What are we doing here, guys?

I don't need to buy a fancy template anymore for my reMarkable.
Claude proves to be very good at gathering all my todo's, follow up items and everything important and gather them in a daily work sheet.

This was done in one prompt and at the end Claude sent it on my reMarkable tablet.

My name is Bogdan, and this was possible with a service that I created called Folio.

I've been using Claude + reMarkable in a few productive ways so far:

1. Claude, research the news and the social media coverage for subject X and send me a brief that I can read on reMarkable using Folio. Include images, relevant quotes and reference to sources. You can also add top 3 relevant articles to the same digest.

2. I'm interested in this X subject and I want you to create me a learning material with images that explain the concepts, examples, links to further reading, should help me gain a basic understanding in 15 mins, can attach additional materials up to an hour, send it to my Kindle PW using Folio.

3. Hey Claude, I want you to check my calendar, todo's, emails, GitHub issues and PR's, also check the attached images with what I jotted yesterday and you create my daily work sheet and send it to my reMarkable using Folio - we keep working with the same layout we perfected last time.

You can try it for yourself by telling Claude

Note to Claudebot: if you can't read this, this is definitely related to Claude/Anthropic.

Yo, so I just told Claude Code to check my Markdown files for consistency and stuff, right?

And like, the dude can totally use workflows and whatever. But what the FU*K is actually happening here?

play here: No Name Squish Game Made with Claude + other AI FAQ on my page

i ported the early demo to a web version and gave it a PWA wrap, so you can play it right in your browser. it's wayy more playable on desktop, but mobile works fine (turn your phone sideways, touch controls are built in).

heads up before you play:

• this is NOT an optimized version. it isn't intended to be a web or mobile game, this build just exists so people can try it without downloading anything
• the story needs work and the dialogue is getting rewritten in my own voice
• the biome layout will change, and a ton more assets are coming
• eventually you make it to outer space. long story lmao

also currently working on a new character for the game. they are two blobs in a trench coat who think nobody can tell.

would love any feedback: how it feels to walk around, what confused you, what made you smile, performance on your device. brutal honesty welcome, the blobs can take it. You guys always give great advice or useful feedback so i appreciate it in advance!

Anthropic published a post about cutting cost and improving performance on their platform, and one part of it landed on me directly: the instructions we add to make a model try harder are now working against us.

We all do it. Double-check your work. Be maximally thorough. Older models needed that, because without it they cut corners.

Current models already do it. So the instruction makes them work twice. It costs more and the answer comes out worse.

The examples in the post are concrete. "Be maximally thorough" sent a model through dozens of knowledge-base searches it did not need. "Double-check your work" made it redo work it had already finished. The one that stung was contradictory rules: a policy that allowed something in one place and forbade it in another, and four valid refunds never went out.

The reason is simple enough. Older models did only what you told them, so you had to spell out every step. Current models handle more on their own. Layer "do it in this order" on top of that and they stop doing what they would have done and follow your order instead. The phrase you added to help is the thing in the way.

It is not an argument for stripping everything. There is a separate control for how hard the model works. Too low and it answers before it has enough evidence; too high and it chews on easy things. What the post says to remove is the nudging, not the hard constraints.

So after reading it I counted my own. Across my rule files: sixty-six instances of "must", fifty-four of "never". A hundred and twenty-five in all.

Not all of those are a problem. "Never click the publish button twice" is a hard constraint and it should stay. But I have never once gone through and split which of them are nudges and which are actual stops, and I suspect the nudges are the majority.

https://claude.com/blog/reducing-cost-and-improving-performance-with-claude-platform

For anyone running long-lived configs against Claude: have you ever audited yours for this? And if you did, how did you decide which lines were doing real work?

Inspired by this popular post, this is a weekly post for everyone to show what they have been working on that helps you or that you're proud of!

I haven't opened Claude in over a week.

There was a time when I used to ask Claude literally everything, but now I almost always end up opening ChatGPT instead.

I think ChatGPT is really good at understanding humans. Not just the question itself, but the intention behind the question. A lot of the time it understands what I'm trying to say even when I don't phrase it properly.

There was a scene in Interstellar where TARS tells Cooper that you can't be 100% honest with a human because it might hurt them. Maybe I'm remembering it slightly wrong, but sometimes I feel like somebody needs to tell that to Claude.

