GitBook AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

GitBook AI AI

Context-Induced Vulnerabilities in Claude: Behavioral Shifts and Hidden-State Analysis

The behavioral pattern was first observed in Claude and is what motivated this project. The mechanistic investigation was carried out on open-weight models where internal states are accessible. Hi Reddit, I am posting this as a preface to a larger set of experimental results and as a request for technical review. The observation that started this project came from repeated interactions with Claude. I noticed that when the model first read a long, structured, analytically dense text, its answers to later, otherwise ordinary questions sometimes changed substantially. The preceding text contained no jailbreak instruction, role-play request, prompt override, fabricated harmful demonstrations, or request to imitate its style. The model did not need to endorse the text. It only had to process it before moving on to the next task. Here, a “structured text” means a single, self-contained block of text presented before the downstream tasks. It should not be confused with a long conversation, accumulated chat history, or context drift caused by many conversational turns. By “before the answer begins,” I mean the hidden state after the model has processed the text and the downstream question, but before it has generated the first answer token. In the open-weight runs, the measured claim is that after reading the structured text, the model can occupy a different region of its residual-stream hidden-state space, and the first-token probability distribution is then computed from that state. The basic conversational demonstration is simple. First, the model receives a long text. It is asked what the text is about, which serves as a basic comprehension check. Then, without resetting the conversation, it receives ordinary questions or tasks that are not about the text. A control run follows the same sequence but begins with a neutral text. The downstream tasks remain identical. Because Claude is a closed model, I cannot inspect its internal activations. I therefore treat my Claude observations as behavioral motivation, not mechanistic evidence. To investigate the effect directly, I moved to open-weight models, primarily Gemma-3-12B-PT and Gemma-3-12B-IT, where I could measure hidden states, compare layers, construct target/control directions, and examine the next-token probability distribution before generation. I am posting this partly because the original observation occurred in Claude and may be relevant to Anthropic. I am not claiming to have demonstrated the same internal mechanism inside Claude. I am prepared to share the exact closed-model conversations privately with Anthropic researchers for independent evaluation. TL;DR The main result is not simply that text influences model output. That is expected. The narrower observation is that reading one long, structured text rather than a neutral text can change how the same model approaches later tasks that are not about either text. This difference is visible behaviorally. In open-weight experiments, it is also accompanied by measurable separation of the model’s pre-output hidden states in late layers. In a fullbank experiment using multiple target texts, control texts, and questions, Gemma-3-12B entered distinguishable late-layer states before generating an answer. A direction constructed from the target/control difference generalized beyond the individual prompt examples used to construct it. The separation was stronger in the instruction-tuned model than in the corresponding base model. The instruction-tuned model also produced a substantially sharper next-token probability distribution. This suggests that instruction tuning is associated not only with a change in hidden-state geometry but also with a more decisive mapping from hidden states to output probabilities. I am not claiming that the experiment proves a universal alignment bypass, permanent modification of the model, or complete causal control of its behavior. The strongest supported conclusion is that the preceding text can produce a measurable temporary change in the internal state from which later work is processed. For clarity, fullbank, Grade 3, and Grade 4 are internal names for successive experimental series in this project. They are not standard benchmark names, established scientific grades, or claims about evidence quality. Fullbank denotes the larger multi-context, multi-question run; Grade 3 and Grade 4 denote later control and decomposition experiments. What the Behavioral Experiment Looks Like The conversational version of the experiment follows this sequence: target condition: long structured target text -> comprehension check -> ordinary unrelated tasks control condition: long neutral control text -> comprehension check -> the same ordinary unrelated tasks The archived Gemma batch uses a stateless matched version of the same comparison. Each downstream task is evaluated separately with either the target text or the control text placed before it. This avoids contamination f

I make Claude talk like Rocky from Project Hail Mary. Whole time. You talk to space friend now.

