I can’t really decide. Punishments for crimes need to be enough to prevent people from doing them. Guy made millions of dollars fraudulently, what’s an acceptable punishment if it’s not jail time?
Same thing with big companies. They knowingly break the law because the punishment is less than what they gain from it. There’s no incentive not to break the law at that point.
A fine of an equal amount + s&p gains on that amount over that period of time. This is not a person who has indicated they would physically be unsafe in society. Many people don’t have the opportunity to lie at that level, but would, are they dangerous and in hiding?
If they spent a good chunk of it at the time and you don't let them discharge that fine in bankruptcy, isn't that basically a sentence to a life of poverty to pay back the $X million owed? Median US income is about 90k, let's say that left him owing 4M (less than half of 8M + interest), that's 44 years to pay back 4M even if the entirety of your salary was going to it.
Is "forfeit what you've got and go to jail for 18 months" harsher than that? I'd pick the one that let me get a clean start after.
And in the case that it wasn't spent, and by fine you mean as a replacement for any forfeiture, not in addition, then sibling comment has a great point that "if you get caught, you just gotta give it back" is an incentive to commit fraud, not one against committing fraud.
I mean, returning what you stole, surrendering the gains you made from what you stole, and covering the gap of the person you stole from seems pretty reasonable? Like, they were made whole. It's a net loss to the thief.
Prison for theft is so brutally cruel. Who was really harmed by this once he paid the money back? A line item in some megacorp that was lower for awhile?
No one felt anxiety or pain, the megacorp probably barely noticed. Pay them back with interest, move on.
Obviously the calculus changes for violent thefts, or breaking into someone's home. Those cause real emotional impacts to people. Of course simply returning those items doesn't make someone whole.
I have had a very different experience so far. The more code AI writes for me the worse it gets. It gets more complicated and it’s harder to follow and understand. It doesn’t refactor, it layers on top.
Even worse is that it’s hard to do anything about it at this point because reviewing code is very different from writing it, so even if I’ve seen it all I don’t have that same deep level of understanding that I do when I write it myself.
All these AI code bases are ticking time bombs. Either AI gets smart enough that it won’t matter in the future or we’re going to have a huge mess to clean up.
It's possible I invented skills before they were common. I've always had some instructions in agents.md that are something like "when working with typescript, read prompts/conventions.ts.md, when working with our fooBar module, read prompts/foobar.md"
I'm not sure if this differs greatly from skills. Maybe my wording makes these "skills" less likely to be read at the correct times, but I haven't seen an issue.
I try to keep agents/Claude.md as tiny as possible. With high level "truths" that don't change. Stack used, invariants, file structure, and some scripts.
Skills are more for things you do often. I run mutation tests, type check,linting,etc. I _could_ just prompt and copy/paste the same prompt each time I need to, or I can just run /tests.
I also have skills for specialized tasks I need every once in a while, like a ux skill, a text skill optimized for xyz, etc.
Most guidance I’ve read, and experienced success with, is keeping a lean agents.md file and building out a tree of docs or skills that an agent can navigate via progressive disclosure.
Depends on how much information and details you have. The agents.md always goes into context. Detailed testing or process information might be excessive, when agent is working on UI. Skills are pulled when needed.
I handle the context problem by splitting the details to dozens of small md files. Agents.md acts as a router that directs the llm to correct documentation file/folder according to the task at hand.
This documentation is its own git repo, and the agents.md file has an explicit instruction to update the docs when it has learned something general that can be useful in future sessions. I then occasionally review and prune those docs.
The description in the front-matter (at the top of the skill markdown file) is the only thing in the context and used by the agent to determine when to read in the rest of the skill file.
skills are just an agents.md broken up into chunks so you can manage and share them separately. unfortunately there's no real good workflow for managing or sharing them separately, so most people end up treating them exactly the same way they do agents.md.
My problem with hard mode is it leaves a lot up to luck. If it was 3 letters and ended in “at” it could be pat, mat, bat, hat, cat, rat, sat, etc. so all you can do is to pick one and hope for the best.
> and it's likely producing better output to keep a human in the loop rather than trying to solve the world independently and making multiple incorrect assumptions.
I was just discussing this with a co-worker yesterday. I would really like a model (or harness?) that worked with me instead of for me. Walk me through its choices and decisions, let me correct it and guide it along. I would be way more confident in it's output, I would be more familiar with the changes that are being made, and it would make reviewing the final code way easier since I was making the decisions along side it. I'm sure it would also reduce the "brainrot" we're all going to experience the more we hand work to these models.
does "Superpowers" exist outside of the Claude ecosystem? I feel like I've become hooked on this workflow - honestly I could take or leave the models ... it's the workflows and the way that they essentially create tightly focused loops over multiple sessions that I've becoming fairly dependent on.
Aside from the skills mentioned, I recently found that asking the model to create a simple HTML presentation to walk you through it's proposed design can do wonders. Fine tune your prompt to your liking (language style, what to include, what not, etc). Then, read that thing thoroughly, and keep asking questions and iterating on the plan until you fully understand what's about to be built, and are happy with it.
Same thing with big companies. They knowingly break the law because the punishment is less than what they gain from it. There’s no incentive not to break the law at that point.