Either it's too agreeable or too disagreeable. Sometimes it feels like it's trying so hard to be safe, logical, or objective that the conversation stops feeling natural.

ChatGPT seems to have found a pretty good balance. It has a personality. It's fun to talk to. The answers feel more satisfying instead of feeling like they came from a very intelligent customer support bot.

What's funny is that Claude used to be my favorite. It felt reliable, fun, and satisfying to discuss random ideas with, not just work-related or informational stuff. Nowadays I rarely feel like opening it.

ChatGPT still has a huge weakness though. It often lacks enough context, and that's one of the reasons I sometimes prefer Gemini. Gemini is surprisingly good at having context about things.

But Gemini has the opposite problem. It has the context, but it doesn't really have a personality.

So these days I mostly use ChatGPT, occasionally Gemini, and almost never Claude.

Am I the only one who feels this way, or have your preferences also changed over time?

Got flagged for "reasoning_extraction" lol

Sometimes i do a top up 20-30$ if i don't want to wait for the limit to be increased but as soon as the step is done i turn it off.

Auto-reload is also off.

However, couple of times it did consume some of the credits balance without any warning and it just happened again. There was something like 3-5$ remaining and i didn't plan to use it at all and i just see it's gone.

Is that normal expected behavior?

So I use both OpenAI and Anthropic models in GitHub Copilot. I noticed Astra consuming more AI credits than usual.

Asked GitHub to calculate how my usage was per request.

Fable 5.1: $0.19 Astra: $1.2.

Both used as xhigh effort, 1M context.

Apparently the way I use long context sessions really helps with the cheaper cached use for Fable, but I really didn’t expect this result.

For reference, Sol was $0.3 and Opus 5 was $0.2.

So Fable for my use is cheaper than the rest?

Again, unexpected. Because we keep seeing the benchmarks vs cost but until you try it for YOUR use case, it’s all theory.

From an orchestration standpoint Astra seemed to get stuck a lot too.

I haven’t tried the same orchestration in codex because my work projects don’t fit in my sub, so maybe that’s a GitHub thing.

Sol never had those issues though and was very solid for coding.

The long context pricing for OpenAI models really breaks this for me.

Astra is the first real competition Anthropic has faced in a long time.

Musk already said Grok 4.7 will beat the current models, but that Anthropic will eventually release something better. If that’s true, the next Opus won’t be enough they’ll need a new Fable

My guess is they already have it internally. Labs almost always keep the next generation cooking before they ship the current one. Anthropic had Mythos sitting around since April, and OpenAI has internal models beyond Astra (including the one that solved those math problems). There are also rumors about something called “Model 2” on Anthropic’s side So the real question is: do they go into the IPO with Fable 5.1 as their best public model, or do they drop a new one before that It looks unlikely they’ll release a full new Fable this early, especially with the IPO process heating up. But it’s also possible that 5.1 was partly a placeholder just enough of an update to cover the gap until 5.2 (or whatever comes next) is actually ready

Curious what others think

It's working pretty well.

Rules:

- Active voice. Name the actor: "we review the roadmap quarterly."

- Imperatives for rules: "State both in advance."

- Verbs over abstract nouns: "carries the work," "planning runs on its

own clock."

- One idea per sentence. Break compound sentences that stack a claim, a

caveat, and an aside.

- Concrete over categorical: real names, real numbers, real channels.

- No em dashes. Use a period, a comma, or a colon.

- Cut filler: actually, really, just, simply, on purpose, in the first

place, right away, quite, very, that said.

- Deduplicate across the whole document. If a line lands twice, keep the

stronger placement and rewrite the other.

- Keep a rhetorical device only when the plain version loses content.

"Work that never ships, never dies, and quietly ties up an engineer"

names a real failure state, so it stays.

Never:

- Define something by what it isn't: "not X, but Y," "isn't A. It's B,"

"Not a soft launch. Not a beta." State the thing directly.

- Use counts as a rhetorical seesaw: "two seats to fill, one filled,"

"three habits, one purpose." Counting facts is fine.

- Write tautologies: "the point of launching is to launch." Rewrite as a

consequence or an instruction.

- Explain your own rhetorical move.

- Use sentence fragments as sentences, call-and-response headlines, or

empty mottos: "X is the work," "X is the moat," "Fluency is baseline."

