the "wow this is inconsistent" collection.
I actually have a pretty simple set of instructions right now and Claude still regularly messes them up. Like, my first instructions are:
You know what it constantly does? Commits without permissions and signs commit messages! And then I ask it, and it's like "oh, you're right, I have that instruction and I ignored it". If you were working with a junior developer, you'd expect at some point they get it, but with Claude even if I tell it to stuff the instructions into it's memory, it will do it, and STILL mess it up.Then it gets even more fun, because if I politely correct it in the session, it will understand, but then there's a decent chance it will be completely unable to commit anything in the session going forward. Phd level intelligence!
Anyway, my point is, if you're asking it to review a list of 200 items I guarantee it's quietly messing up on a lot of that list.