John Papa

Husband. Father. Climber. Seeker.
Principal quantitative software engineer.
Degenerate gambler.

“If code were Valium, I’d be comfortably numb.”

[John Papa @SublimeTrades]

🤦‍♂️

[John Papa @SublimeTrades]

What is going on with Opus 4.8? I assumed it would be an improvement but seems like it’s extremely prone to hallucinations during just the short amount of time I’ve been using it.

[John Papa @SublimeTrades]

Yeah, this isn’t even usable if it keeps doing stuff like this

[John Papa @SublimeTrades]

@bcherny @kevinefiles @LeeveLeon @sickdotdev Has the vulnerability in the Claude chrome extension been fixed. I saw some articles about it a couple days ago?

[Spill The Memes @SpillTheMemes]

Where were you Gandalf?? 😂😂

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

Truth Bomb

[Claude @claudeai]

New for financial services: ready-to-run Claude agent templates for building pitches, conducting valuation reviews, closing the books at month-end, and more.

Install them as plugins in Cowork and Claude Code, or use our cookbooks to run them in production as Managed Agents.

[John Papa @SublimeTrades]

as the default — schema validation rejects "max" in settings.json. Either add "max" to the enum or rename max → xhigh in the UI to match.

Repro: set "effortLevel": "max" in ~/.claude/settings.json. VSCode flags it as invalid; new sessions ignore it and fall back to the default.

[John Papa @SublimeTrades]

hey @bcherny, can you fix this:

/effort command exposes 5 levels (low | medium | high | xhigh | max), but the effortLevel setting in ~/.claude/settings.json only accepts the first 4 per the JSON schema. Picking max via /effort works for
the current session but can't be persisted

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

i deleted half my Claude setup last week and every output got BETTER

sounds backwards, but anthropic's own team just explained exactly why it works.

here's the one prompt that tells you what to cut (and you don't even have to paste anything):

this is what happens to everyone...

you get a bad output, so you add a rule to your skills. "be more concise."

next week, another bad output. another rule. "use a casual tone."

but a month later, something else breaks. "always explain technical terms."

you keep stacking, and it feels productive because you're fixing problems as they come up.

but 3 months in, you've got 30 rules piled on top of each other.

some of them contradict each other ("be concise" and "always explain your reasoning" are fighting).

some of them fix problems that the model doesn't even have anymore.

and the model is trying to follow all of them at once, which means it's doing none of them well.

it's like handing a chef a 47-step recipe when they only need 12.

the extra 35 steps slow the chef down, make them second-guess the parts they already know, and the dish comes out worse than if you'd just let them cook.

that's what over-prompting does.

anthropic just published a piece on how they build claude code (the ai coding agent).

their own engineering team found that their scaffolding was making the ai worse

which means your custom instructions are almost certainly doing the same thing.

so here's the actionable move...

instead of manually reading through your setup line by line, just tell claude to audit itself.

if you're in claude's desktop app, claude already has access to your:

claude[.]md (the file where your preferences and rules live), your skills folder (where your reusable instruction files are stored), your context files, everything.

just open claude code/cowork and say this:

—

"read my entire setup before responding. check my claude .md, every skill in my skills folder, every file in my context folder, and any other instruction files you can find.

then go through every rule, instruction, and preference you found. for each one, tell me:

1. is this something you already do by default without being told?
2. does this contradict or conflict with another rule somewhere else in my setup?
3. does this repeat something that's already covered by a different rule or file?
4. does this read like it was added to fix one specific bad output rather than improve outputs overall?
5. is this so vague that you'd interpret it differently every time? (ex: 'be more natural' or 'use a good tone')

then give me a list of everything you'd cut with a one-line reason for each, a list of any conflicts you found between files, and a cleaned up version of my claude.md with the dead weight removed."

—

one message. claude goes and reads your entire setup, audits it, and comes back with exactly what to cut and why.

you don't dig through files, you don't read every rule yourself. it does the whole thing.

once you get the results, don't just blindly delete everything it flags.

here's the process:

1. read what it flagged and why
2. delete the flagged rules
3. run your 3 most common tasks with the trimmed setup
4. did the output stay the same or get better? the deleted rules were dead weight
5. did something specific break? add back just that one rule

the goal is to find the minimum viable setup that gets you the output you want.

your ai setup should be getting simpler over time.

addition by subtraction baby

[Ted Lieu @tedlieu]

Dear @WhiteHouse: If trump has all the cards, then why are gas prices at record levels?

Oh wait, in Uno you win by not having any cards. Your social media person really should get fired.

[Adam Mockler @adammocklerr]

MAGA authoritarianism is pretending the president is “joking” when he makes death threats, but comedians are somehow “shaping public policy” when they make jokes.

[Marlene Robertson🇨🇦 @marlene4719]

Trump:
“I’m not a rapist I didn’t rape anybody. I’m not a pedophile.”

O’Donnell:
“Oh, do you think he was referring to you?”

Fucking priceless.

[shut up, josh @ChiefJosheola]

School Shooting: There’s nothing we can do about this. Don’t politicize these tragedies.

Political Shooting: We need a $400 million bunker built immediately and you hate America if you don’t agree.

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

Ask yourself this:

If the President is so easily embarrassed that he’d lie about falling down during an emergency, something incredibly human…

What else wouldn’t he lie to you about?

If his ego is so fragile, he can’t admit to tripping. What else would he hide?

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

READ THIS.
RECOGNIZE THE FALSE FLAG.

[Glenn Tunes @glenn_tunes]

RFK said Trump uses a "different" kind of math 🤦 yes it is called im a stupid mother fucker that does not understand numbers math 🙄🤡

[Mari @Tech_girlll]

Netflix uses Python.
Google uses Python.
Anthropic uses Python.
Meta uses Python.
xAI uses Python.
Perplexity uses Python.
DeepSeek uses Python.
Instagram uses Python.
Spotify uses Python.
Dropbox uses Python.
Reddit uses Python.
Pinterest uses Python.
Uber uses Python.
Airbnb uses Python.
Quora uses Python.

And yet Python is ‘too slow’ for your project?

[David J Phillips @davj]

Claude watching me write code by hand