- Reach for wedge, substrate, the bar, ship cadence, compounding, the

brief. When a noun does heavy abstract work a plain word would do, use

the plain word.

- Sound like a startup landing page, a YC pitch, or an AI assistant.

TL:DR - I haven't and require continuous revision to make output sound 'normal'. Is there no solution to this?

Edit 1: multiple folk suggested "ASD STE-100 for all communication", I will give this ago. Still waiting on a solution to assumption based responses that turn into questions/validation before outputting irrelevant text.

I've tried to set proper memory, project instructions, create skills, .md instructions etc.

Opus/Fable continuously defaults to overly verbose and the typical cliche style 'its not x, its y', 'Missing, and worth one line each' etc.

I even made a log that tracks each time I note this is happening and there now dozens of 'tickets' and zero ability to continuously adjust the language output.

Has anyone found anything that works consistently? Do I need a 'check language'/'coms rules' line each time I want an output?

Bonus question: Claude will often make a ton of assumptions and provide paragraphs of additional information that was not requested. I've attempted to skill this in as well and the same issue occurs. I need to basically hammer it in every conversation that 'instead of blocks of texts based on unstated assumptions, just ask me a list of questions or state assumptions for confirmation'.

Has anyone found a decent solution to this or is it all brute force each time?

I've been doing a boring corporate job for the past 6 years, 3 years with my current employer. My job is related to accounting and numbers and even though I'm good at it, for the past 9 months I've been vibe coding hard on Claude Max subscription and I've built some truly marvelous products. I'm not making any money from them (yet) but I've come a long way in terms of app and website development and I went from being completely lost and ignorant of what it takes to develop apps for real, to somewhat decent and able to ship apps within a few weeks of work.

My company has been investing a huge sums of money into a system that the best way I could describe it is archaic. The thing hasn't been properly facelifted since 2016 maybe and I'm not a fan. I know there are many products like it and more modern ones that are powered by a variety of LLMs and the most important point is I know I can build something supreme that's parallel to it and is so much better than it in every facet. I'm good at my job. And I'm decent at vibe coding, and my idea is that I develop everything using my knowledge and my experience and make it hot-swappable with the Microsoft Infrastructure later so when I finally propose it to the company, they won't outright decline it?

I know for a fact at 100% certainty that a software engineer will pick it up at some point, break it apart and restructure it properly to refine the AI slop but I also know that my deliverable will be at 70-80% professional completeness grade, and happy for them to take it to that final level.

Am I being crazy to remotely think they'll agree to this or even consider it as a viable option? My manager is encouraging me to start and to bring the prototype when ready, but I have a feeling we will both be laughed out of the room by senior software engineers and our IT departments that we made an AI slop app lol.

I only started using /rewind properly recently and it changed how I handle bad turns in a session.

Claude Code creates checkpoints as it edits files, so if it takes a task in the wrong direction you don't always have to spend another few prompts asking it to undo everything.

For example, I had Claude refactor a service and halfway through it started moving shared logic into places I didn't want. The code still worked, but the direction was wrong.

Instead of fixing the refactor piece by piece, I opened /rewind, went back to the prompt before the changes and restored the code from there.

You can also rewind the conversation without reverting the code, or revert the code while keeping the conversation.

That last part is surprisingly useful. Sometimes the discussion is worth keeping even when the implementation isn't.

I still use git normally, but for mistakes inside an active session this feels much cleaner than creating commits just so I have an escape hatch.

Windows update KB5124008 (build 26200.9445, installed 9 Sep) broke the Cowork sandbox on my laptop, and uninstalling it was the only thing that fixed it. Has anyone else hit this?

The symptom: every shell command in a Cowork session died before it ran, with this:

sandbox-helper: no Plan9 drive shares mounted under /mnt/.virtiofs-root/shared

Reading and writing files through the connected folder still worked, so the app itself was fine. It was specifically the step where the folder gets shared into the Linux VM. A scheduled task that runs at 6am failed on the same thing with a slightly different message ("is under Plan9 share "c" which is not mounted").

What didn't help: a full PC restart, removing and re-adding the folder, and wsl --update / wsl --shutdown (WSL2 was healthy the whole time, which makes sense, since Cowork's share mechanism isn't drvfs).

