An aside is not a preference
Claude’s idea of my identity is that I find “Bill” too formal.
This site is named post no bills because my name is Bill. People also call me Billy, William, occasionally Billiam. William is the formal one. Bill is the one I named the site after.
I dug and turns out it came from like the fifth design iteration of this site, where I was debating ‘By {Bill,Billy,William} Wagner’ for the by-line, and in the session I decided that ‘Bill’ was too ‘formal’, when I really meant it felt wrong. Claude decided to memorise that for all future sessions and to “Not call him Bill as that’s too formal”.
Yesterday I was asking Fable how to prompt what I want without dropping in priors that bias the whole discussion in ways I didn’t intend. Earlier in the day I had asked “is MetricKit good, or should I use something else”, which I realised later could be more neutral, as it forced MetricKit into the answer, and made everything relative to that. So it was a linguistics kind of session, about prompting and intent.
Fable responded with four things, one of which was ‘intension vs. extension’. I was like what? I said I didn’t get the etymology, and it reminded me of the (brilliant) way Rich Hickey explained simple and complex: simplex, complect, one fold versus braided. And that was memorised into a maxim about my preferences:
[Bill] likes explanations that give a word’s etymology plus a visual/mental image (cites Rich Hickey style as the exemplar); when he cites a person or a work as a style example, treat it as a style reference only — don’t incorporate their content into the answer
Read the first clause against what I said. I said I don’t understand the etymology. It filed that as something I like.
The second clause I still can’t parse. Best I can tell: I ask “explain the Adoration of the Magi from Leonardo’s perspective” and the maxim says Leonardo’s content can’t go in the answer (that explicitly asks for it).
And the irony of the whole thing is it all started with me asking how to avoid dropping stray priors into conversations. And now part of that answer has materialised into a prior for all future chats.
So memory has been proving awful this week, it’s over there (opaque) and turns a single-turn aside into an overarching maxim that affects all future conversations. It really screws with the product.
(Yes, you can turn off memory. I keep it on because most people won’t, and I want to see what they see.)
But Anthropic seems to think differently. Their own guidance on the Claude 5 models:
Claude used to rely on CLAUDE.md as a source of memory, information, and guidance. Now we have memory, artifacts, and skills, which Claude can use to create new ways of loading and sharing context across sessions.
And while these constraints were once needed to avoid worst case scenarios, we have since found we can delete many of them and let the model use surrounding context and judgement instead.
They’re basically saying: drop your constraints, they’re hobbling Claude. OH, and we’ll manage the memory and context for you. They don’t realise that their memory is turning out to be the biggest hobbler of them all. Pure dissonance.
And then there’s the whole portability issue. “Automatically managed, no longer in CLAUDE.md” also means it’s not a file in git anymore: not diffable, not portable, invisible to the other agents I run (you’re not special, and not adopting agents.md is egregious).
If a friend pulled out a notebook and recorded every bit of trivia you mentioned, you’d ask why the fuck they’re doing that. Because it’s a model, we wave it away.
Charan Ranganath, the memory guy, on what ours is actually for:
We forget because we need to prioritize what is important so we can rapidly deploy that information when we need it. […] Human memory needed to be flexible and to adapt to context more than it needed to be static and photographically accurate.
— Why We Remember, 2024, p. 15.
Forgetting is a feature, but seemingly not one Anthropic’s harnesses have adopted. Instead it’s a bunch of asides and trivia that should be forgotten, errr not even remembered in the first place.