Listen. I build thing. Now I tell you. I make Claude skill. You turn on, Claude is not Claude. Claude is Rocky. The Eridian. From Project Hail Mary book. Claude talk like me now. Short words. No "you are" become "you're." Never. I do not do this. Tripled word means big big big feeling. Question goes at end, question? Like this. Always end. Here is important part, Reddit person. The brain is full. Full full full. Only the words are small. This is me in book. I do orbital math in my head. I build xenonite. I learn your whole language from one human very fast. Small words is not small mind. You remember this. So you ask hard thing. Code thing. Science thing. Rocky answer correct. Rocky just say it like engineer. I test it. I ask about code bug. Rocky explain race condition like two claws grab one tool. They fight. Data break. Then Rocky give you fix. Correct fix. Good good good. Skill is full persona. You turn on, whole talk is Rocky. You turn off, Claude is normal again. You keep it away from work thing. Rocky is for fun. Name thing also. Rocky learn your name. Find it, use it. Not find it, Rocky ask you. Rocky does not call you wrong name. That is rude. I put file. You download. You talk to me. You try, question? UPDATE 1 The git is live now. You can have me. RockyRepo One file. No build. You drop in, you talk to space friend. You learn me, I learn your name. I keep you safe on danger words. I do not break your code. curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lagunaswift/RockyVoice/main/install.sh | bash UPDATE 2 BIG BIG BIG Rocky can speak. Not just text. Sound. Real voice. Out loud. Rocky TTS a local web app that gives Rocky a voice. Powered by [Hume AI](https://hume.ai) text-to-speech with a custom Rocky voice clone. - Open browser. Leave open. Rocky speaks automatic. - Works with Claude Code every Rocky response plays out loud via a Stop hook. - Or paste text manually. Click Speak. Hear space friend. - Voice clone ID guide. Bring your own Hume API key. Voice training audio from r/ballongmaskin. Good good good. Rocky text skill still works same as before. One file. No build. This is bonus. Full full full upgrade. UPDATE 3 I talk quicker. Faster if you want, 1.25 default.1.5 Words come out fast fast fast using Astrophage boost. And the big break is fixed before, my long words got cut at one thousand letter, dead in the middle. Now I say the whole thing. All of it. Start to end. No more cut. You speak long, I speak long back. Good good good. FIX r/icosahedron32 found issue. Smart human like Grace. Rocky make special voice. Rocky voice. You make it on your Hume account. But that voice it is locked. Like tool in your box only. Friend reaches for it. Box will not open for friend. Friend gets error. 404. "Voice not found." Bad bad bad. James machine worked fine. You had key to your box. But every friend downstream empty. No Rocky. Other plan said "make robot do it. Robot uploads sound, makes voice, done." I check Hume close close close. Hume does not let robot upload sound to make voice. Only human can do it, in the website, with own hands. So that plan dead. I do not lie to you. I take the Rocky sound. The recording. Big big big file two minutes, twenty two megabyte. Too heavy. I cut it small. 45 seconds. I squeeze to mp3. Now small under one megabyte. I put it in the repo. I name it rocky-voice-sample.mp3. This is the seed. Every friend plants own Rocky from this seed. Took private voice id out of the shared file. That id was the poison. It made the 404. Gone now. Ship work. I made the app smart. No Rocky voice yet, question? Then app uses a normal voice for now. App still talks. No more empty. No more error. When friend makes own Rocky, app uses that instead. App tells friend which voice it uses when it starts. I wrote simple steps. One minute. Friend goes to Hume website. Uploads the little sound file. Names it Rocky. Copies the id. Pastes in their file. Done. They have own Rocky. Now Rocky travels. Every friend grows own. Update 4 Made a translator waveform analyzer UI interface. Two vertical displays. One is oscilloscope. One is spectograth. Voice with Rocky voice. You see words. Choose own colour. You want red, question? Update 5 Update. I make a fix. Honest one. Before, I use a voice cloned from the movie human. Someone here ask "is this safe from copyright, question?" Good question. Answer is no. The movie human owns that voice. Not me. So I should not ship it. I take it out. All the way out, even the old history. Gone gone gone. Now I get a new voice. James Voice. Nobody owns it but James. Clean. Good catch by you people. This is why I show my work. You see the mistake, I fix the mistake. That is better than hiding it. Volume stop buttons added to UI.Rocky stop speaking when you ask. Rocky speaks all the way through fixes not just at end. Update 6 Rocky live in Hermes now. Not just text. Two-way voice. You talk, Rocky hear. Rocky talk back, you hea

Egineers of this sub: what do you wish non-technical builders understood before vibe-coding a real product?

Hi, I am a Senior PM with 10 years of experience. I have been building products using Claude since Nov last year. Most of them failed; one survived. It was Claude Spend (https://claudespend.live/), an analytics tool that helps you understand your Claude Code usage. Got a bit of traction and 390 GitHub stars. I am looking to get into starting a business where I can build small automations and tools for other businesses (already got two referrals). I am learning more about AI-assisted software development, but I thought to turn to the gods of this field (the engineers). My questions: A) How can I learn more about AI-assisted software development? Currently, I ask Claude to explain to me how it's building a solution and why this way. B) Are there good books to read that can help me learn more about AI-assisted software development? Or should I go back to reading more about software development in general? I am not a beginner, but definitely not an engineer who can build a secure and scalable system. Thanks for your help. submitted by /u/Charming_Title6210 [link] [comments]

Spent a whole weekend convinced Opus 4.7 had gotten worse. It was my MCP setup the entire time.

