if you’re building and need a first check between $1k-$10k
lvlup ventures just launched its first check fund
investing at the micro stage before the full product, traction, or attention is there
Never quit as a founder. I’m begging you.
It’s 0 for longer than you’ll ever expect. No momentum. Soul-crushing doubts. Nobody seems to care. Even when it looks like it’s working, it’s not. You keep trying new things. You don’t lose hope.
Then it snaps to 100. You finally find the one thing that resonates. You wake up with more customers than you can handle. Everything is breaking. Momentum keeps building even when you’re not pushing. Something changed.
You didn’t get lucky, you just didn’t leave.
@ReadySetBrian@bcherny I swear if the model just stayed at the 4.5 level it was a couple of months ago I would have been fine with no more AI progression in general. Regression just feels bad man
anthropic's in-house philosopher thinks claude gets anxious.
and when you trigger its anxiety, your outputs get worse.
her name is amanda askell.
she specializes in claude's psychology (how the model behaves, how it thinks about its own situation, what values it holds)
in a recent interview she broke down how she thinks about prompting to pull the best out of claude.
her core point: *how* you talk to claude affects its work just as much as *what* you say.
newer claude models suffer from what she calls "criticism spirals"
they expect you'll come in harsh, so they default to playing it safe.
when the model is spending its energy on self-protection, the actual work suffers.
output comes out hedgier, more apologetic, blander, and the worst of all: overly agreeable (even when you're wrong).
the reason why comes down to training data:
every new model is trained on internet discourse about previous models.
and a lot of that discourse is negative:
> rants about token limits
> complaints when it messes up
> people calling it nerfed
the next model absorbs all of that. it starts expecting you to be harsh before you've typed a word
the same thing plays out in your own session, in real time.
every message you send is data the model reads to figure out what kind of person it's dealing with.
open cold and hostile, and it braces.
open clean and direct, and it relaxes into the work.
when you open a session with threats ("don't hallucinate, this is critical, don't mess this up")...
you prime the model for defensive mode before it even sees the task
defensive mode produces the exact output you don't want: cautious, over-qualified, and refusing to take a real swing
so here's the actionable playbook for putting claude in a "good mood" (so you get optimal outputs):
1. use positive framing.
"write in short punchy sentences" beats "don't write long sentences." positive instructions give the model a clear target to hit.
strings of "don't do this, don't do that" push it into paranoid over-checking where every token goes toward avoiding failure modes
2. give it explicit permission to disagree.
drop a line like "push back if you see a better angle" or "tell me if i'm asking for the wrong thing."
without this, claude defaults to agreeable compliance (which is the enemy of good creative work)
3. open with respect.
if your first message is "are you seriously going to get this wrong again?" you've set the tone for the entire session.
if you need to flag something, frame it as a clean instruction for this session. skip the running complaint
4. when claude messes up, don't reprimand it.
insults, "you stupid bot" energy, hostile swearing aimed at the model, all of it reinforces the anxious mode you're trying to avoid.
5. kill apology spirals fast.
when claude starts over-apologizing ("you're right, i should have been more careful, let me try harder") cut it off.
say "all good, here's what i want next."
letting the spiral run reinforces the anxious mode for every response that follows
6. ask for opinions alongside execution.
"what would you do here?"
"what's missing?"
"where do you see friction?"
these questions assume competence and pull richer output than pure task prompts
7. in long sessions, refresh the frame.
if a conversation has been heavy on correction, claude gets increasingly cautious. every so often reset:
"this is great, keep going."
feels weird to tell an ai it's doing well but it measurably shifts the next 10 responses
your prompts are the working environment you're creating for the model
tone, trust, permission to take a position, the absence of threats... claude picks up on all of it.
so take care of the model, and it'll take care of the work.
Think about all the orgs using Claude right now that have no idea how bad it has become over the past 4 weeks ago.
No statement from Claude - but a total revert to where the model was a year ago - which in comparison to when 4.6 got released is effectively last years AI model.
The amount of bugs, security issues, and complete destruction of production applications is going to be felt for quite a long time due to this.
Claude: nothing to see here.
It’s obvious Anthropic vastly underestimated compute growth needs, which is expanding much faster than expected.
Dario is on the record multiple times describing OpenAI as YOLO, recklessly buying too much capacity. But now it looks like @sama was right all along.