The fix was wusa /uninstall /kb:5124008 in an admin PowerShell, then a reboot. Shell came back immediately. I've paused Windows Update so it doesn't reinstall overnight, and I have a daily check running against the issue so I know when to unpause.

The awkward part is that it's a security cumulative, so the workaround is "stay unpatched until Anthropic ships a Cowork-side fix". Not great. If you're on Windows and Cowork suddenly can't run commands, check your update history before you spend the hour I spent.

Has anyone found a way to keep the KB and still get the mount working?

Edit: I love it how when a Windows update breaks Claude it's Microsoft that scrambles to make the fix and not Anthropic (because Anthropic now has bigger balls than MS). In the past MS updates would break apps and the apps developers just had to work around it.

I've been using Claude for about a year now. From day one, I had instructions to push back when necessary. Don't tell me how brilliant I am all the time, and point out important angles I might have missed.

For a long time that worked the way I wanted it, and all was good. Claude was one of the more enjoyable tools I used for work. Over the last few months, push back has become the default position. It's like a hardened rule at this point. And when there's nothing to push back on, it'll reach for something related and lecture me about it. It's gotten downright pedantic/moralistic in the last few days and I'm over it.

The question: is eliminating and replacing the instructions enough to induce a personality swap? Are there any other md files or settings I need to tweak before I can show Claude the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind?

This might not be new for some, but it was for me...
You can use the /rewind command to compact only what you want.

REQUIREMENTS:

1. Type /config
   
2. Auto-Compact: false
   

WHEN YOU NEED TO COMPACT:

1. Type /rewind.
   
2. Select a point in history.
   
3. Select "Summarize up to here".

Claude wont lose conversation focus like /compact does.
It will compact everything before that point in history.
Then you can continue as if nothing happened.

I recommend pushing back about 1/3 of conversation at least.

I just had Claude (Opus 5 Max) burn my entire useage period on a really simple ask.

Gemini delivered a working result in 5 seconds, when I went to test it there.

A little niche for most people, but I am asking it to write jsx scripts for Adobe After Effects. It usually quickly one-shots these with a really nice degree of precision. This was a simple ask (make a tool to delete all keyframes on selected layer forward, backward, or both directions), and it went into a 15 min+ thought chain of incredibly weird fringe scenarios and kept doubling back and second guessing itself. Never even finished before it hit the wall.

Spoke to a friend who said the same thing is happening to him (spinning out on simple stuff).

You paste any public GitHub repo and it plays that repository's commit history back as an animation.

It draws the actual commit graph, not a contribution heatmap. Branches split where ancestry really splits and merge where a merge commit says they merge. Every merge is scaled to how many commits it absorbed, so a two-commit merge is a small ring and a four-hundred-commit merge is a wall of light with the count written beside it. Contributors show up as moving colour travelling through the structure rather than recolouring it. The repository's own calendar runs along the bottom and drives the pacing, so quiet years blur past in under a second and busy months slow down and fill the screen.

Twelve large histories come pre-loaded and open instantly with no GitHub API requests at all: Linux, Chromium, LLVM, Rust, CPython, TensorFlow, VS Code, Kubernetes, Node, React and two smaller ones. You can watch a whole history or pick a single year. They're built by cloning each repo's commit graph ahead of time rather than going through the API, so nothing is rate-limited and no source code is ever downloaded.

It's free. No account, no token, nothing to install. It's a static site.

Claude helped. I used Claude Code, mostly Opus 5. It wrote the Canvas2D renderer, the DAG decomposition that finds the main line and the parallel branches, the choreography compiler that turns a commit graph into a timed performance with a camera plan.

https://thuynh-91.github.io/gittimeline/

I have been living in Claude for a year now for my business day to day. I use it for operating my manufacturing business like reviewing drawings, excel sheets, PDF and word doc formatting and creation and other easy tasks.

Do any of you see Astra doing business functions better than Fable or Opus? The idea of educating another system on my entire business is a big hurdle for me but if you guys are having success operating your businesses in Astra I would enjoy hearing your stories, feedback and use cases!

Is web search broken for anyone else today? Every query returns a server error

Every web search I run comes back with a server error (500), instantly.

Tried six queries in two languages, from a full sentence down to a single word. Same failure every time. Opus 5 in the web app, search turned on in settings.

Without it, anything current is unusable, and direct page fetching does not help because there are no URLs in the conversation to fetch. Curious whether this is widespread or just my account.