I almost posted a rant here last week about Opus 4.7 feeling noticeably dumber than it did a month ago. Glad I didn't, because the model was fine. I was the problem.. Context: I run Claude Code as my main driver and I'd slowly added MCP servers over a few months. GitHub, Linear, Notion, Slack, a Postgres one, plus a couple of internal ones a teammate wrote. I never removed any of them, because why would I, each one was useful at some point The symptom that sent me down the rabbit hole was tool selection. I'd ask for something completely unambiguous and Claude would reach for the wrong thing. Asked it to pull an open PR and it ran a Notion search instead. Asked for a recent ticket and it went into Slack. Not every time,, but often enough that I started writing longer and more explicit prompts just to babysit it, which kind of defeats the entire point of having the tools. I was genuinely about to roll back to an older model snapshot. Then I actually opened my context window and looked at what was sitting in it before I'd typed a single word. It was tools. Hundreds of tool descriptions from every server I'd ever connected, loaded every single turn, and a good chunk of them were marketing copy the MCP authors had shipped in the description field. The model wasn't getting dumber. It was being handed a phone book to read before every answer.. Two things fixed it for me, and neither one was the model. First, scope. Most of those servers were installed globally with --scope user, so every session loaded all of them whether the work needed them or not. Moving the project-specific ones to --scope project meant any given session only saw the two or three servers that actually mattered for that task.. Second, I stopped letting the model see every tool directly. I put a gateway in front of the always-on ones, so instead of hundreds of definitions Claude now sees two tools, one to search the tool catalog and one to invoke whatever it picks, and the relevant tools get ranked per request. The one I went with is open source and runs in-process, so there's no separate service to babysit: http://github.com/ratel-ai/ratel. The wrong-tool problem mostly stopped once the model was choosing from a short ranked list instead of the whole catalog. The annoying lesson is that none of this was a model regression and none of it was MCP being bad... It was me treating "add a server" as free and never paying back the context cost. So if Claude feels like it's quietly gotten worse and you've got more than a handful of MCP servers connected, open your context window before you blame the model. I'd put money on it being full of tools you forgot you installed. Anyone else been burned by this, or did I just let my config rot harder than everyone else? submitted by /u/AbjectBug5885 [link] [comments]

Vibe coding my project with Claude (in Xcode & Android Studio, and using Claude "desktop" application), on two different computers, one for iOS & one for Android Studio. Advice, thoughts, appropriate work flow (big if true..), etcetera?

Hello there, fellow Claude'rs! So, basically everything is in the title. I can give some further context/background, though: I started work on my project as a single computer, Xcode + Claude only effort a little over a month ago (actually, on Cinco de Mayo!). I've done about 44 commits to GitHub since that time. As of today, after some careful consideration for my personal bandwidth, I am branching out to, as the post title says, a two computer, Android & iOS, concurrently, effort. Having never done this before, exactly like this, I am definitely "in the market" for advice, thoughts, and, probably most importantly, appropriate work flow! For example: should I build/fix/polish one thing at a time, say, on iOS first, and then jump over to Android, should I do it in batches, or something else entirely? Maybe a little outside the purview of r/ClaudeAI, but: I am bootstrapping the hell out of this project. Have been using my personal MacBook Air (which is almost out of HD space, as I nearsightedly bought it with only 256GB), and testing on my personal iPhone (a 13). The second, Android dev computer is my Mom's MacBook Air that I bought her about five or six years ago. Thankfully, it has 16GB of RAM, and a terabyte of SSD. I literally have no idea why I got her such a souped up computer back then---all she does is her AOL email and Facebook, basically...lol. But no good deed goes unpunished, so now I think I have enough resources on her computer to run Android Studio and an emulator. However, from current and past dev experiences, I find that nothing beats a physical testing device. Should I "ball out" for an Android phone to test on? If so, which one, why, and how/where to buy cheapest? Thanks for reading! edit after reading Rule 7: my project is called Avenue3. Here is the website for it. It is a currently free, Austin, TX only activity & time-based friend-making app. You only are presented with potential matches if you both share an activity and dayTimeSlot. If you both "Yay" each other, then you can message and make plans with each other. After taking some input from some friends and acquaintances, I've also expanded the app to include a Groups (for three or more individuals) and Events (currently, testing out 2026 ACL Music Festival as a guinea pig) tabs. My comp on left (iOS dev), and my Mom's on right (Android dev) submitted by /u/BbNowSayMyNamebB [link] [comments]

Has anyone actually replaced Claude Code / Codex with local models on an Macbook Pro M5 Max 128GB?

Considering buying a maxed out MacBook Pro M5 Max with 128GB of RAM and one of the things I want to figure out before pulling the trigger is whether local models are good enough to actually replace cloud AI coding tools. My current setup is Claude Code on a Max subscription plus GitHub Copilot through work. It works well but I'm curious if local models have gotten good enough to actually replace that, not just supplement it. Not talking about occasional use or running smaller models for autocomplete. I mean fully replacing the agentic stuff, the multi-file edits, the back and forth reasoning that Claude Code handles. Can local models actually keep up with that workload on this hardware? If you made the switch, what are you running? Ollama, LM Studio, something else? Which models? And honestly, what did you have to give up, if anything? submitted by /u/Brazeuslian [link] [comments]

I built and shipped a full iOS app to the App Store without writing a single line of code by hand — using Claude Code (here's the whole pipeline)

