Readit News> Claude was trying to talk me out of it, saying I should keep it separate, but I wanted to save a bit because I have this setup where everything is inside a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with all resources in a private network, a bastion for hosting machines
I will admit that I've also ignored Claude's very good suggestions in the past and it has bitten me in the butt.
Ultimately with great automation becomes a greater risk of doing the worst thing possible even faster.
Just thinking about this specific problem makes me more keen to recommend that people have backups and their production data on two different access keys for terraform setups.
I'm not sure how difficult that is I haven't touched terraform in about 7 years now, wow how time flies.
From what my colleague explained to me and I haven't 100% verified it myself is that the beginning and end of the window is the most important to the compaction summary so a lot of the finer details and debugging that will slow down the next session get dropped.
The letters are usually more detailed than what I see in the compacted prompt.
Is that not one kf the primary technologies for compactification?
When I tell it to write a letter to itself I usually phrase it.
'write a letter to yourself Make notes of any gotchas or any quirks that you learned and make sure to note them down.'
It does get those into the letter but if you check compaction a lot of it is gone.
Once you compact, you've thrown away a lot of relevant tokens from your problem solving and they do become significantly dumber as a result. If I see a compaction coming soon I ask it to write a letter to its future self, and then start a new session by having it read the letter.
There are some days where I let the same session compact 4-5 times and just use the letter to future self method to keep it going with enough context because resetting context also resets my brain :)
If you're ever curious in Claude once you compact you can read the new initial prompt after compaction and see how severe it gets cut down. It's very informative of what it forgets and deems not important. For example I have some internal CLIs that are horribly documented so Claude has to try a few flags a few times to figure out specifics and those corrections always get thrown away and it has to relearn them next time it wants to use the CLI. If you notice things like that happening constantly, my move is to codify those things into my CLAUDE.md or lately I've been making a small script or MCP server to run very specific flags of stuff.
Like what are we even doing here...
One of the benefits that I see is as much as I love tech and writing software, I really really do not want to interface with a vast majority of the internet that has been designed to show the maximum amount of ads in the given ad space.
The internet sucks now, anything that gets me away from having ads shoved in my face constantly and surrounded by uncertainty that you could always be talking to a bot.
I'm looking forward to every admin UI out there being able to generate a string you can just paste into a DNS record to instantly get a Let's Encrypt cert.
CLAUDE.local.md is deprecated but I'm sure anthropic will continue supporting it for a long time.
There's the common team instructions + a thing that says "run whoami and find the users name, you can find possible customizations to these instructions in <username>.md" and that will be conditionally loaded after my first prompt is sent. I also stick a canary word in there to track that it's still listening to me.