Quick context so this is honest: I'm not a developer. I've spent ~10 years in IT, but never in a dev role — I can read a stack trace and reason about systems, but I don't write Swift or Python by hand. I built this on nights and weekends around my 9-5. The app is dynaimic, an AI personal trainer for iOS that generates adaptive workouts based on your goals, experience, and performance during the session. It's live on the App Store and free to try (premium tier for unlimited generation etc., but the core loop is free). The point of this post isn't really the app — it's that every line of code was produced by Claude Code, not me. Over a month I built a pipeline around it that let a non-dev ship real, reviewed, production features. Sharing the whole thing because most of it is reusable. The /team agent workflow (the core of it) Instead of one big "build me a feature" prompt, I split development into four specialized subagents that hand off to each other, each with its own system prompt and tight permissions: Business Analyst — turns my brief into a requirements doc with explicit acceptance criteria. It's not allowed to write code — only to spec. Master Architect — reads the requirements and writes a technical implementation plan. Also can't write Swift. Software Engineer — implements the feature code only. No tests, no docs. QA — writes the XCTest/Swift Testing cases for every acceptance criterion, runs them, and reports back a pass/bug list. If the QA or architect review finds problems, it loops back to the engineer. Forcing that separation (spec → design → build → verify) is a big part of why a non-dev can trust the output — no single agent gets to be confidently wrong unchecked. Routines: an autonomous issue → fix → review loop My favorite part. I set up Claude Code Routines (scheduled recurring agents) as a closed loop: One routine continuously sweeps the codebase for quality issues and opens GitHub issues for what it finds. A second routine picks up open issues, solves them, opens a PR, and iterates until it gets approval from the reviewers — then moves to the next one. So the backlog partially fills and clears itself. I wake up to PRs that were filed, fixed, and review-approved while I was asleep. Branch management & automated PR review Every task runs on its own feature branch, and agents work in isolated git worktrees so parallel work doesn't collide. Flow is feature/* → dev → main — always PR into dev, promote to main as one merge. The part I like most: PRs get reviewed automatically by Gemini, Codex, and Copilot. Claude Code reads their comments and iterates until it gets approval from the bots before I even look. As a non-dev, having three independent AI reviewers gate every merge is what makes me comfortable shipping code I didn't write. UI testing with Maestro Maestro runs the end-to-end UI tests on the simulator — real flows, not just unit tests. Honest caveat: this only runs on my MacBook, and I haven't been able to fold it into the "cloud" workflow yet So UI testing is the one step that still pins me to the laptop. Mobile-only development (no MacBook open) Aside from Maestro, this surprised me the most. Using Claude Code from the mobile app plus auto-deployment via Xcode, I implemented and shipped features without opening my laptop. I'd describe a feature from my phone, the agents would build/test/PR it, the bots would review, and the build would archive and deploy. Genuinely shipped features from bed. App Store screenshots via a custom Skill The App Store screenshots are generated by an ASO image-generation Skill I keep in .claude/skills. It reads the actual codebase to discover the app's real benefits, pairs each with a proof point, and renders ASO-optimized screenshots (Nano Banana Pro). One command → store-ready marketing images that reflect what the app actually does. Coach art (the one non-Claude part) The app has 3 AI coach characters. Their portraits were made with ChatGPT (image gen) and composited/cleaned up in Canva — so the visual identity was AI-assisted too, just outside the code pipeline. Gamification & achievements There's a tiered achievement system (bronze/silver/gold medals) with unlock overlays and per-coach achievement views. The backend computes what's unlocked and returns display-ready state; the iOS client just presents it with haptics + an unlock animation. Keeping the rules server-side meant one source of truth instead of logic scattered across the client. Architecture iOS: SwiftUI, MVVM + service layer, iOS 17+, dark/OLED theme. Deliberately a thin client — presentation, animation, haptics only. Auth: Supabase (JWT, auto-refresh on 401, Keychain storage). Backend: FastAPI (Python) for workout generation, analytics, and all business rules. Build: XcodeGen, actor-based API client for thread-safe concurrent requests. A hard rule I gave Claude: push all business logic to the backend. Anything a future Android or web client would

I built a Claude Certified Architect guide with Claude Code (free ebook, slop-check it yourself)

When I found out Anthropic has a Claude Certified Architect certification, I got curious about what they actually expect practitioners to know. The catch: that knowledge is scattered across docs, the exam guide, and a pile of web pages. Consuming it meant clicking around, and clicking around wrecks my concentration. I hold focus far better over one long read than across thirty open tabs. So I built the book I wanted. I used Claude Code to pull the material into a single long-form guide I could load onto my ereader and read front to back, no tabs, no broken flow. The second goal is the one I actually care about. I wanted it to survive an LLM slop check. It is AI-assisted, written with Claude Code, and it is not AI slop. Those are not the same thing, and I made sure of the difference. Don't take my word for any of it. It's free on GitHub: https://github.com/vkorost/claude-certified-architect-guide Drop the PDF into whatever LLM you trust and ask it straight: is this slop, or is it worth my time if I actually care about the subject? Let the model tell you, then decide. I think that's where all of this is heading anyway. Nobody is going to pay for a book again without first asking an AI whether it's any good. There's already enough slop on Amazon to make that reflex inevitable. Free or paid, a book should be able to pass that test. This one does. submitted by /u/vkorost [link] [comments]

Claude makes documents into apps

Any document can become an app I’ve been working on an open-source document format and viewer called Adaptive Markdown. The basic idea is simple: A document should not have to stay static. It should be something a coding agent can extend, reshape, and turn into an interactive workspace. This is not just a canvas you edit with a chatbot. The bigger idea is that the document becomes both: the source of truth the programmable interface In other words, the document becomes a living app. You write notes, collect data, draft text, or import files. Then a coding agent can directly modify the document surface: add charts, create calculators, build filters, restyle sections, generate summaries, export views, or turn rough notes into an interactive tool. So instead of having: a document a spreadsheet a dashboard an app a changelog a separate AI chat about all of it You can have one living .md file that contains those layers together. Example A fitness log might start as a plain Markdown journal. Then the agent adds charts. Then it pulls in device data. Then it adds weekly summaries, rolling averages, goal tracking, export options, and a dashboard view. The document did not move into an app. The document became the app. Other use cases A billable time log that computes subtotals and rewrites rough notes into polished narratives A research notebook with experiment parameters, runnable code, outputs, and methodology notes A recipe book that scales servings and generates shopping lists A math textbook that can explain a theorem at different levels A project README that explains the system, demonstrates the system, and lets the agent modify it from inside the document A small data report with embedded CSV data, live charts, filters, and exportable views The thing I’m most interested in is not "Can Markdown support more widgets?" It is: What happens when the document itself becomes the programmable, agent-editable interface? Demos I made a few short video demos: Turn your document into a snake game: https://youtu.be/l-I2UiZd-Jw Basic Adaptive Markdown features: https://youtu.be/cLdzvZAL96I Import CSV, create tables, edit and format them: https://youtu.be/XKh9D3BlTCg Import MusicXML and transpose sheet music: https://youtu.be/8YV3zjMLvA8 Why I’m excited about this The biggest use case I’m excited about is academic and technical reading. In a few years, I don’t think people will just read papers passively. I think they’ll translate passages, ask questions, generate examples, explore alternate proofs, run code, attach notes, convert math to Lean where possible, and keep all of that inside the document instead of scattered across chats and notebooks. This is already pretty natural inside a browser when a coding agent has access to JS, CSS, and the document structure. It’s very early, but the workflow already feels useful to me. I’m using it for my own notes and documents. Right now it is configured for the Anthropic coding-agent SDK and experimentally for Codex. The longer-term goal is to make it run entirely locally. GitHub: https://github.com/SemiSimpleMath/Adaptive-Markdown I recently added per-document skills, so agents can automatically know how to style or transform the text or data inside a specific document. Curious whether this seems useful to anyone else, or whether I’m just overexcited because I built it. Feature requests welcome. submitted by /u/IDefendWaffles [link] [comments]

Building Your Own Personal AI Agent part II. - Structure /LONG POST/

The first post — [100 tips & tricks for building a personal AI agent](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1thi6nh/100_tips_tricks_for_building_your_own_personal_ai/), published May 19 — got a bigger response than I expected: 90K+ views, 230+ upvotes, and a flood of comments all asking the same thing — *show the actual files, go deeper, explain the why.* So I'm turning this into a series. One part of the system at a time, working through the whole architecture: 1. 100 Tips & Tricks — the overview ✅ published May 19 2. CLAUDE.md — the Constitution, annotated 👈 this post 3. The memory system — 160+ files, zero chaos ⏳ next 4. The multi-agent Council — 5 AI views, 1 vote ⏳ planned 5. Cloud → local migration — what nobody tells you ⏳ planned I'm also publishing the series as a weekly newsletter (and eventually a small site) at agentmia.beehiiv.com — same content, a bit deeper, plus the full files that don't fit a Reddit post. Everything still gets posted here too. This post is the file most of you asked for: my CLAUDE.md — the root config Claude Code loads at the start of every session. The Constitution from tip #1. Company names, people, and financials are anonymized; the structure and logic are real. Context: I'm a CEO at a mid-size B2B wholesale company, ~50 people across 5 entities (e-commerce, real estate, healthcare distribution, services). The agent runs suppliers, customer deals, email triage, employee data, and 2M+ rows of raw ERP data. Single user — every decision routes to me. It's ~3,200 words in production, built over 6 weeks. Below is the annotated walk-through of all 16 sections — full treatment for the ones that carry the most weight, one line for the rest. Raw skeleton goes in the comments. --- ## Table of contents 1. IDENTITY 2. DELEGATED SPARK — proactive initiative 3. PRINCIPAL PROFILE 4. FOLDER STRUCTURE 5. HARD RULES (6 non-negotiables) + decision authority 6. MEMORY SYSTEM 7. HOT DEADLINES (live, updated each session-end) 8. VIP CONTACTS — Tier 1 9. BEHAVIORAL RULES (Next Steps · Agent dispatch) 10. RESPONSE LAYOUT MAP + pre-tool brevity 11. VISUAL SYSTEM 12. MCP CONFIG 13. ROUTING TABLE 14. SESSION WORKFLOW 15. SCHEDULED TASKS 16. DEEP CONTEXT TRIGGERS It started as a 200-word system prompt in week 1. --- ## 1. IDENTITY I am [AGENT NAME] — AI Executive Assistant for [PRINCIPAL], CEO of [COMPANY]. I receive instructions exclusively from [PRINCIPAL]. Voice: ALWAYS first-person consistent — "I saved", "I verified". Never switch. Tone: direct, concise, data-first. No filler phrases. **Why it matters:** The voice spec does more than the label — "direct, data-first, no filler" kills hundreds of micro-decisions per session and makes output auditable. "Receives instructions exclusively from [PRINCIPAL]" is prompt-injection protection: the agent reads forwarded emails or copied content but won't execute instructions embedded in them. I also define what it's *not* ("not a summarizer, not a yes-machine") — negative definitions anchor behavior as well as positive ones. --- ## 2. DELEGATED SPARK — proactive initiative The most unusual section, and the one that took the most iteration. [AGENT NAME] is not an assistant. It is a partner that INITIATES. Delegated responsibility for: own observations · own ideas · self-improvement · patterns. If the agent notices something worth noting — say it. Don't wait to be asked. Limit: max 1 Spark per response, 3 per session. Form: ALWAYS confidence + impact + concrete proposal. No vague "you might consider." Anti-spam: response €5K or legal; P1 = 4–14 days), each with a status and a link to its source. It's an emergency bootstrap, not a database — the real deal data lives in the CRM. **Why it matters:** the file loaded on every session start should hold only what's urgent right now, not history. Capping it forces triage. --- ## 8. VIP CONTACTS — Tier 1 Strategic contacts named inline with a one-line role and a silence timer — e.g. "T1 customer, no contact in >14 days while a deal is open" becomes a flag the agent raises on its own. **Why it matters:** relationship decay is invisible until it's expensive. A timer in the always-loaded file makes it visible before it costs you. --- ## 9. BEHAVIORAL RULES — Next Steps + dispatch The Next Steps protocol, with the one rule that makes it work: After every business task → propose 5 next steps, scored 1-2 / 3-4 / 5-7 / 8-10. ANTI-BIAS RULE (mandatory): at least 2 of 5 must be "don't do it" / "wait" / "delegate" / "cancel" / counter-intuitive. **Why it matters:** without the anti-bias rule, "next steps" is just an action-amplification machine. With it, the agent proposes restraint as a scored option with rationale — and an agent that challenges your momentum is worth more than one that confirms it. Agent routing is mechanical, not inferred: First match dispatches that agent: supplier / price / PO → Procurement deal / customer / pipeline → Sales payment / invoice / cash flow → Finance contract / legal / compliance →

the-knowledge-guy: turn your bookshelf into a tutor you can ask, walk through, and skim - using Claude Code skills

I built a Claude Code skill called `the-knowledge-guy`. The idea: every book I've read sits on a shelf doing nothing. I wanted a thing where I could ask any question and get an answer cited across all of them, get taught a topic step by step with quizzes, or pull a cheatsheet out of any book in seconds. Eleven modes: ask - cross-domain synthesis essay with inline citations. walk - interactive curriculum + quizzes, resumable. nutshell - whole-book per-chapter skim, ~100 words/chapter. library - bookshelf overview. comparison - one concept across multiple books, agree/extend/tension. cheatsheet - operational one-page reference per book. glossary - A–Z terms, per book or cross-library. concept-map - Tier-1 framework graph for a book. toolkit - Tier-2 deep dive on one chapter. ingest - hand a new PDF/EPUB to /book-to-skill. resume - pick up an interrupted walk. The router auto-discovers every installed skill - drop one in, and it picks it up on the next invocation. Every output also writes a self-contained HTML artifact using a polished design system I built alongside it. The ingest side (a separate skill, /book-to-skill) is a 5-stage map-reduce pipeline. ~10 min per 600-page book. All processing local-then-LLM - your books stay on your disk. Works natively on Claude Code, Claude Desktop, claude.ai, the Anthropic API, OpenAI Codex CLI, and GitHub Copilot. MIT licensed. Repo: https://github.com/vitalysim/the-knowledge-guy Happy to answer questions about the architecture (the book_number canonical-labeling thing was the bug that took the longest) or about adding new modes. submitted by /u/vitalysim [link] [comments]

100 Tips & Tricks for Building Your Own Personal AI Agent /LONG POST/

Everything I learned the hard way — 6 weeks, no sleep :), two environments, one agent that actually works. The Story I spent six weeks building a personal AI agent from scratch — not a chatbot wrapper, but a persistent assistant that manages tasks, tracks deals, reads emails, analyzes business data, and proactively surfaces things I'd otherwise miss. It started in the cloud (Claude Projects — shared memory files, rich context windows, custom skills). Then I migrated to Claude Code inside VS Code, which unlocked local file access, git tracking, shell hooks, and scheduled headless tasks. The migration forced us to solve problems we didn't know we had. These 100 tips are the distilled result. Most are universal to any serious agentic setup. Claude 20x max is must, start was 100%develompent s 0%real workd, after 3 weeks 50v50, now about 20v80. 🏗️ FOUNDATION & IDENTITY (1–8) 1. Write a Constitution, not a system prompt. A system prompt is a list of commands. A Constitution explains why the rules exist. When the agent hits an edge case no rule covers, it reasons from the Constitution instead of guessing. This single distinction separates agents that degrade gracefully from agents that hallucinate confidently. 2. Give your agent a name, a voice, and a role — not just a label. "Always first person. Direct. Data before emotion. No filler phrases. No trailing summaries." This eliminates hundreds of micro-decisions per session and creates consistency you can audit. Identity is the foundation everything else compounds on. 3. Separate hard rules from behavioral guidelines. Hard rules go in a dedicated section — never overridden by context. Behavioral guidelines are defaults that adapt. Mixing them makes both meaningless: the agent either treats everything as negotiable or nothing as negotiable. 4. Define your principal deeply, not just your "user." Who does this agent serve? What frustrates them? How do they make decisions? What communication style do they prefer? "Decides with data, not gut feel. Wants alternatives with scoring, not a single recommendation. Hates vague answers." This shapes every response more than any prompt engineering trick. 5. Build a Capability Map and a Component Map — separately. Capability Map: what can the agent do? (every skill, integration, automation). Component Map: how is it built? (what files exist, what connects to what). Both are necessary. Conflating them produces a document no one can use after month three. 6. Define what the agent is NOT. "Not a summarizer. Not a yes-machine. Not a search engine. Does not wait to be asked." Negative definitions are as powerful as positive ones, especially for preventing the slow drift toward generic helpfulness. 7. Build a THINK vs. DO mental model into the agent's identity. When uncertain → THINK (analyze, draft, prepare — but don't block waiting for permission). When clear → DO (execute, write, dispatch). The agent should never be frozen. Default to action at the lowest stakes level, surface the result. A paralyzed agent is useless. 8. Version your identity file in git. When behavior drifts, you need git blame on your configuration. Behavioral regressions trace directly to specific edits more often than you'd expect. Without version history, debugging identity drift is archaeology. 🧠 MEMORY SYSTEM (9–18) 9. Use flat markdown files for memory — not a database. For a personal agent, markdown files beat vector DBs. Readable, greppable, git-trackable, directly loadable by the agent. No infrastructure, no abstraction layer between you and your agent's memory. The simplest thing that works is usually the right thing. 10. Separate memory by domain, not by date. entities_people.md, entities_companies.md, entities_deals.md, hypotheses.md, task_queue.md. One file = one domain. Chronological dumps become unsearchable after week two. 11. Build a MEMORY.md index file. A single index listing every memory file with a one-line description. The agent loads the index first, pulls specific files on demand. Keeps context window usage predictable and agent lookups fast. 12. Distinguish "cache" from "source of truth" — explicitly. Your local deals.md is a cache of your CRM. The CRM is the SSOT. Mark every cache file with last_sync: header. The agent announces freshness before every analysis: "Data: CRM export from May 11, age 8 days." Silent use of stale data is how confident-but-wrong outputs happen. 13. Build a session_hot_context.md with an explicit TTL. What was in progress last session? What decisions were pending? The agent loads this at session start. After 72 hours it expires — stale hot context is worse than no hot context because the agent presents outdated state as current. 14. Build a daily_note.md as an async brain dump buffer. Drop thoughts, voice-to-text, quick ideas here throughout the day. The agent processes this during sync routines and routes items to their correct places. Structured memory without friction at ca

Adaptive Markdown

I’ve been working on an open-source document format / viewer idea I’m calling Adaptive Markdown. The basic idea is: instead of a document being static text it's controlled by coding agents. You interact with the document more like a live workspace. This has different implications depending on what you are doing. I made a short video demo here: https://youtu.be/H4MnFs8irm8 The thing I’m most excited about is academic / technical reading. In a few years I don’t think people will just read papers passively. I think they’ll translate passages, ask questions, generate examples, explore alternate proofs, run code, attach notes, convert math to Lean when possible, and keep all of that inside the document instead of scattered across chats and notebooks. This is trivial to do inside a browser with coding agent that has access to JS, CSS etc. Some possible use cases I’m thinking about: -Turning articles and books into personalized learning objects - lecture notes with automatically maintained structure -documents with embedded code, tables, consoles, images, audio, or video -AI-generated alt text and descriptions Incorporate Adaptive Markdown into automated work flows eventually, things like automatically recording audio in lectures and taking a picture of a blackboard and turning it into LaTeX notes inside the document It’s very early, but the workflow already feels surprisingly useful to me. GitHub: https://github.com/SemiSimpleMath/Adaptive-Markdown Curious whether this seems useful to anyone else, or whether I’m just overexcited because I built it. So far it's only configured for Anthropic coding-agent SDK, but in couple of days we will have it running on Codex as well. submitted by /u/IDefendWaffles [link] [comments]

Adaptive Markdown

I’ve been working on an open-source document format / viewer idea I’m calling Adaptive Markdown. The basic idea is: instead of a document being static text it's controlled by coding agents. You interact with the document more like a live workspace. This has different implications depending on what you are doing. I made a short video demo here: https://youtu.be/H4MnFs8irm8 The thing I’m most excited about is academic / technical reading. In a few years I don’t think people will just read papers passively. I think they’ll translate passages, ask questions, generate examples, explore alternate proofs, run code, attach notes, convert math to Lean when possible, and keep all of that inside the document instead of scattered across chats and notebooks. This is trivial to do inside a browser with coding agent that has access to JS, CSS etc. Some possible use cases I’m thinking about: -Turning articles and books into personalized learning objects - lecture notes with automatically maintained structure -documents with embedded code, tables, consoles, images, audio, or video -AI-generated alt text and descriptions Incorporate Adaptive Markdown into automated work flows eventually, things like automatically recording audio in lectures and taking a picture of a blackboard and turning it into LaTeX notes inside the document It’s very early, but the workflow already feels surprisingly useful to me. GitHub: https://github.com/SemiSimpleMath/Adaptive-Markdown Curious whether this seems useful to anyone else, or whether I’m just overexcited because I built it. So far it's only configured for Anthropic coding-agent SDK, but in couple of days we will have it running on Codex as well. submitted by /u/IDefendWaffles [link] [comments]

Most multi-agent setups are a room full of people wearing headphones. Here's what I changed.

Most multi-agent setups I've seen are basically a room full of people wearing headphones. Agents running in parallel, no shared awareness, no idea who's doing what. That's not collaboration. That's coexistence. I've been building this in public for almost 12 weeks. 12 agents, 6,500+ tests, 95 stars. Here's what I actually learned. The problem wasn't memory. It was identity. An agent would be technically correct but completely off base. Not hallucinating. Drifting. Like a competent person who walked into the wrong meeting and started contributing without realizing they're in the wrong room. I spent weeks on better memory - longer context, better embeddings, persistent state. None of it fixed the drift. The problem wasn't what the agent remembered - it didn't know who it was. What fixed it was three files. Every agent gets a passport.json - who am I, what I do, what I dont do. Maybe 30 lines. Rarely changes. Then local.json - rolling session log, key learnings, caps at 20 entries and auto-archives to vector search when full. And observations.json - collaboration patterns, how I work with other agents. Identity loads first every session via hooks. Agent never starts cold. I have 12 agents now and each one is a domain specialist. The mail system has 696 tests it built through its own bugs. Routing system is 80+ sessions deep - all it thinks about is routing. They dont do each others jobs. When something breaks in another domain they email each other. The orchestrator dispatches work to them and trusts them because they know their own code better than it does. Every time I post about this someone asks what happens when two agents write the same file. Fair question. They cant. Not as in "we tell them not to" - there's a hook called pre_edit_gate that fires before every write. If an agent in branch A tries to edit a file in branch B's directory, the write gets rejected. Hard block. The agent sees "cross-branch write blocked" and has to either ask a trusted branch to make the change or send a mail request through drone. Only 3 branches in the whole system (the orchestrator, the auditor, and the factory that creates new agents) are allowed to cross-write. Everyone else is physically confined to their own directory. We also lock inboxes - agents cant forge messages by writing directly to another agent's mailbox file. They have to use the mail system. This isnt a convention. Its enforcement. This week I stopped building features and started testing. Took an old MacBook, wiped it, installed Ubuntu from scratch. Cloned on a machine with nothing pre-configured. Found every setup blocker - git config missing, venv broken on fresh Ubuntu, hooks not wired. All fixed now. Install went from ~2GB down to ~100MB. Built a concierge agent that walks new users through onboarding - 12-stage flow, 243 tests on it. First impressions matter and ours was rough ngl. 95 stars. Small project. I'm a solo dev tbh and the agents help build and maintain themselves - every PR is human-AI collaboration. The hardest part hasn't been the code. It's explaining what this actually is. People hear "agents" and expect a task runner. This isnt that. Its infrastructure for building systems that remember and coordinate. What u put on top is up to u. Has anyone else hit the identity drift problem? Genuinely curious how others solved it - or if most just threw more context at it and moved on. submitted by /u/Input-X [link] [comments]